There are a massive number of incorrect statements in your response.

"Personally, I'm offended by your conclusions that as a Computer Scientist, you have the credability to then dictate that any "Developer" supporting Web3 is "grossly incompetent or malicious ". That conclusion is absurd and ridiculous. Perhaps you meant ignorant instead of incompetent (which would be a more reasonable, yet still flawed, assumption), but the point remains that such vast generalizations and reductions severely damage your arguments and premises."

No. A developer who supports Web3 is akin to an electrician who doesn't know what electricity is; it's ignorant to the point that only a person going very far out of their way to avoid being informed could possibly be in that situation. That is not ignorance but wilful ignorance, especially as most such Web3 advocates are financially invested in the scheme they claim they don't know the flaws of. Wilful ignorance for financial conflict of interest reasons.

"Nothing is ever black/white, yes/no, good/evil. Systems, people and everything else are complex and full of conflicting emotions/opinions/reasoning etc, and as such have various different reasons for supporting the same thing as other people. Reducing them to anything less than that is inherently flawed."

I think you'll find that many things are, in fact, black and white. According to you, we should assume that any idea, no matter how terrible, malicious or misguided, must have nuance or not be entirely bad, when in fact many are. There is such a thing as people who are genuinely ignorant and not aware of what they are supporting, but Web3 is certainly not an example of that. Even the most ignorant crypto buyer knows they have bought into something that promised huge returns very fast; that’s no different to a witch doctor promising to double your money in a week, going off and spending it on child trafficking or weapons, then pretending you had no idea the witch doctor wasn’t actually a magician.

"This basic flaw sums up the rest of your arguments. You mainly take a topic, make broad claims, build up a straw man (by reducing the real complexity into binary terms), defeat the straw man, and then dismiss the entire premise. This is a textbook logical fallacy and while popular in politics to try and sway public opinion, it has no place in actual logical debates (nor should it in politics truthfully)."

If you have any understanding of the underlying technology, there is not even the slightest hint of a strawman anywhere here. It's actually impossible for me to *make* a strawman, because Web3 has no basis in the first place: in order to argue against its functions, I would have to invent a function to argue against. I have provided a huge amount of evidence and technical detail to support those claims in the linked article at the top of the article; if you didn't want to read it, that's really your own problem. I didn't see a reason to repeat all of the same information in this article.

"I think people are right to be skeptical about the technologies, whether they truly will be fair for all, etc, but discussing them in this way, with faulty arguments, only encourages people to quickly dismiss the entire thing as naysayers instead of leading to a productive conversation."

Using your logic, we should also discuss and take credible note of antivax opinions, flat earth opinions, and anything else devoid of facts or logic under the guise of what you call a "productive conversation". That's not productive; spreading falsehoods and advocating for things that have no defence is neither balanced nor productive.

"If you were less invested in trying to "prove that this is an inane idea" and left the positions softer, and didn't try to make broad stretches you could have potentially written a useful and thought provoking piece. I'd encourage you to do so in the future, as the topics you wanted to discuss were definitely worth discussing."

See above. Under your logic absolutely any idea, no matter how malicious or useless, should be discussed as if it is a credible one. I think you will struggle to find a single example of that being a good idea at any time in history.

"- Decentralized systems are by default more fail-safe and more fail resiliant than centralized systems. Full stop. As a computer scientist, I'm embarassed that you seem to be confused by this."

You have misunderstood what decentralised and centralised systems are, and no, they are not more fail resistant. They are more fail resistant *if and only if* the nodes of the system do not have a motive for it to fail, which can be said for various mechanical systems but not for Web3. Decentralised does not equal "many nodes deciding together", it simply means that no node has overriding authority over the others - and in such systems, when the nodes have a motive for the system to fail, it is unquestionably less fail resistant. I wrote specifically about this here: https://antsstyle.medium.com/explanation-of-blockchain-consensus-algorithms-pow-pos-etc-735fa50d93c8

"Humanity only survived until the point we're at now because we existed as decentralized tribes. The ones that made the correct decisions kept going, and the ones that didn't have the right practices failed. Had all of humanity been following the same "centralized" process, we all would have died out long ago from a single event. Likewise, a centralized system ensures that if the wrong decision is made, the entire system suffers (i.e inflation, destroyed economies, etc.)."

This is an incredibly naive argument. The vast majority of species that ever existed have died out; the vast majority of human civilisations have also died out, and we were very close to total extinction as a species at once point. Decentralisation was what stopped us from changing from being tribes; no laws, no generally accepted information or practices, nothing. You'll actually find that in nature, whether for humans or otherwise, many tribes who made the right decisions died out anyway because luck - in the form of available food or other such factors - wasn't kind to them. This doesn't make centralised systems perfect, and they are indeed vulnerable - yet they remain better. There's a reason we have used them for the entirety of human civilisation up to now.

"Now as you rightly pointed out, a fully free market without rules is a terrible design. You need some rules and regulations to incentivize the correct behavior and get people and companies in the right direction. This however, is a balance. The rules can be too heavy and that also hurts the system."

Yes, this is possible. In some religious areas this has happened for example - religion can certainly be seen as a bad example of centralisation. That said, in most societies today the problem is not rules being too heavy but too lax (taxation, environment, etc). Decentralisation is actually the reason for that: countries, acting in their own interests, do not care much about what happens to the overall system. The result has been climate change continuing and a race to the bottom for tax rates everywhere.

"1. Take a system like the US voting for elections (it's largely decentralized). Sure we end up electing people to represent us, but we're doing it at the city, county, district and state level. The states make their own rules and the the results come together to establish the president. If any one state's results are invalidated because of fraud, it doesn't invalidate the other 49 state's results, just the one. Even then it may just be a specific county that needs to redo their election. If the system was in fact fully centralized, the federal government would have to run the entire election."

The US is a very bad example of a democracy (it barely is one). Pretty much every other democracy on the planet does a better job. Also, your example is rather ironic given that right now Republican politicians are showing very clearly that in fact it's not like that.

Most other democratic countries DO have a system where the federal government runs the entire election and do a much better job of democracy than America does, so your point doesn't make much sense. It's also cheaper in most countries than it is in the US to run elections. US decentralisation - both in its politics and laws - just makes for a giant mess of states where nobody has the same laws, which allows easy gun sales, easy discrimination against voters... the list goes on.

"2. A centralized system is more prone to corruption than decentralized. If you get one bad apple in the right position, they can make everything go their way. A decentralized system has checks and balances. If one thing fails, another replaces it and so on." - this is actually quite a naive view. The history of most democratic countries is that they found out decentralised government is a lot MORE prone to corruption, which is exactly why we now have centralised government in most countries. Decentralised systems, by the way, also have exactly the same corruption as centralised systems but in a more insidious form: unlike a centralised system, there is no knowledge of who the decentralised actors are, so nobody can be held to account for it. That's exactly what will happen with Web3; blockchains will be largely controlled by rich and powerful entities, but since it's anonymous we will not know who they are, and because it's decentralised there is no system to hold them to account.

"Now truth be told, nothing is fully centralized and nothing is fully decentralized, but you seem to be confusing the fact that many of your examples that "work" are referring to systems that are largely decentralized in parts." - No. A system cannot be decentralised in "part" - if it has any centralised failsafe, then it is centralized. It is true to say a system can have decentralised parts, but if they answer to a centralised superior, then the system is overall centralised. The examples I have referred to which work all largely have some degree of decentralised parts - but those parts only work because if they fail, a centralised failsafe can correct them. Without that, they do not work.

If you have further questions, the much longer article I wrote is here: https://antsstyle.medium.com/why-nfts-are-bad-the-long-version-2c16dae145e

If you have questions about that or other issues, you can ask them either here or in the other article's comments, either way is fine.