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0 pointsKallDrexx4y ago0 comments

Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets?

If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same with Twitter and Linked In.

If you are saying that web3 solves these by making it so that these platforms aren't in charge of my identity, well they aren't today so I'm not sure what the deal is. If gmail bans my account it's not a huge issue because I use a custom domain for my email, so I can route it to another provider or host my own. If Facebook bans me then I lose contact with family on there but I don't lost my identity because FB isn't in charge of my identity. same with twitter or linked in or whatever.

All these problems you list are solvable today with the decentralized web we've had for decades. There's a reason centralization has happened on these platforms, and it seems like all the web3 talk I see is naive to that.

Edit: Also Keybase is a great example using cryptography to solve the identity problem without a blockchain and with some level of decentralization (keybase's servers are centralized but the actual identity is all based on PGP and GPG that's been around for a long time).

0 comments

wpietri4y ago

This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain. But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey.

When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change.

A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me.

So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.

the_snooze4y ago

At its heart, the strongest claim blockchain technology offers is pretty good data consistency assurances between nodes that don't trust one another. I guess that's kind of interesting as a technical demonstration, but it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that. This has been around and under continuous development since 2008, and still no actual use case.

It seems like the space is full of hype-bro crooks and hype-bro dupes who feed off one another, warping a niche technical toy into whatever get-rich-quick revolutionary fantasy they want.

s3tz4y ago

That's because everyone fell for the systems fallacy. Blockchain was designed for bitcoin to function, for that purpose alone. Then because it worked for that one use case of a decentralized storage/transfer of value, people assumed they could make it work for everything else. Not how technology works.

Vetch4y ago

> it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that

Its utility is much easier to see if you're stuck in a system rife with corruption and have a general lack of trust in central institutions. A key aspect of corruption is that central authorities are not accountable to anyone.

With blockchains, you can design systems where game theory via what's encoded into system design, can limit what concentrations of power can do. The centralized powers in bitcoin for example, can't rationally act in way that destroys the value of the system they're participating in. This is totally not true for many developing economies; just that property is already an encouraging one.

Working on scaling these systems, making them less resource intensive and proving stronger more formal bounds for open peer to peer friendly non-discriminatory systems that are harder to corrupt and more robust to bad actors is a not a solution in search of a problem.

2 more replies

bawolff4y ago

I think its important to add, with open group membership to that definition.

If there is a known fixed list of nodes participating in the system, blockchain again becomes a bad choice.

dehrmann4y ago

The expression you're looking for to describe blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

outside12344y ago

To be fair - it probably has revolutionized money laundering and government bribes.

Vetch4y ago

> government bribes

Governments mired in corruption, embezzlement of public funds, dumping toxic waste and ignoring infrastructure and human development are not banning crypto out of the goodness of their heart. They're banning it because it erodes and threatens control of their mismanaged currencies.

If we required governments and large corporations to use identifiable addresses then the traceability and immutability of public blockchains makes bribes and corruption much harder to hide. Government spending, which is not used to being held accountable would of course not take kindly to this.

1 more reply

nberkman4y ago

I remember when the massive early growth of Napster led to a similar hype cycle around P2P, with overblown articles in Wired proclaiming it to be the answer to everything. Around 2004 I was CTO of a company building a streaming music service and I got a call from the CEO of a P2P-based CDN. I asked him some basic questions trying to find any reason I might consider them. It became clear that it would make no sense for us - their pricing was above the quotes I had received from other CDNs and I had no confidence in their reliability. The only selling point was whatever residual buzz P2P had at that point. He quickly became agitated and began yelling at me about how I "didn't get it". The company was called Red Swoosh and the angry CEO was Travis Kalanick. A few years later he somehow managed to sell it to Akamai, and as I recall it was shut down within a year.

wpietri4y ago

Wow, excellent story. If only he had gone out of business before the sale, we might never have heard from that guy again, and the world would have been much better for it.

shsbdncudx4y ago

This [jazz hands] _thing_ works once but then drop it, it ruins your [jazz hands] _story_

wpietri4y ago

Oh, is today the day on HN where we give unwanted writing advice? In that case, I'll just tell you that I don't really listen to people who universalize their individual reactions and act as if they're their only audience member in the world. So next time you want to give feedback, please do it in a fashion where your individual feelings are clearly marked as such, not hyperbolized into the total ruination of the writing in question.

kwertyoowiyop4y ago

[sarcastic finger quotes]?

practice94y ago

Sure, I'll try to explain the Gmail point:

- Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails and/or photos, docs, Drive files will be not recovered. Also non-technical person would probably skip this step.

The issue of not really being in control of your data can be solved by:

- regulating Google to let you access your data irrespectively if you are banned from their frontend or not. You can choose to export it in a standardized way to your own server, IPFS or another cloud provider. All data and metadata is exported and then parsed depending on capabilities of the receiving server.

- putting all of your data, encrypted, on IPFS or similar and creating multiple frontends for it (not unlike email clients, right? Similar idea). Then assigning your unique DID to this data, so it's part of your online belongings

- Next step would be regulating Google to allow you to use the complete user data stored on their servers with any client. Like an S3 bucket? Yes, something like that. Google can choose to charge some price for the access, that's OK.

GDPR tried to solve some of the high level issues related to user data, but it's not enough

Edit:

Google already has semi-closed APIs for some of their products, but only for partner businesses.

You're required to jump through multiple hoops to gain access (not guaranteed): https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overvie...

On Twitter: Jack does seem to have plans to make Twitter more decentralized, i.e. Bluesky https://blueskyweb.org/

Seem like they started off with brainstorming identity verification solutions and DIDs.

But I haven't followed them closely

denton-scratch4y ago

> Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails [...]

Fetchmail?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

wpietri4y ago

the_snooze4y ago

It seems like the space is full of hype-bro crooks and hype-bro dupes who feed off one another, warping a niche technical toy into whatever get-rich-quick revolutionary fantasy they want.

s3tz4y ago

Vetch4y ago

> it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that

2 more replies

bawolff4y ago

I think its important to add, with open group membership to that definition.

If there is a known fixed list of nodes participating in the system, blockchain again becomes a bad choice.

dehrmann4y ago

The expression you're looking for to describe blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

outside12344y ago

To be fair - it probably has revolutionized money laundering and government bribes.

Vetch4y ago

> government bribes

1 more reply

nberkman4y ago

wpietri4y ago

Wow, excellent story. If only he had gone out of business before the sale, we might never have heard from that guy again, and the world would have been much better for it.

shsbdncudx4y ago

This [jazz hands] _thing_ works once but then drop it, it ruins your [jazz hands] _story_

wpietri4y ago

kwertyoowiyop4y ago

[sarcastic finger quotes]?

practice94y ago

Sure, I'll try to explain the Gmail point:

- Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails and/or photos, docs, Drive files will be not recovered. Also non-technical person would probably skip this step.

The issue of not really being in control of your data can be solved by:

GDPR tried to solve some of the high level issues related to user data, but it's not enough

Edit:

Google already has semi-closed APIs for some of their products, but only for partner businesses.

You're required to jump through multiple hoops to gain access (not guaranteed): https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overvie...

On Twitter: Jack does seem to have plans to make Twitter more decentralized, i.e. Bluesky https://blueskyweb.org/

Seem like they started off with brainstorming identity verification solutions and DIDs.

But I haven't followed them closely

denton-scratch4y ago

> Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails [...]

Fetchmail?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse