story
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036350
But if you really want to see the “immune system” shine, mention web3 and smart contracts, and watch the downvotes pour in. Any time one even mentions “decentralized byzantine fault tolerant” anything, an army rises up to repeat anodyne versions of “grift… no one needs it… banks are great…” etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073421
But if you mention any concerns with AI, no matter who or what you cite, the same group goes the other way and always repeats “(insert problem here) has always been possible, there is nothing to see here, move on, AI is amazing, deregulate and let the industry develop faster”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900155
It’s groupthink at its most obvious, repeatable, always on, and I wonder how much of it is organic.
Don't bother telling people how it works. Show them who's using it and for what.
Oh, and for any kind of "normie" use it must have a decent moderation and anti-abuse system. Which inevitably clashes hard with "decentralized". Bluesky is succeeding because it lives in a contradiction of pretending to be decentralized, but what it really offers is the "pre Elon Twitter" experience. To basically the same people.
> the same group
While there's a certain amount of hivemind, it's rare that you see people directly contradict their own posts here; what you're seeing is different people.
Our thesis is that the client-server architecture is a fundamental flaw in the world wide web's design, which inherently concentrates power in the hands of a few. Freenet aims to be a general purpose replacement for this in which all services are entirely decentralized.
The first non-trivial app we're building will be a group chat system called River[1].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ&t=12m0s
Look around the 12 minute mark when I start to discuss how “the capitalist system” produces centralized monopoilies that extract rents for their shareholders.
They key differences between old and new Freenet are:
Functionality: The previous version was analogous to a decentralized hard drive, while the current version is analogous to a full decentralized computer.
Real-time Interaction: The current version allows users to subscribe to data and be notified immediately if it changes. This is essential for systems like instant messaging or group chat.
Programming Language: Unlike the previous version, which was developed in Java, the current Freenet is implemented in Rust. This allows for better efficiency and integration into a wide variety of platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, MacOS, etc).
Transparency: The current version is a drop-in replacement for the world wide web and is just as easy to use.
Anonymity: While the previous version was designed with a focus on anonymity, the current version does not offer built-in anonymity but allows for a choice of anonymizing systems to be layered on top.
I'm all for distributed / P2P social media, but crypto is full of some of the most scammy and downright shameful behavior I've ever seen in my life. Pump and dumps, rug pulls, money laundering. There is a real reason people hate crypto.
To tip it off, crypto is one of the least meritocratic things there is. The longer you've been in it, the more people you've scammed, the more you hype, the "wealthier" you are.
Crypto smells like a shit and vomit sandwich and people immediately turn their noses.
Build P2P social without the crypto angle and you have my attention. I've been wanting p2p (not federated) social media since the 200Xs and the decline of the indie web. Social and news should work like email and BitTorrent, not Facebook or "federated Twitter".
The SEC's answer no questions, sue first, approach to crypto in general made legitimate players afriad to operate, so the space became dominated by those that didn't care about the law.
This isn't true, and last time someone tried to prove it was, they cited .. a huge PDF of all the questions the SEC had been asking crypto firms prior to action.
Besides, the rules are over now. The US President ran a pump and dump. Can't get more legitimacy than that.
Here are some:
https://intercoin.org/applications
But most comments I get are “I stopped reading 2 seconds in when I saw the word Web5.”
(We started using it when Jack who founded Twitter, started bluesky, promoted nostr started using it).
Here is a graphical presentation that can drive it home:
Do I have your attention now?
Ten years and $1 million dollars later, it’s free to use, but we haven’t started promoting it yet, still testing with paying clients:
Here are some ideas:
Instead of trying to build a "you.com" (as in your pdf example), I want a place we're all just a simple disposable signed hash address (that you can change, make public, keep pseudonymous, etc.) - easy and disposable if needed, but also possible to use as the building block of an online presence or brand if your hash becomes well known. Kind of like email, in that sense.
The platform doesn't need real time streaming video or video calls. Just text and images to start. P2P Reddit or Twitter.
It shouldn't be about building a platform where you attract others to your brand. That can come later. It should be about participating in a swarm and building up a mass of people. An exchange of ideas and information, but where it feels like being in public. Like BitTorrent. Once network effects kick in, you can find the nodes (people, topics, etc.) you care about and want to prioritize in your interest graph.
Yeah that sounds like a feature, not a bug.
Crypto in general and Web3 as well, all have mostly delivered scams. To the tune of billions stolen from everyday folks. Everything (to within a rounding error) that hasn't been a scam has delivered nothing else but being a speculative asset at best. Everything else has been a barely working toy that's better served by non-distributed implementations of the same thing.
People shit on crypto. government, regulators, and the public, all dislike crypto because the only thing that ever happens to us with it and the only thing we ever hear about happening, is folks losing money to scams.
There's no mystery here. Crypto doesn't need a policy shift. Crypto needs to stop fucking over folks. Yes it's cool technology, yes it also seems to just be a way to part folks from their money.
If I am going to put my money at risk, I expect it to be at risk. I'm happy to have a regulatory framework around that from the SEC, for instance, and there are. For example, since the JOBS Act, the SEC has greatly expanded the opportunities to raise money in a regulated way. I even interviewed the actual authors of Regulation S at the SEC, where I go into depth for an hour about how to raise money legally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
FINCEN has also been putting out guidances to the crypto industry since 2013:
2013: https://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/pdf/FIN-2013-G...
2019: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...
So the regulations are there.
And frankly, most true adherents of crypto have been yelling from the rooftops that Celsius and FTX and Binance are not actual DeFi. They are not decentralized, they simply tell you to do the very thing crypto was designed to avoid -- i.e. send them money and "trust them". This is the very thing Bitcoin and Blockchain were designed to avoid -- the middleman.
FileCoin and UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and so on are real crypto, and they have never had any scandals and billions of dollars, bits, etc. are entrusted to them every day. Ditto for most altcoins and networks, including Hedera Hashgraph, Polygon, COSMOS, Polkadot, etc.
Any shade thrown at, e.g. Telegram's TON or Ripple's XRP, is due to regulators. I can understand why Facebook's Libra was shut down. But it has to do with them becoming "too powerful" and "not subject to national oversight". Kind of like Facebook and Twitter and Google themselves.
