2 ms·

> ...a technical means -- decentralization -- quickly becomes an ethical stance... As in blockchain?

jancsika 8y ago
Blockchain isn't an ethical stance as much as a mad scramble to cash in on something. What I'm talking about is something like what happened with Retroshare. They created a friend-to-friend social graph that could facilitate file-sharing, chat, etc. Then the users quickly figured out that bootstrapping an F2F network is extremely difficult unless you are in the same physical proximity as your peers (e.g., a college dorm). Otherwise there is no easy way to do key exchange. So the idea was introduced that you could have these bootstrap servers (not sure what they called them) so that all the new users who couldn't download anything could use them to do a key exchange with at least one other random peer, thus entering the network that way. But such a user is no longer building an F2F network. Instead it is some kind of friend roulette network where you trust random nodes only because the software would be unusable otherwise. Worse-- at the time Retroshare data wasn't onion-routed so the user was shuttling data unencrypted data among untrustworthy nodes, and encouraged by other users to shuttle share data for friends-of-friends because that would presumably improve your connectivity. At that point everyone except little LAN F2F islands would have only been slightly worse off with a Facebook-style app where Retroshare devs surveilled the network and spent all their time denying access to whatever they considered bad actors. It goes without saying that FLOSS devs would never build a Facebook-style app. But there is at least one other piece decentralized app I know that did essentially the same bootstrap roulette as Retroshare. The only way that can happen is if users and devs feel like they are doing something righteous by using such a piece of software, rather than just leveraging a tool to do a job.

Blockchain isn't an ethical stance as much as a mad scramble to cash in on something. What I'm talking about is something like what happened with Retroshare. They created a friend-to-friend social graph that could facilitate file-sharing, chat, etc. Then the users quickly figured out that bootstrapping an F2F network is extremely difficult unless you are in the same physical proximity as your peers (e.g., a college dorm). Otherwise there is no easy way to do key exchange. So the idea was introduced that you could have these bootstrap servers (not sure what they called them) so that all the new users who couldn't download anything could use them to do a key exchange with at least one other random peer, thus entering the network that way. But such a user is no longer building an F2F network. Instead it is some kind of friend roulette network where you trust random nodes only because the software would be unusable otherwise. Worse-- at the time Retroshare data wasn't onion-routed so the user was shuttling data unencrypted data among untrustworthy nodes, and encouraged by other users to shuttle share data for friends-of-friends because that would presumably improve your connectivity. At that point everyone except little LAN F2F islands would have only been slightly worse off with a Facebook-style app where Retroshare devs surveilled the network and spent all their time denying access to whatever they considered bad actors. It goes without saying that FLOSS devs would never build a Facebook-style app. But there is at least one other piece decentralized app I know that did essentially the same bootstrap roulette as Retroshare. The only way that can happen is if users and devs feel like they are doing something righteous by using such a piece of software, rather than just leveraging a tool to do a job.