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EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

259 points by pimterry 5y ago

mhitza 5y ago
Got a bit of envy for the people that get funds/grants for their idea. I'm always "lucky" enough to find the call for proposals that match my skills and interest past their closing date. Must be a sign :)
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  These NGI grants come around quite regularly. I'm sure they have a newsletter. :)
- Vinnl 5y ago
  NGI0 is relatively often, and relatively approachable (though not major sums, usually), so there's almost always a call open. I got a grant through them and found the process very approachable, which I can't say of almost every other grant-giving organisation. See https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ and consider following them on Mastodon: https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero
- mariusor 5y ago
  I always look at the problem as the people that actually build cool tech don't really have the time to find grants and submit proposals. I personally haven't really seen something concrete and useful coming out from someone that has won one.
wisethrowaway1 5y ago
How will bureaucrats burn the next few billions of taxpayer money? * spins roulette *
- wisethrowaway1 5y ago
  Bitcoin! Devtools! How about lowering taxes? Have they ever considered aligning with the rest of the world to make it easier to do business, or they pretend to succeed being approximately the most hostile region for businesses?
  - wisethrowaway1 5y ago
    Will they do something about the fact that when YC (to put a very random example) invests, they ask the recipient to move to US as EU regulatory environment is extremely hostile to startups?
    - Kbelicius 5y ago
      What part of the EU regulatory environment is extremely hostile to startup? I really don't know but if I had to guess my guess would be worker rights and regulators that are unwilling to let startups enter whatever industry doing whatever they want while disregarding established rules. Happy to be corrected.
    - PaywallBuster 5y ago
      The last few batches they started accepting people remote afaik? But the company is probably transferred to Delaware so the paperwork remains the same for IPO and stuff
  - netcan 5y ago
    Please relax. You don't have to leave your politics out of it, but you can't just start slinging it around belligerently. Stick to context. Be polite.
    - xondono 5y ago
      Belligerently? He is just rising a point. Government “innovation” subsidies move a lot of money into shinny “new” ideas, but in EU there’s no thought about how to create innovation itself. Just as an example, a friend of mine roasts coffee for a living. He is considering closing shop, because he is succeeding too much. At the point he is, he’ll be required to register as a business, which in Spain means he will have to pay ~300$ a month whether he makes money or not, plus 20% VAT and 20% in income taxes. Add to it the massive amount of time he’ll have to spend in paperwork (or paying someone another 100$/mo for handling it). Another good side job that will go to waste, instead of growing into a company. And it’s by no means an exception. I’ve work for tens of companies here, all of them have admitted to be flunking regulations intentionally to avoid costs during their creation to be able to exist.
- zoobab 5y ago
  A new chip foundry entirely paid with tax payers money, and where the profits will go to a private corporation? (the 'socialize losses, privatize profits') https://twitter.com/EIF4eu/status/1438041794940395523 https://twitter.com/EIF4eu/status/1438041794940395523 "The @EU_Commission announced a new European Chips Act, in order to jointly create a state-of-the-art European #chip ecosystem including production."
  - notimetorelax 5y ago
    At this point with chip shortages it’s in EU’s interest to attract businesses to build it. Even if it costs us to build it, overall we’ll benefit from it. How much is lost due to stopped Audi plants?
    - zoobab 5y ago
      "attract businesses to build it" I am wondering how that will work with the current "state aid" framework. The current crisis is an opportunity to empty the public coffins, full of state aids everywhere, especially to large corporations, and send the bill afterwards to the people that have to pick up the bill. No thank you. As for cars, we don't need those chips, cars were fine before without all those useless electronics.
      - throwaway59553 5y ago
        >As for cars, we don't need those chips, cars were fine before without all those useless electronics. But how will they make sure you need to have your car checked every 12 months and bill you for some vague "electronic component"?
  - wisethrowaway1 5y ago
    The EU Commission is desperate to find niches where it becomes an essential dealmaker. To their dismay, after 50 years of trying hard, they are still an irrelevant institution economically, a net negative for businesses and individuals. The chip industry will and can sort their issues perfectly on it's own. In fact one of the top chipmakers is already European, and they are doing extremely well, they don't need any political help.
- JW1800 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
- nickik 5y ago
  Among all the things the EU waste money on this is not even in the Top 1000 of things that should not be done. Fundamental research into next generation technology that is also open source seems like the exact kind of thing governments should be doing.
wisethrowaway1 5y ago
Classic politician. They take 50% or more of your income, and then give back 1%, and then ask us to thank them!
woodpanel 5y ago
Of all the institutions to promote a uncensorable web it is the EU?! Talking about Gaslighting. Who knows, it could be a gentle attempt at keeping talent from leaving, or FOMO because every other important nation is doing crypto-stuff and lastly, and naturally, the sheer incompetence of this overextended bureaucracy where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban
- akie 5y ago
  > the sheer incompetence of this overextended bureaucracy where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban Tell me, which Murdoch newspaper have you been binging on?
- mojzu 5y ago
  The EU is not a monolith, there are many groups within it pushing different ideas. Some of them tech-friendly, some of them not. From my layman's perspective though it seems as though national governments who want to implement unpopular tech policy will often try to push it through the EU first because then they can deflect the criticism. Overall though I'd say the EU has been okay at preventing the most extreme anti-tech legislation, although it usually requires public scrutiny/outcry to make them drop it
- snthd 5y ago
  >where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir." Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.” ― Terry Pratchett, The Truth
superkuh 5y ago
It's disappointing to see this project, like many other decentralized web projects, has tunnel vision with respect to "cool technologies". The real distributed web is not non-web protocols, blockchains, or the like. The real distributed web is THE WEB HTTP servers and every single individual running their own web server to host their content (and then syndicate on whatever walled gardens are most profitable after). Connections are fast enough. Computers are fast enough. Self hosting is entirely viable and it cuts the gordian knot that is the content moderation problem. If it's a static HTTP site then there are almost no attack surfaces; it's magnitudes safer than running JS from an arbitrary site in your browser. These non-web protocols do not dencentralize. Lets start with IPFS. It's a great idea but unfortunately, like other security/anonymization layers, it relies mostly on centralizing gateways to actually let people access content. Additionally it is design to disassociate people from their files. Not a great start. WebRTC is just the sickness of modern browser and in-browser "app" architectures causing them to re-implement what already exists in the host OS. But this time in the browser, the most insecure piece of third party code running software there is. And blockchains like etherium aren't even worth talking about until they actually do switch over to proof of stake like they've been talking about for the last decade and never doing. And even then it directly involves monetary transactions which is sure to make thing suck for everyone. No, the decentralized web is the decentalized web. And it's easy to be a part of it.
- imglorp 5y ago
  > IPFS [...] relies mostly on centralizing gateways to actually let people access content No, IPFS does not need gateways: they are conveniences for people that don't have ipfs:// support in their browser or run a local daemon. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-companion/nibjojkomfdiaoajekhjakgkdhaomnch https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-companion/nib... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companion https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companio... https://brave.com/ipfs-support https://brave.com/ipfs-support
  - superkuh 5y ago
    That's exactly what I said. I don't appreciate you twisting my words to make a point. No one has IPFS support. I have some IRC friends that are big in to it and they always link the gateways because no one can access their content otherwise.
drKarl 5y ago
IPFS is pretty awesome, and the ideas it builds upon like a Merkle tree DAG are really cool. I love the idea of DApps or Decentralized apps. I've played with some cool projects like MetaMask etc. But I really don't like the idea that all (most?) DApps are based on Ethereum and require huge amounts of Gas to run. Can't we have DApps without Blockchain/Ethereum? I know IPFS doesn't use Ethereum, and neither do things like SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt, based on the gossip protocol) but the biggest ecosystem of DApps is based on Ethereum and requires gas...
- cdiddy2 5y ago
  It is hard to get away from a gas based system because of spam and resource limitations. Regarding the expensiveness there are a lot of new technologies rolling out today such as optimistic rollups(arbitrum/optimism) and zkrollups(dydx,zksync) that allow for cheaper dapps to run. Then there is also things like Avalanche or Solana that are completely separate chains with different decentralization trade offs that allow for cheaper transactions. The space is still going through rapid advancement and experimentation.
  - vmception 5y ago
    > It is hard to get away from a gas based system because of spam and resource limitations. I went to a Hyperledger workshop just to get a more objective opinion on it. All the demo functions were showing us how it was possible to threads and put the state on an internal blockchain, but that all nodes had to run the threaded functions we wrote. hmmmm, why is this taking so long, oh because everyone in the class was spamming the nodes with arbitrary executions! with no anti-spam resource it was as actually dumb as the theory suggested. that said, I've come to accept that the market can bear many things in the distributed ledger space, so even if other theoretical solutions can make participants cooperate, an out of the box solution is here that the world is selling so hard that it is easy to sell itself.
- opatdchan 5y ago
  >But I really don't like the idea that all (most?) DApps are based on Ethereum and require huge amounts of Gas to run. Can't we have DApps without Blockchain/Ethereum? Previous generation dapps were mostly on Ethereum because it was the only real solution available. But the ecosystem is maturing, there are chains that consume so little gas it's effectively a negligible cost, and more and more dapps are making use of them. Not to mention that Eth 2.0 is coming soon™.
netcan 5y ago
One thing "The EU" can do is provide demand. If they want to promote ethereum, IPFS, or WebRTC... use them for their activities in an open way. One real difficulty here is the ability of open systems people to communicate, lobby, advocate with governments. The reps, staffers and ministerial professionals aren't that numerous, specialized or inventive... usually. They basically work off ideas, prototype plans and such that are provided by (usually corporate) industry bodies and such. Even sympathetic politicians or public servants don't have much to go on. An Australian Shadow Secretary for rural development can pull a bold, $1bn infrastructure plan straight off the shelf in his parliamentary library and start talking it up the next day. It'll typically come with a booklet explaining the main ideas, easy to find allies/advocates. Etc. The "Decentralized Web" section is a sparse mess.
- Shadonototra 5y ago
  promote ethereum? you mean promote speculators with tax payer money? so they can sell their ETH and make ton of profit? remove ethereum from your post, and i 100% agree with you the fact that you included ethereum alongside IPFS and WebRTC is very suspicious i don't believe in "decentralized web" if people wants it solely to make profit from 'trading' aka speculating "decentralized coins" with fiat currency before any decentralization, there should be a global transparency act so before doing anything, one should be able to know what your portfolio consist of, to prevent any form of conflict of interest and even that i'm not sure that'll be enough to move forward if it's to repeat what we lived, there is no reason to lie to ourself into pretending things will change for the better why do you want a "decentralized web"? to maximize your profits? yeah no thanks
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Is it REALLY speculation that humanity needs a digital way to make microtransactions? (e.g. to replace ads) And other new types of payment?
  - netcan 5y ago
    Those are the article's examples, not mine.
dusted 5y ago
How is the web not already decentralized? everyone's got an IP address and is free to plug in a server at home.. If the EU should do anything, it should be require by law that any Internet connection comes with a non-carrier-gade-natted ip address, and that it can be made static if the customer desires, for free.
- jitix 5y ago
  This! Legislating for network infrastructure upgrades and IPv6 adoption will go a long way towards decentralization. The market will produce a bunch of privacy focused “Facebook in a box” kind of products on top of such infrastructure.
- dylkil 5y ago
  This is funding for developer tools for building decentralised services
- magila 5y ago
  The web as a whole is decentralized, but the HTTP URL scheme can only reference assets through a single authoritative hostname (or IP address). Thus the ability to retrieve a particular asset is always beholden to a single, privledged entity. When people talk about the "decentralized web" they are generally talking about combining a means of referencing assets in a self-authenticating manner (e.g. using cryptographic hashes and signatures) with a way a retrieving those assets which does not rely on a privledged authority (e.g. using a DHT and a P2P transfer protocol).
  - openfuture 5y ago
    Precisely. The internet is all the protocols, the web is HTTP(S), the dweb would be protocols like bittorrent and now with zero knowledge proofs we can hash executions of programs also... The biggest problem is how do you prove your right to participation? Proof of work and proof of stake are both laughably inadequate. Machine learning things are being applied incorrectly imo but it'll converge eventually.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
wb14123 5y ago
I never really understand the hype behind blockchain related technologies. The low transaction throughput, high compute resource demands makes it pretty unusable in most cases. Lots of workaround either has security problem or violated the idea of decentralization of blockchain, which makes it meaningless to use blockchain. Oh, there is also PoS which doesn't need CPU for mining, but doesn't anyone think it's irony that it makes rich people richer? Decentralization doesn't mean there shouldn't be one or some centralized nodes. That means open protocol, and server cannot control everything (for example, with end to end encryption). So that anyone can run the server, and user can use the service without trust the server. Most importantly, non regulation doesn't always mean good. Otherwise why we need law and government? Why not live in the wild west and let strong people kill weak people? Why not let big company play the monopoly?
- vkk8 5y ago
  I'm also puzzled by the fact that EU is funding this. Usually states and state-like entities are exactly the ones who don't want people to use decentralized technologies, because they often make laws difficult or impossible to enforce. In fact, wanting to circumvent laws is the only reason why people en mass would ever want to use decentralized technologies. I'm not necessarily always against this (there are some really stupid laws that should be broken), but I'm pretty annoyed by how people try to pretend that there is demand for these technologies for any other reason.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    EU is way behind in tech. Centralized web means centralized web in US or China. Probably the push for decentralized web will fail, but at least it appears that EU does something to reduce dependence on foreign superpowers.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      The EU could also subsidize centralized EU-based tech. What are the largest tech companies in the US and China based around? Ads, payments, cloud computing, and media consumption ("FAANG"). Europe already has solid, utility-priced payment infrastructure. Ads are arguably toxic (especially Facebook), and cloud computing is relatively straightforward to implement with talent and funding. Europe could even take a page from China and use regulation to strongly encourage European customers and businesses to not use US products and services (GDPR, for example).
butz 5y ago
How to get EU funding for a new, intependent browser engine and internet browser?
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  ...the internet browser has to be based on a blockchain, otherwise the NGI fund won't accept it. Source: wanted to apply with my Web Browser that is peer to peer but doesn't go with the blockchain hypetrain.
  - ognarb 5y ago
    I have a project that is currently funded by ngi and it has nothing to do with Blockchain...
    - cookiengineer 5y ago
      On the open calls page [1] it seems that the only open fund in the context of a web browser is the one related to search and discovery. All the other ones specifically mention blockchain based technologies. Or did your project get funded by NLNet directly via another fund? [1] https://www.ngi.eu/opencalls/ https://www.ngi.eu/opencalls/
- adrn10 5y ago
  Hey! NGI is funding Nyxt browser as part of the same sub-grant call. Check it out, I was quite thrilled! https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/
shrimpx 5y ago
With apologies to my European friends (I’m also European), this article illustrates how the EU is a second rate sucker in technology. While they boast and believe that they’re cutting edge because they’re investing in Blockchain, the likely reality is that they’re jumping on a false trend and Blockchain and its thousands of buzzwords will fizzle out, as it’s sustained only by fomo and speculation.
- RealStickman_ 5y ago
  That's only one of the protocols they're funding though. The others being IPFS and WebRTC.
- y4mi 5y ago
  As neither webrtc nor ipfs have anything to do with the Blockchain I'm guessing your talking about their Ethereum focus and I have to agree. but you have to admit that eth probably sounds like a great idea for non programmers. Implementing smart contacts that do non trivial stuff is just basically impossible, but it's a very interesting concept to run code if it were. Non-programmers just don't really realize how error riddled the average software is, so they get caught on the promise itself.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    I think they are calling out to the IPFS and Filecoin relationship. The projects used to be much closer but have move apart. https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/ipfs-and-filecoin/ https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/ipfs-and-filecoin/
    - y4mi 5y ago
      Sure, but wasn't ipfs released long before filecoins were added to the mix? Edit: they're both from summer 2014, so I was mistaken. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054571
- 5y ago
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I think a definition of "Decentralized web" should mean is in order. The Internet/Arpa net was created to be decentralized from the beginning. If a node, or more nodes went down, the rest of the network may be able to keep working. If you, and me and all of our friends and all of their friends all ran out own web servers from our homes it would be decentralized to the extent that if a server disconnected all the others would keep working. The information on that server may be gone for all time. The prevalence of enormously centralized monopolies on the internet is not a result of its technical architecture, but rather narrow business interests and a terminal lack of regulation. Now we are all using AOL v3. (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc). It can get semantically confusing. Facebook is massively distributed in some ways. Datacenters in several locations, CDNs all over the place. It would take a hell of a lot (I think) to blow Facebook off the web. Or maybe some servers centrally will shut everything off it they are blown up. IPFS is weird when taking about decentralized. Storage is not on one big server located somewhere. It is distributed among many. In theory if one goes down, the data is still available. but only if the server/nodes that make up the IFPS network are reliable and dependable. If a lot of nodes are run from laptops that that are shutdown at the end of the day that would become a significant problem. Since more and more and more data would need to be stored in IPFS the need for dependable storage servers will increase rapidly. I would like a simpler approach more in line with the original architecture, lots and lots of independent small servers. The people who run them can mirror each other in some fashion to persist data. Like FTP used to be (and maybe still is), like NNTP used to be (and maybe still is)
- pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
  > Now we are all using AOL v3. (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc) ...GitHub (the Facebook of software development)...
- fleddr 5y ago
  "The prevalence of enormously centralized monopolies on the internet is not a result of its technical architecture, but rather narrow business interests and a terminal lack of regulation." Neither business interests or regulation have anything to do with something being centralized or not. If you would launch "Thinkbeat's blog", in the traditional sense of web publishing, it is 100% centralized. Regardless of its size or your good or bad intentions. You would be in full control of it. You could intentionally retire the site, and all information and access is lost, forever. You could accidentally do that by forgetting to pay a bill. Another scenario, you publish something fishy on your blog, and get banned from the blogging platform, or whichever dependency you rely on. Further, all content on the blog is 100% owned by you, and none of it by the users. So you would also own and control comments to the blog, and arbitrarily edit or delete them. You have 100% control on everything, and users none at all. A decentralized version of your blog would be radically different. You can't just retire it. You can't permanent delete or overwrite prior entries. Commenters may actually own their own comments. I know, a blog is not a good example and a poor use case, just saying that the decentralized web very much is a difference in technical architecture.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
IMHO, there is no object of government funding that is more beneficial than this: open source data/tools/software etc.
soapdog 5y ago
> 3 main protocols that today form the backbone of the decentralized web: IPFS, WebRTC & Ethereum Err... I'm deep into decentralisation and I don't use any of those protocols. Anyone saying that there is a backbone for decentralisation or a dominant protocol is just pushing an agenda. I prefer using SSB and Hyper, I don't go around saying they're the backbone of decentralisation. Also, screw cryptocurrency and its wasteful usage of resources.
IMAYousaf 5y ago
A lot of people might benefit from reading decentralized systems as permissionless systems. That framing unlocked a lot of understanding here, and insight into why regulators freak out about it.

259 points by pimterry 5y ago

Got a bit of envy for the people that get funds/grants for their idea. I'm always "lucky" enough to find the call for proposals that match my skills and interest past their closing date. Must be a sign :)

black_puppydog 5y ago
These NGI grants come around quite regularly. I'm sure they have a newsletter. :)
Vinnl 5y ago
NGI0 is relatively often, and relatively approachable (though not major sums, usually), so there's almost always a call open. I got a grant through them and found the process very approachable, which I can't say of almost every other grant-giving organisation. See https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ and consider following them on Mastodon: https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero
mariusor 5y ago
I always look at the problem as the people that actually build cool tech don't really have the time to find grants and submit proposals. I personally haven't really seen something concrete and useful coming out from someone that has won one.

wisethrowaway1 5y ago

How will bureaucrats burn the next few billions of taxpayer money? * spins roulette *

wisethrowaway1 5y ago
Bitcoin! Devtools! How about lowering taxes? Have they ever considered aligning with the rest of the world to make it easier to do business, or they pretend to succeed being approximately the most hostile region for businesses?
- wisethrowaway1 5y ago
  Will they do something about the fact that when YC (to put a very random example) invests, they ask the recipient to move to US as EU regulatory environment is extremely hostile to startups?
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    What part of the EU regulatory environment is extremely hostile to startup? I really don't know but if I had to guess my guess would be worker rights and regulators that are unwilling to let startups enter whatever industry doing whatever they want while disregarding established rules. Happy to be corrected.
  - PaywallBuster 5y ago
    The last few batches they started accepting people remote afaik? But the company is probably transferred to Delaware so the paperwork remains the same for IPO and stuff
- netcan 5y ago
  Please relax. You don't have to leave your politics out of it, but you can't just start slinging it around belligerently. Stick to context. Be polite.
  - xondono 5y ago
    Belligerently? He is just rising a point. Government “innovation” subsidies move a lot of money into shinny “new” ideas, but in EU there’s no thought about how to create innovation itself. Just as an example, a friend of mine roasts coffee for a living. He is considering closing shop, because he is succeeding too much. At the point he is, he’ll be required to register as a business, which in Spain means he will have to pay ~300$ a month whether he makes money or not, plus 20% VAT and 20% in income taxes. Add to it the massive amount of time he’ll have to spend in paperwork (or paying someone another 100$/mo for handling it). Another good side job that will go to waste, instead of growing into a company. And it’s by no means an exception. I’ve work for tens of companies here, all of them have admitted to be flunking regulations intentionally to avoid costs during their creation to be able to exist.
zoobab 5y ago
A new chip foundry entirely paid with tax payers money, and where the profits will go to a private corporation? (the 'socialize losses, privatize profits') https://twitter.com/EIF4eu/status/1438041794940395523 https://twitter.com/EIF4eu/status/1438041794940395523 "The @EU_Commission announced a new European Chips Act, in order to jointly create a state-of-the-art European #chip ecosystem including production."
- notimetorelax 5y ago
  At this point with chip shortages it’s in EU’s interest to attract businesses to build it. Even if it costs us to build it, overall we’ll benefit from it. How much is lost due to stopped Audi plants?
  - zoobab 5y ago
    "attract businesses to build it" I am wondering how that will work with the current "state aid" framework. The current crisis is an opportunity to empty the public coffins, full of state aids everywhere, especially to large corporations, and send the bill afterwards to the people that have to pick up the bill. No thank you. As for cars, we don't need those chips, cars were fine before without all those useless electronics.
    - throwaway59553 5y ago
      >As for cars, we don't need those chips, cars were fine before without all those useless electronics. But how will they make sure you need to have your car checked every 12 months and bill you for some vague "electronic component"?
- wisethrowaway1 5y ago
  The EU Commission is desperate to find niches where it becomes an essential dealmaker. To their dismay, after 50 years of trying hard, they are still an irrelevant institution economically, a net negative for businesses and individuals. The chip industry will and can sort their issues perfectly on it's own. In fact one of the top chipmakers is already European, and they are doing extremely well, they don't need any political help.
JW1800 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
nickik 5y ago
Among all the things the EU waste money on this is not even in the Top 1000 of things that should not be done. Fundamental research into next generation technology that is also open source seems like the exact kind of thing governments should be doing.

wisethrowaway1 5y ago

Classic politician. They take 50% or more of your income, and then give back 1%, and then ask us to thank them!

woodpanel 5y ago

Of all the institutions to promote a uncensorable web it is the EU?! Talking about Gaslighting. Who knows, it could be a gentle attempt at keeping talent from leaving, or FOMO because every other important nation is doing crypto-stuff and lastly, and naturally, the sheer incompetence of this overextended bureaucracy where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban

akie 5y ago
> the sheer incompetence of this overextended bureaucracy where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban Tell me, which Murdoch newspaper have you been binging on?
mojzu 5y ago
The EU is not a monolith, there are many groups within it pushing different ideas. Some of them tech-friendly, some of them not. From my layman's perspective though it seems as though national governments who want to implement unpopular tech policy will often try to push it through the EU first because then they can deflect the criticism. Overall though I'd say the EU has been okay at preventing the most extreme anti-tech legislation, although it usually requires public scrutiny/outcry to make them drop it
snthd 5y ago
>where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir." Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.” ― Terry Pratchett, The Truth

superkuh 5y ago

It's disappointing to see this project, like many other decentralized web projects, has tunnel vision with respect to "cool technologies". The real distributed web is not non-web protocols, blockchains, or the like. The real distributed web is THE WEB HTTP servers and every single individual running their own web server to host their content (and then syndicate on whatever walled gardens are most profitable after). Connections are fast enough. Computers are fast enough. Self hosting is entirely viable and it cuts the gordian knot that is the content moderation problem. If it's a static HTTP site then there are almost no attack surfaces; it's magnitudes safer than running JS from an arbitrary site in your browser. These non-web protocols do not dencentralize. Lets start with IPFS. It's a great idea but unfortunately, like other security/anonymization layers, it relies mostly on centralizing gateways to actually let people access content. Additionally it is design to disassociate people from their files. Not a great start. WebRTC is just the sickness of modern browser and in-browser "app" architectures causing them to re-implement what already exists in the host OS. But this time in the browser, the most insecure piece of third party code running software there is. And blockchains like etherium aren't even worth talking about until they actually do switch over to proof of stake like they've been talking about for the last decade and never doing. And even then it directly involves monetary transactions which is sure to make thing suck for everyone. No, the decentralized web is the decentalized web. And it's easy to be a part of it.

imglorp 5y ago
> IPFS [...] relies mostly on centralizing gateways to actually let people access content No, IPFS does not need gateways: they are conveniences for people that don't have ipfs:// support in their browser or run a local daemon. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-companion/nibjojkomfdiaoajekhjakgkdhaomnch https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-companion/nib... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companion https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companio... https://brave.com/ipfs-support https://brave.com/ipfs-support
- superkuh 5y ago
  That's exactly what I said. I don't appreciate you twisting my words to make a point. No one has IPFS support. I have some IRC friends that are big in to it and they always link the gateways because no one can access their content otherwise.

drKarl 5y ago

IPFS is pretty awesome, and the ideas it builds upon like a Merkle tree DAG are really cool. I love the idea of DApps or Decentralized apps. I've played with some cool projects like MetaMask etc. But I really don't like the idea that all (most?) DApps are based on Ethereum and require huge amounts of Gas to run. Can't we have DApps without Blockchain/Ethereum? I know IPFS doesn't use Ethereum, and neither do things like SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt, based on the gossip protocol) but the biggest ecosystem of DApps is based on Ethereum and requires gas...

cdiddy2 5y ago
It is hard to get away from a gas based system because of spam and resource limitations. Regarding the expensiveness there are a lot of new technologies rolling out today such as optimistic rollups(arbitrum/optimism) and zkrollups(dydx,zksync) that allow for cheaper dapps to run. Then there is also things like Avalanche or Solana that are completely separate chains with different decentralization trade offs that allow for cheaper transactions. The space is still going through rapid advancement and experimentation.
- vmception 5y ago
  > It is hard to get away from a gas based system because of spam and resource limitations. I went to a Hyperledger workshop just to get a more objective opinion on it. All the demo functions were showing us how it was possible to threads and put the state on an internal blockchain, but that all nodes had to run the threaded functions we wrote. hmmmm, why is this taking so long, oh because everyone in the class was spamming the nodes with arbitrary executions! with no anti-spam resource it was as actually dumb as the theory suggested. that said, I've come to accept that the market can bear many things in the distributed ledger space, so even if other theoretical solutions can make participants cooperate, an out of the box solution is here that the world is selling so hard that it is easy to sell itself.
opatdchan 5y ago
>But I really don't like the idea that all (most?) DApps are based on Ethereum and require huge amounts of Gas to run. Can't we have DApps without Blockchain/Ethereum? Previous generation dapps were mostly on Ethereum because it was the only real solution available. But the ecosystem is maturing, there are chains that consume so little gas it's effectively a negligible cost, and more and more dapps are making use of them. Not to mention that Eth 2.0 is coming soon™.

netcan 5y ago

One thing "The EU" can do is provide demand. If they want to promote ethereum, IPFS, or WebRTC... use them for their activities in an open way. One real difficulty here is the ability of open systems people to communicate, lobby, advocate with governments. The reps, staffers and ministerial professionals aren't that numerous, specialized or inventive... usually. They basically work off ideas, prototype plans and such that are provided by (usually corporate) industry bodies and such. Even sympathetic politicians or public servants don't have much to go on. An Australian Shadow Secretary for rural development can pull a bold, $1bn infrastructure plan straight off the shelf in his parliamentary library and start talking it up the next day. It'll typically come with a booklet explaining the main ideas, easy to find allies/advocates. Etc. The "Decentralized Web" section is a sparse mess.

Shadonototra 5y ago
promote ethereum? you mean promote speculators with tax payer money? so they can sell their ETH and make ton of profit? remove ethereum from your post, and i 100% agree with you the fact that you included ethereum alongside IPFS and WebRTC is very suspicious i don't believe in "decentralized web" if people wants it solely to make profit from 'trading' aka speculating "decentralized coins" with fiat currency before any decentralization, there should be a global transparency act so before doing anything, one should be able to know what your portfolio consist of, to prevent any form of conflict of interest and even that i'm not sure that'll be enough to move forward if it's to repeat what we lived, there is no reason to lie to ourself into pretending things will change for the better why do you want a "decentralized web"? to maximize your profits? yeah no thanks
- atatatat 5y ago
  Is it REALLY speculation that humanity needs a digital way to make microtransactions? (e.g. to replace ads) And other new types of payment?
- netcan 5y ago
  Those are the article's examples, not mine.

dusted 5y ago

How is the web not already decentralized? everyone's got an IP address and is free to plug in a server at home.. If the EU should do anything, it should be require by law that any Internet connection comes with a non-carrier-gade-natted ip address, and that it can be made static if the customer desires, for free.

jitix 5y ago
This! Legislating for network infrastructure upgrades and IPv6 adoption will go a long way towards decentralization. The market will produce a bunch of privacy focused “Facebook in a box” kind of products on top of such infrastructure.
dylkil 5y ago
This is funding for developer tools for building decentralised services
magila 5y ago
The web as a whole is decentralized, but the HTTP URL scheme can only reference assets through a single authoritative hostname (or IP address). Thus the ability to retrieve a particular asset is always beholden to a single, privledged entity. When people talk about the "decentralized web" they are generally talking about combining a means of referencing assets in a self-authenticating manner (e.g. using cryptographic hashes and signatures) with a way a retrieving those assets which does not rely on a privledged authority (e.g. using a DHT and a P2P transfer protocol).
- openfuture 5y ago
  Precisely. The internet is all the protocols, the web is HTTP(S), the dweb would be protocols like bittorrent and now with zero knowledge proofs we can hash executions of programs also... The biggest problem is how do you prove your right to participation? Proof of work and proof of stake are both laughably inadequate. Machine learning things are being applied incorrectly imo but it'll converge eventually.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago

wb14123 5y ago

I never really understand the hype behind blockchain related technologies. The low transaction throughput, high compute resource demands makes it pretty unusable in most cases. Lots of workaround either has security problem or violated the idea of decentralization of blockchain, which makes it meaningless to use blockchain. Oh, there is also PoS which doesn't need CPU for mining, but doesn't anyone think it's irony that it makes rich people richer? Decentralization doesn't mean there shouldn't be one or some centralized nodes. That means open protocol, and server cannot control everything (for example, with end to end encryption). So that anyone can run the server, and user can use the service without trust the server. Most importantly, non regulation doesn't always mean good. Otherwise why we need law and government? Why not live in the wild west and let strong people kill weak people? Why not let big company play the monopoly?

vkk8 5y ago
I'm also puzzled by the fact that EU is funding this. Usually states and state-like entities are exactly the ones who don't want people to use decentralized technologies, because they often make laws difficult or impossible to enforce. In fact, wanting to circumvent laws is the only reason why people en mass would ever want to use decentralized technologies. I'm not necessarily always against this (there are some really stupid laws that should be broken), but I'm pretty annoyed by how people try to pretend that there is demand for these technologies for any other reason.
- angelzen 5y ago
  EU is way behind in tech. Centralized web means centralized web in US or China. Probably the push for decentralized web will fail, but at least it appears that EU does something to reduce dependence on foreign superpowers.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    The EU could also subsidize centralized EU-based tech. What are the largest tech companies in the US and China based around? Ads, payments, cloud computing, and media consumption ("FAANG"). Europe already has solid, utility-priced payment infrastructure. Ads are arguably toxic (especially Facebook), and cloud computing is relatively straightforward to implement with talent and funding. Europe could even take a page from China and use regulation to strongly encourage European customers and businesses to not use US products and services (GDPR, for example).

butz 5y ago

How to get EU funding for a new, intependent browser engine and internet browser?

cookiengineer 5y ago
...the internet browser has to be based on a blockchain, otherwise the NGI fund won't accept it. Source: wanted to apply with my Web Browser that is peer to peer but doesn't go with the blockchain hypetrain.
- ognarb 5y ago
  I have a project that is currently funded by ngi and it has nothing to do with Blockchain...
  - cookiengineer 5y ago
    On the open calls page [1] it seems that the only open fund in the context of a web browser is the one related to search and discovery. All the other ones specifically mention blockchain based technologies. Or did your project get funded by NLNet directly via another fund? [1] https://www.ngi.eu/opencalls/ https://www.ngi.eu/opencalls/
adrn10 5y ago
Hey! NGI is funding Nyxt browser as part of the same sub-grant call. Check it out, I was quite thrilled! https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

shrimpx 5y ago

With apologies to my European friends (I’m also European), this article illustrates how the EU is a second rate sucker in technology. While they boast and believe that they’re cutting edge because they’re investing in Blockchain, the likely reality is that they’re jumping on a false trend and Blockchain and its thousands of buzzwords will fizzle out, as it’s sustained only by fomo and speculation.

RealStickman_ 5y ago
That's only one of the protocols they're funding though. The others being IPFS and WebRTC.
y4mi 5y ago
As neither webrtc nor ipfs have anything to do with the Blockchain I'm guessing your talking about their Ethereum focus and I have to agree. but you have to admit that eth probably sounds like a great idea for non programmers. Implementing smart contacts that do non trivial stuff is just basically impossible, but it's a very interesting concept to run code if it were. Non-programmers just don't really realize how error riddled the average software is, so they get caught on the promise itself.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  I think they are calling out to the IPFS and Filecoin relationship. The projects used to be much closer but have move apart. https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/ipfs-and-filecoin/ https://docs.filecoin.io/about-filecoin/ipfs-and-filecoin/
  - y4mi 5y ago
    Sure, but wasn't ipfs released long before filecoins were added to the mix? Edit: they're both from summer 2014, so I was mistaken. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8069836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054571
5y ago

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I think a definition of "Decentralized web" should mean is in order. The Internet/Arpa net was created to be decentralized from the beginning. If a node, or more nodes went down, the rest of the network may be able to keep working. If you, and me and all of our friends and all of their friends all ran out own web servers from our homes it would be decentralized to the extent that if a server disconnected all the others would keep working. The information on that server may be gone for all time. The prevalence of enormously centralized monopolies on the internet is not a result of its technical architecture, but rather narrow business interests and a terminal lack of regulation. Now we are all using AOL v3. (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc). It can get semantically confusing. Facebook is massively distributed in some ways. Datacenters in several locations, CDNs all over the place. It would take a hell of a lot (I think) to blow Facebook off the web. Or maybe some servers centrally will shut everything off it they are blown up. IPFS is weird when taking about decentralized. Storage is not on one big server located somewhere. It is distributed among many. In theory if one goes down, the data is still available. but only if the server/nodes that make up the IFPS network are reliable and dependable. If a lot of nodes are run from laptops that that are shutdown at the end of the day that would become a significant problem. Since more and more and more data would need to be stored in IPFS the need for dependable storage servers will increase rapidly. I would like a simpler approach more in line with the original architecture, lots and lots of independent small servers. The people who run them can mirror each other in some fashion to persist data. Like FTP used to be (and maybe still is), like NNTP used to be (and maybe still is)

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> Now we are all using AOL v3. (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc) ...GitHub (the Facebook of software development)...
fleddr 5y ago
"The prevalence of enormously centralized monopolies on the internet is not a result of its technical architecture, but rather narrow business interests and a terminal lack of regulation." Neither business interests or regulation have anything to do with something being centralized or not. If you would launch "Thinkbeat's blog", in the traditional sense of web publishing, it is 100% centralized. Regardless of its size or your good or bad intentions. You would be in full control of it. You could intentionally retire the site, and all information and access is lost, forever. You could accidentally do that by forgetting to pay a bill. Another scenario, you publish something fishy on your blog, and get banned from the blogging platform, or whichever dependency you rely on. Further, all content on the blog is 100% owned by you, and none of it by the users. So you would also own and control comments to the blog, and arbitrarily edit or delete them. You have 100% control on everything, and users none at all. A decentralized version of your blog would be radically different. You can't just retire it. You can't permanent delete or overwrite prior entries. Commenters may actually own their own comments. I know, a blog is not a good example and a poor use case, just saying that the decentralized web very much is a difference in technical architecture.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

IMHO, there is no object of government funding that is more beneficial than this: open source data/tools/software etc.

soapdog 5y ago

> 3 main protocols that today form the backbone of the decentralized web: IPFS, WebRTC & Ethereum Err... I'm deep into decentralisation and I don't use any of those protocols. Anyone saying that there is a backbone for decentralisation or a dominant protocol is just pushing an agenda. I prefer using SSB and Hyper, I don't go around saying they're the backbone of decentralisation. Also, screw cryptocurrency and its wasteful usage of resources.

IMAYousaf 5y ago

A lot of people might benefit from reading decentralized systems as permissionless systems. That framing unlocked a lot of understanding here, and insight into why regulators freak out about it.