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You absolutely don't need some crypto-based financial scheme to run decentralized web applications. Just some kind of open standard & a set of motivations and i

You absolutely don't need some crypto-based financial scheme to run decentralized web applications. Just some kind of open standard & a set of motivations and incentives to keep the system running and improving. American ideas of decentralization tend to make the root assumption that financial incentives are the only thing that drive human motivation, so almost every decentralization project gets "blockchained" eventually, at which point progress on the core standards or applications gets halted because the attention, focus, and energy shifts to figuring out the myriad, predictable problems with adding "operate a global financial system" to your JIRA tickets. I don't really know any way out of this bottleneck for Americans; they're simply too obsessed with complicated financial schemes to make clear progress on usable dApps. I have slightly more hope for Europeans; if you notice the Matrix project has been chugging along for years, with millions of users, and is poised to actually compete with big tech products via traditional funding and company operation, like normal people.

oleganza 5y ago
What you call "american ideas" is the only thing that works in the anonymous environment. Communal solidarity works fine in small social groups where "having something at stake" that keeps people cooperate honestly is measured in many things beyond money, which includes the multi-faceted hard-to-quantify reputation. But if you want random people to cooperate on the internet, you can't have any of those properties but stupid cold cash. And, if you try to recreate reputation mechanisms, consider how exposed people would be with persistent perfectly precise digital identification of their cooperation efforts whenever such efforts cross interests of some other group. In non-internet life a lot of things are understood and agreed upon without making those decisions public. Even in private contracts, parties prefer that the details of the contract to remain known only to themselves unless (in rare and unfortunate circumstances) their dispute warrants participation of an arbiter.
- someguyorother 5y ago
  > What you call "american ideas" is the only thing that works in the anonymous environment. What about BitTorrent or its various file-sharing predecessors? It has no cash, they had no cash. Or Tor? Exit nodes don't demand money as compensation from attracting the attention of people in authority.
Geee 5y ago
Someone has to pay for the resources. If you're going to compete with Facebook, then someone has to pay for billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Voluntarist P2P can work to an extent when everyone donates their computer to the task, but a better way is to allow people to pay and let experts run the nodes. People get better quality service, and experts can make a living by providing the service. Voluntarist networks can't guarantee quality of service. You just get what you get. If you want to have 1 Gbps downloads and 100% content availability, you have to pay someone to provide that.
- natural219 5y ago
  I 100% get that, and fwiw I'm fully supportive of any scheme that eventually works out to fund traditional app development. I admit I was more skeptical in ~2017 when these grand claims were made, and it seemed like you needed to be deeply up-to-date with latest crypto happenings to be able to navigate the 'blockchain dApp' world. I'm very supportive and admiring of things like Protocol Labs, which have put their money where their mouth is to translate the windfall from the Filecoin IPO into projects that make more sense to my traditional webapp brain, like the latest Matrix. So genuine kudos to everyone involved, I'm happy that this model exists and the ecosystem does eventually deliver in some cases.
  - Geee 5y ago
    I have to say that I don't know any blockchain P2P-networks that have succesfully done this (Sia/Skynet maybe). I don't advocate for 'token for every app' or ICOs, which end up being ponzi schemes. Currently I'm more interested in what's being built on Bitcoin and Lightning Network, such as https://www.impervious.ai https://www.impervious.ai and the ecosystem on https://getumbrel.com https://getumbrel.com

oleganza 5y ago

What you call "american ideas" is the only thing that works in the anonymous environment. Communal solidarity works fine in small social groups where "having something at stake" that keeps people cooperate honestly is measured in many things beyond money, which includes the multi-faceted hard-to-quantify reputation. But if you want random people to cooperate on the internet, you can't have any of those properties but stupid cold cash. And, if you try to recreate reputation mechanisms, consider how exposed people would be with persistent perfectly precise digital identification of their cooperation efforts whenever such efforts cross interests of some other group. In non-internet life a lot of things are understood and agreed upon without making those decisions public. Even in private contracts, parties prefer that the details of the contract to remain known only to themselves unless (in rare and unfortunate circumstances) their dispute warrants participation of an arbiter.

someguyorother 5y ago
> What you call "american ideas" is the only thing that works in the anonymous environment. What about BitTorrent or its various file-sharing predecessors? It has no cash, they had no cash. Or Tor? Exit nodes don't demand money as compensation from attracting the attention of people in authority.

Geee 5y ago

Someone has to pay for the resources. If you're going to compete with Facebook, then someone has to pay for billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Voluntarist P2P can work to an extent when everyone donates their computer to the task, but a better way is to allow people to pay and let experts run the nodes. People get better quality service, and experts can make a living by providing the service. Voluntarist networks can't guarantee quality of service. You just get what you get. If you want to have 1 Gbps downloads and 100% content availability, you have to pay someone to provide that.

natural219 5y ago
I 100% get that, and fwiw I'm fully supportive of any scheme that eventually works out to fund traditional app development. I admit I was more skeptical in ~2017 when these grand claims were made, and it seemed like you needed to be deeply up-to-date with latest crypto happenings to be able to navigate the 'blockchain dApp' world. I'm very supportive and admiring of things like Protocol Labs, which have put their money where their mouth is to translate the windfall from the Filecoin IPO into projects that make more sense to my traditional webapp brain, like the latest Matrix. So genuine kudos to everyone involved, I'm happy that this model exists and the ecosystem does eventually deliver in some cases.
- Geee 5y ago
  I have to say that I don't know any blockchain P2P-networks that have succesfully done this (Sia/Skynet maybe). I don't advocate for 'token for every app' or ICOs, which end up being ponzi schemes. Currently I'm more interested in what's being built on Bitcoin and Lightning Network, such as https://www.impervious.ai https://www.impervious.ai and the ecosystem on https://getumbrel.com https://getumbrel.com