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> Blockchain makes it easy to pay people for being part of the network Pay people for being part of the network? Where is this money coming from? Blockchain

> Blockchain makes it easy to pay people for being part of the network Pay people for being part of the network? Where is this money coming from? Blockchain solutions are more expensive to maintain than centralized solutions. It’s going to cost a lot of money to put all of the photos and other data of a social network into a blockchain and keep it maintained. Certainly far more than it costs hyper-optimized centralized providers like Facebook and Twitter. There might be a few people out there interested in paying substantially to be part of a decentralized blockchain-based social platform, but it’s certainly a far, far smaller number than the people who are happy to use Twitter or Facebook for free.

outside1234 5y ago
It is folks using the network that are paying folks providing the network. Take storage, for example, this is folks paying to rent space (perhaps to do backups) from folks that have excess space.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Most people already pay folks to provide the network, their ISP. It's a hard sell to ask users to pay a second set of people.
armchairhacker 5y ago
wrt blockchain I was actually thinking of peers getting payed with cryptocurrency for participating in the p2p network and storing/providing non-blockchain assets. I assume it's easier to calculate and submit micropayments with a cryptocurrency than to connect with a real bank and do them with real money. Plus peers can trust that they get the correct payment for the amount they contribute to the p2p network, especially if the payment is via a smart contract. The one big advantage of blockchain I know of, is that a group of people can negotiate some sort of payment (e.g. I do X work I get Y coins), and once they agree, nobody can break the negotiation. So assuming everyone understands what they're doing, they will get automatically payed and nobody will run off with all the money (of course if people don't understand what they're doing, they can get scammed like the many many crypto scams we've seen so far).
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > wrt blockchain I was actually thinking of peers getting payed with cryptocurrency for participating in the p2p network and storing/providing non-blockchain assets. It’s easy to imagine where the money goes out, but where does the money come in? Obviously the answer is “the users” but that’s the problem: Not many users are going to be interested in paying ongoing fees just to exist on a social network when they can get the same thing for free. There will always be a core group of true believers who will pay for these networks, but the networks aren’t very useful if it’s limited to a small group of people willing to go through all of the trouble and keep paying just to exist on it. This is the big question that a lot of the web3 conversations conveniently sidestep: How much is it going to cost? Everyone seems to assume some hypothetical future blockchain that costs very little, but the bottom line is that you still have to incentivize all of the nodes and peers to keep the data and you need to do so in a decentralized manner that will always be orders of magnitude less efficient than hosting on a standard cloud server. That inefficiency is expensive.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    Blockchains may be generally less efficient for storing and processing lots of data (though there are specialized blockchains for storage, for GPU rendering, for computation, and so on), but the flip side of this is, do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is? In some cases, maybe. But I think what pays for the servers running all these services is the advertising industry. Whether you like it or not, you are paying for the services you use, but in ways that are often opaque to you. Even if you agreed to let Facebook use your data, you have no transparency into what exactly they're doing with it, and you don't benefit from it beyond access to their platform. In many instances, you'd be fine with a subset of the functionality (do we really need AI-curated news feeds designed to keep us infinitely scrolling)?
    - tomrod 5y ago
      > do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is? People vote with their feet. At least today, the answer is "yes." A compelling alternative may change their mind. A blockchain-based social media network is difficult to image doing so for the majority of people.
nl 5y ago
We (https://verida.io https://verida.io) are building decentralized Web3 storage APIs using PouchDB/CouchDB for data storage and replication and using blockchain for signing data. It's as fast as a centralized solution (because you have a real database!) but has all the benefits of being decentralized (own your own data! Choose replication servers! Split payment for data between data originators and app developer! Alternate models to advertising for free-to-use apps!)

outside1234 5y ago

It is folks using the network that are paying folks providing the network. Take storage, for example, this is folks paying to rent space (perhaps to do backups) from folks that have excess space.

adrianN 5y ago
Most people already pay folks to provide the network, their ISP. It's a hard sell to ask users to pay a second set of people.

armchairhacker 5y ago

wrt blockchain I was actually thinking of peers getting payed with cryptocurrency for participating in the p2p network and storing/providing non-blockchain assets. I assume it's easier to calculate and submit micropayments with a cryptocurrency than to connect with a real bank and do them with real money. Plus peers can trust that they get the correct payment for the amount they contribute to the p2p network, especially if the payment is via a smart contract. The one big advantage of blockchain I know of, is that a group of people can negotiate some sort of payment (e.g. I do X work I get Y coins), and once they agree, nobody can break the negotiation. So assuming everyone understands what they're doing, they will get automatically payed and nobody will run off with all the money (of course if people don't understand what they're doing, they can get scammed like the many many crypto scams we've seen so far).

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> wrt blockchain I was actually thinking of peers getting payed with cryptocurrency for participating in the p2p network and storing/providing non-blockchain assets. It’s easy to imagine where the money goes out, but where does the money come in? Obviously the answer is “the users” but that’s the problem: Not many users are going to be interested in paying ongoing fees just to exist on a social network when they can get the same thing for free. There will always be a core group of true believers who will pay for these networks, but the networks aren’t very useful if it’s limited to a small group of people willing to go through all of the trouble and keep paying just to exist on it. This is the big question that a lot of the web3 conversations conveniently sidestep: How much is it going to cost? Everyone seems to assume some hypothetical future blockchain that costs very little, but the bottom line is that you still have to incentivize all of the nodes and peers to keep the data and you need to do so in a decentralized manner that will always be orders of magnitude less efficient than hosting on a standard cloud server. That inefficiency is expensive.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Blockchains may be generally less efficient for storing and processing lots of data (though there are specialized blockchains for storage, for GPU rendering, for computation, and so on), but the flip side of this is, do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is? In some cases, maybe. But I think what pays for the servers running all these services is the advertising industry. Whether you like it or not, you are paying for the services you use, but in ways that are often opaque to you. Even if you agreed to let Facebook use your data, you have no transparency into what exactly they're doing with it, and you don't benefit from it beyond access to their platform. In many instances, you'd be fine with a subset of the functionality (do we really need AI-curated news feeds designed to keep us infinitely scrolling)?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    > do most users of web2 services want their data collected, processed, analysed, rebundled, and resold to the extent that it is? People vote with their feet. At least today, the answer is "yes." A compelling alternative may change their mind. A blockchain-based social media network is difficult to image doing so for the majority of people.

nl 5y ago

We (https://verida.io https://verida.io) are building decentralized Web3 storage APIs using PouchDB/CouchDB for data storage and replication and using blockchain for signing data. It's as fast as a centralized solution (because you have a real database!) but has all the benefits of being decentralized (own your own data! Choose replication servers! Split payment for data between data originators and app developer! Alternate models to advertising for free-to-use apps!)