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Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, the

Can you explain how web3 solves any of your bullets? If you are trying to say that web3 will prevent platform holders from banning you from their platform, then good luck with that. Any platform can and will ban you and have complete control over their platform. Thinking web3 is going to prevent that is naive for many many reasons. If Facebook bans me then web3 isn't going to allow me to post on Facebook still. Same with Twitter and Linked In. If you are saying that web3 solves these by making it so that these platforms aren't in charge of my identity, well they aren't today so I'm not sure what the deal is. If gmail bans my account it's not a huge issue because I use a custom domain for my email, so I can route it to another provider or host my own. If Facebook bans me then I lose contact with family on there but I don't lost my identity because FB isn't in charge of my identity. same with twitter or linked in or whatever. All these problems you list are solvable today with the decentralized web we've had for decades. There's a reason centralization has happened on these platforms, and it seems like all the web3 talk I see is naive to that. Edit: Also Keybase is a great example using cryptography to solve the identity problem without a blockchain and with some level of decentralization (keybase's servers are centralized but the actual identity is all based on PGP and GPG that's been around for a long time).

wpietri 5y ago
This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain. But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change. A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me. So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  At its heart, the strongest claim blockchain technology offers is pretty good data consistency assurances between nodes that don't trust one another. I guess that's kind of interesting as a technical demonstration, but it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that. This has been around and under continuous development since 2008, and still no actual use case. It seems like the space is full of hype-bro crooks and hype-bro dupes who feed off one another, warping a niche technical toy into whatever get-rich-quick revolutionary fantasy they want.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    The expression you're looking for to describe blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
  - s3tz 5y ago
    That's because everyone fell for the systems fallacy. Blockchain was designed for bitcoin to function, for that purpose alone. Then because it worked for that one use case of a decentralized storage/transfer of value, people assumed they could make it work for everything else. Not how technology works.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I think its important to add, with open group membership to that definition. If there is a known fixed list of nodes participating in the system, blockchain again becomes a bad choice.
  - Vetch 5y ago
    > it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that Its utility is much easier to see if you're stuck in a system rife with corruption and have a general lack of trust in central institutions. A key aspect of corruption is that central authorities are not accountable to anyone. With blockchains, you can design systems where game theory via what's encoded into system design, can limit what concentrations of power can do. The centralized powers in bitcoin for example, can't rationally act in way that destroys the value of the system they're participating in. This is totally not true for many developing economies; just that property is already an encouraging one. Working on scaling these systems, making them less resource intensive and proving stronger more formal bounds for open peer to peer friendly non-discriminatory systems that are harder to corrupt and more robust to bad actors is a not a solution in search of a problem.
practice9 5y ago
Sure, I'll try to explain the Gmail point: - Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails and/or photos, docs, Drive files will be not recovered. Also non-technical person would probably skip this step. The issue of not really being in control of your data can be solved by: - regulating Google to let you access your data irrespectively if you are banned from their frontend or not. You can choose to export it in a standardized way to your own server, IPFS or another cloud provider. All data and metadata is exported and then parsed depending on capabilities of the receiving server. - putting all of your data, encrypted, on IPFS or similar and creating multiple frontends for it (not unlike email clients, right? Similar idea). Then assigning your unique DID to this data, so it's part of your online belongings - Next step would be regulating Google to allow you to use the complete user data stored on their servers with any client. Like an S3 bucket? Yes, something like that. Google can choose to charge some price for the access, that's OK. GDPR tried to solve some of the high level issues related to user data, but it's not enough Edit: Google already has semi-closed APIs for some of their products, but only for partner businesses. You're required to jump through multiple hoops to gain access (not guaranteed): https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overview https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overvie... On Twitter: Jack does seem to have plans to make Twitter more decentralized, i.e. Bluesky https://blueskyweb.org/ https://blueskyweb.org/ Seem like they started off with brainstorming identity verification solutions and DIDs. But I haven't followed them closely
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails [...] Fetchmail?

wpietri 5y ago

This is always my issue with things in this space. There's a list of bad things to be fixed or good things to achieve. And then there's a technology like [jazz hands] blockchain. But when you ask how they relate, it gets very handwavey. When I was at Code for America in 2015, somebody dropped by one of our events to buttonhole me about [jazz hands] blockchain for governments. I listened politely for a while and then asked, "Why would something that is definitionally a central authority need a trustless, distributed system?" They blathered and huffed for a while, but could never answer the question. They walked away thinking I was clearly not bright enough to see how it was all going to change. A couple years later a friend asked me to set down with somebody who wanted to launch a startup. Their customers were companies who wanted employees to be able to safely report sexual harassment and other misbehavior. They had a few existing competitors, so I asked what made this new company different. The would-be founder explained that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain. I asked further, and it turned out that they would use [jazz hands] blockchain internally. So basically a database with extra steps. I pointed out that assault reporters wouldn't be able to see any difference; from the user perspective, all the companies in the market were just saying, "trust us, we definitely won't tell the people paying us anything". The entrepreneur was convinced that it really was different, but if so they couldn't make it clear to me. So now we've had, what, 6 or 7 years where [jazz hands] blockchain was going to revolutionize things and it hasn't made a practical dent in any real industry. Originally I too was willing to call that naive, but it seems an awfully long time to accidentally maintain such perfect innocence.

the_snooze 5y ago
At its heart, the strongest claim blockchain technology offers is pretty good data consistency assurances between nodes that don't trust one another. I guess that's kind of interesting as a technical demonstration, but it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that. This has been around and under continuous development since 2008, and still no actual use case. It seems like the space is full of hype-bro crooks and hype-bro dupes who feed off one another, warping a niche technical toy into whatever get-rich-quick revolutionary fantasy they want.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  The expression you're looking for to describe blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
- s3tz 5y ago
  That's because everyone fell for the systems fallacy. Blockchain was designed for bitcoin to function, for that purpose alone. Then because it worked for that one use case of a decentralized storage/transfer of value, people assumed they could make it work for everything else. Not how technology works.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I think its important to add, with open group membership to that definition. If there is a known fixed list of nodes participating in the system, blockchain again becomes a bad choice.
- Vetch 5y ago
  > it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that Its utility is much easier to see if you're stuck in a system rife with corruption and have a general lack of trust in central institutions. A key aspect of corruption is that central authorities are not accountable to anyone. With blockchains, you can design systems where game theory via what's encoded into system design, can limit what concentrations of power can do. The centralized powers in bitcoin for example, can't rationally act in way that destroys the value of the system they're participating in. This is totally not true for many developing economies; just that property is already an encouraging one. Working on scaling these systems, making them less resource intensive and proving stronger more formal bounds for open peer to peer friendly non-discriminatory systems that are harder to corrupt and more robust to bad actors is a not a solution in search of a problem.

practice9 5y ago

Sure, I'll try to explain the Gmail point: - Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails and/or photos, docs, Drive files will be not recovered. Also non-technical person would probably skip this step. The issue of not really being in control of your data can be solved by: - regulating Google to let you access your data irrespectively if you are banned from their frontend or not. You can choose to export it in a standardized way to your own server, IPFS or another cloud provider. All data and metadata is exported and then parsed depending on capabilities of the receiving server. - putting all of your data, encrypted, on IPFS or similar and creating multiple frontends for it (not unlike email clients, right? Similar idea). Then assigning your unique DID to this data, so it's part of your online belongings - Next step would be regulating Google to allow you to use the complete user data stored on their servers with any client. Like an S3 bucket? Yes, something like that. Google can choose to charge some price for the access, that's OK. GDPR tried to solve some of the high level issues related to user data, but it's not enough Edit: Google already has semi-closed APIs for some of their products, but only for partner businesses. You're required to jump through multiple hoops to gain access (not guaranteed): https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overview https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/overvie... On Twitter: Jack does seem to have plans to make Twitter more decentralized, i.e. Bluesky https://blueskyweb.org/ https://blueskyweb.org/ Seem like they started off with brainstorming identity verification solutions and DIDs. But I haven't followed them closely

denton-scratch 5y ago
> Setting up a separate domain for mail is a good idea, but access to previous emails [...] Fetchmail?