7 ms·

> I really can’t think of something more reliable and cheaper with assurances of availability like this Assurances that they only need because they're breaking

by seoaeu 5y ago

> I really can’t think of something more reliable and cheaper with assurances of availability like this Assurances that they only need because they're breaking the law. It is well established that blockchains are good to facilitating illegal behavior. This is just a novel way of using them for that purpose

vmception 5y ago
Or like just a terms of service interpretation that they didn't even know of Platformless internet, whats what people mean by web3 and I’m here for it A public utility that can just be optionally used no matter what people think of you
- arpa 5y ago
  it once was like this already. You can spin up your site anytime. You can use tor hidden services to make yourself uncensorable. No need for crypto, pay in knowledge only. And that's why web 1.0 was superior. edit, ok, tor appeared with web2.0, but still it is more of a web 1.3.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    No you can't any visitor using chrome gives away your hidden public website. Recreating web 1.0 with todays spyware browsers requires a tor setup.
  - vmception 5y ago
    yes web 1.0 had potential but the consolidation of platforms and their protocols made it untenable ISPs can deplatform ICANN and ENOM can deplatform Nations can force them to deplatform and effectively censor your web 1.0 server can be unreachable or unable to serve data a TOR onion service is subject to the same distributed denial of service Reading from a blockchain is not, and the costs for writing to it are one-off and low
    - arpa 5y ago
      somebody will still have to store and serve the blockchain, right? So same problems...
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > yes web 1.0 had potential but the consolidation of platforms and their protocols made it untenable Unlike web3, where they platforms chose to write custom metadata to the blockchain and interpret as they so chose... Oh wait.
      - vmception 5y ago
        lol. I can appreciate that take. there likely will be a day where there is nobody left who knows how to use dominant blockchains and rely on a few company controlled platforms to do everything for them, so there is nobody left to communicate with when using the public utilities in the most raw form. For now, that's not the case and education is expanding. Not as fast as the uneducated users of blockchains, but some of them dive deeper too.
        dmitriid 5y ago
        > For now, that's not the case Even now this is the case. It's a bit more spread because many people jump on the bandwagon and try to maximize their scams^W profits. But then you get news like "Peter Molyneux releasing next game on Gala Games platform", and this is exactly what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter how many users and devs you "educate". If Platform X doesn't recognize Platform Y's metadata, no amount of blockchain will help you.
can16358p 5y ago
It is clearly breaking the law, but think of this example: What if a corrupted government was also blocking access to freedom of speech and querying some harder-to-block public, immutable database on a blockchain was effectively circumventing this block? Yeah, it's technically still breaking the law and it could be blocked too (albeit much harder), though it's for a good cause.
- adrianN 5y ago
  It is my understanding that blocking bitcoin is not all that hard if you have control over ISPs like a corrupted government would have.
  - pentestercrab 5y ago
    https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/ - The Bitcoin blockchain from space. No internet required.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bduerst 5y ago
      Just need to take out 7 non-critical geo sync'd satellites. It's magnitudes more expensive to keep putting them up than to take them down.
      - sabellito 5y ago
        You're technically correct, but what's the point of this statement? Is the next reply supposed to be "then the bitcoin billionaires will just put up 100s of satellites"? This reads a bit like when, as a child, we'd discuss who would win in a fight, Goku or Superman.
        bduerst 5y ago
        Sure, but we're not talking about Super Heroes, but existing entities like China, who only just six months ago shut down all Bitcoin mining inside it's borders in less than a month's time (and who also has anti-satellite capabilities). I doubt bitcoin 'billionaires' would put more up, because liquidating that much bitcoin would crash their market (considering >70% of trades on exchanges are wash trades) and require them to go against tragedy of the commons.
mrighele 5y ago
Something being illegal doesn't necessarily mean that it is wrong. If instead of a C2 Server the above approach was used for SciHub or other servers regularly censored by one government or another, I guess many people here would approve.
- BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
  sci-hub doesn't need it; just look up the latest URL on wikipedia.
webmaven 5y ago
>> I really can’t think of something more reliable and cheaper with assurances of availability like this > Assurances that they only need because they're breaking the law. It is well established that blockchains are good to facilitating illegal behavior. This is just a novel way of using them for that purpose I don't think that describing the mechanisms as facilitating illegal behavior is entirely fair. A better term would be something like "extralegal", which includes illegal behavior as a significant subcategory. This isn't just sophistry. A significant fraction of the world's population live in places where "rule of law" is at best a polite fiction, or where the legal system is largely captured by a kleptocratic oligarchy[0]. It would be nice if trustless distributed ledgers were actually being used to do things like establish property rights and facilitate transactions in places that don't have, for example, a functioning land registry or the equivalent, or at least be shown to be useful to bootstrap that sort of thing into existence (collectible NFTs and virtual real estate are only baby steps in that direction), but it is true that the 'good' edge cases of establishing immutable ground truths that cannot be erased by fiat/regime change/interregnum are legitimate though largely theoretical[1]. Meanwhile, we're left with the definition of "facilitating behaviors that a court can be convinced to disallow, which are mostly, though not entirely, behaviors that are (and most citizens would agree should be) illegal". I can't think of a better concise term than "extralegal" to capture that nuance. [0] I personally don't subscribe to the belief that this describes most of the industrialized world, whatever some cryptocurrency boosters think, but that's a political matter. Everybody draws the line somewhere, and agrees that some chunks of the world exist on the other side of it. [1] Cryptocurrencies can also facilitate otherwise legal transactions that are being hindered by extralegal means, such as donations to WikiLeaks during the global payment processor blockade (December 2010 to July 2012).

by seoaeu 5y ago

vmception 5y ago

Or like just a terms of service interpretation that they didn't even know of Platformless internet, whats what people mean by web3 and I’m here for it A public utility that can just be optionally used no matter what people think of you

arpa 5y ago
it once was like this already. You can spin up your site anytime. You can use tor hidden services to make yourself uncensorable. No need for crypto, pay in knowledge only. And that's why web 1.0 was superior. edit, ok, tor appeared with web2.0, but still it is more of a web 1.3.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  No you can't any visitor using chrome gives away your hidden public website. Recreating web 1.0 with todays spyware browsers requires a tor setup.
- vmception 5y ago
  yes web 1.0 had potential but the consolidation of platforms and their protocols made it untenable ISPs can deplatform ICANN and ENOM can deplatform Nations can force them to deplatform and effectively censor your web 1.0 server can be unreachable or unable to serve data a TOR onion service is subject to the same distributed denial of service Reading from a blockchain is not, and the costs for writing to it are one-off and low
  - arpa 5y ago
    somebody will still have to store and serve the blockchain, right? So same problems...
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > yes web 1.0 had potential but the consolidation of platforms and their protocols made it untenable Unlike web3, where they platforms chose to write custom metadata to the blockchain and interpret as they so chose... Oh wait.
    - vmception 5y ago
      lol. I can appreciate that take. there likely will be a day where there is nobody left who knows how to use dominant blockchains and rely on a few company controlled platforms to do everything for them, so there is nobody left to communicate with when using the public utilities in the most raw form. For now, that's not the case and education is expanding. Not as fast as the uneducated users of blockchains, but some of them dive deeper too.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > For now, that's not the case Even now this is the case. It's a bit more spread because many people jump on the bandwagon and try to maximize their scams^W profits. But then you get news like "Peter Molyneux releasing next game on Gala Games platform", and this is exactly what I'm talking about. It doesn't matter how many users and devs you "educate". If Platform X doesn't recognize Platform Y's metadata, no amount of blockchain will help you.

can16358p 5y ago

It is clearly breaking the law, but think of this example: What if a corrupted government was also blocking access to freedom of speech and querying some harder-to-block public, immutable database on a blockchain was effectively circumventing this block? Yeah, it's technically still breaking the law and it could be blocked too (albeit much harder), though it's for a good cause.

adrianN 5y ago
It is my understanding that blocking bitcoin is not all that hard if you have control over ISPs like a corrupted government would have.
- pentestercrab 5y ago
  https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/ - The Bitcoin blockchain from space. No internet required.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Just need to take out 7 non-critical geo sync'd satellites. It's magnitudes more expensive to keep putting them up than to take them down.
    - sabellito 5y ago
      You're technically correct, but what's the point of this statement? Is the next reply supposed to be "then the bitcoin billionaires will just put up 100s of satellites"? This reads a bit like when, as a child, we'd discuss who would win in a fight, Goku or Superman.
      - bduerst 5y ago
        Sure, but we're not talking about Super Heroes, but existing entities like China, who only just six months ago shut down all Bitcoin mining inside it's borders in less than a month's time (and who also has anti-satellite capabilities). I doubt bitcoin 'billionaires' would put more up, because liquidating that much bitcoin would crash their market (considering >70% of trades on exchanges are wash trades) and require them to go against tragedy of the commons.

mrighele 5y ago

Something being illegal doesn't necessarily mean that it is wrong. If instead of a C2 Server the above approach was used for SciHub or other servers regularly censored by one government or another, I guess many people here would approve.

BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
sci-hub doesn't need it; just look up the latest URL on wikipedia.

webmaven 5y ago

>> I really can’t think of something more reliable and cheaper with assurances of availability like this > Assurances that they only need because they're breaking the law. It is well established that blockchains are good to facilitating illegal behavior. This is just a novel way of using them for that purpose I don't think that describing the mechanisms as facilitating illegal behavior is entirely fair. A better term would be something like "extralegal", which includes illegal behavior as a significant subcategory. This isn't just sophistry. A significant fraction of the world's population live in places where "rule of law" is at best a polite fiction, or where the legal system is largely captured by a kleptocratic oligarchy[0]. It would be nice if trustless distributed ledgers were actually being used to do things like establish property rights and facilitate transactions in places that don't have, for example, a functioning land registry or the equivalent, or at least be shown to be useful to bootstrap that sort of thing into existence (collectible NFTs and virtual real estate are only baby steps in that direction), but it is true that the 'good' edge cases of establishing immutable ground truths that cannot be erased by fiat/regime change/interregnum are legitimate though largely theoretical[1]. Meanwhile, we're left with the definition of "facilitating behaviors that a court can be convinced to disallow, which are mostly, though not entirely, behaviors that are (and most citizens would agree should be) illegal". I can't think of a better concise term than "extralegal" to capture that nuance. [0] I personally don't subscribe to the belief that this describes most of the industrialized world, whatever some cryptocurrency boosters think, but that's a political matter. Everybody draws the line somewhere, and agrees that some chunks of the world exist on the other side of it. [1] Cryptocurrencies can also facilitate otherwise legal transactions that are being hindered by extralegal means, such as donations to WikiLeaks during the global payment processor blockade (December 2010 to July 2012).