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Thanks for the examples. The monetary case seems like the natural first step. The name service case seems more interesting. It isn’t a financial instrument, so

Thanks for the examples. The monetary case seems like the natural first step. The name service case seems more interesting. It isn’t a financial instrument, so it demonstrates DAP utility for non-financial application. You referenced a few standards that the DAPs adhere to, which lines up with assumptions I’ve had about the data schema management. In a generalized sense, it seems that community members, or a governing body, will propose changes, and if the community accepts them, the changes will be implemented into the network. It seems to me the name service case has parallels to identity management through protocols such as SAML and LDAP. But I’m still trying to wrap my head around examples I’ve heard such as building DAP social media apps that allow users to move their data to another DAP social app. Thinking of the social media sites we have today, they all consider their profile structures and models proprietary, as market differentiators that set each one apart from their competitors, and make up the “secret sauce” that gives social value to their users. How would a DAP be able to maintain similar differentiators? Or is the expectation that only certain things such as basic profile information be stored on the blockchain, able to move to other DAPs, while other proprietary functionality is managed elsewhere?

everfree 5y ago
Well, decentralized exchanges usually maintain their moat through liquidity (the catch-22 of attracting liquidity to a new dex without users, and attracting users without liquidity). Ethereum Name Service maintains their moat through legitimacy. You could copy paste the contract and start issuing .eth names of your own, but the ENS team is generally trusted by the community and thus their specific instance of the contract (at their contract address) is already widely integrated into products. You're right that social media dApps perhaps don't have a "moat" like that, which may be part of why we've seen so many of them blossom and fail, while none of them really catch on like with other types of services. Though that might be just as much due to the fact that social media is a low-value service compared to money transfer, and blockchains just haven't become scalable enough yet for a meaningful part of the social media stack to be run cost-efficiently on the blockchain. Personally I've always been less sold on cryptocurrency networks as a host for social media, as I believe traditional decentralized web2 schemes like ActivityPub (Mastodon) still have a long way to race in that regard before the scheme needs to be complicated with a blockchain integration. What I do believe will happen is similar to you explained, where just profile info (and maybe a profile image hash) is stored on the blockchain while other data is stored off-chain. Ethereum Name Service already acts as a profile service in a lot of ways as it already has records for your twitter handle, github handle, etc. as well as support for custom records. One global name standard like ENS would for example allow you to pick your Mastodon profile up and move it seamlessly to another instance, with the authorization of that cross-server move handled by the blockchain.

everfree 5y ago

Well, decentralized exchanges usually maintain their moat through liquidity (the catch-22 of attracting liquidity to a new dex without users, and attracting users without liquidity). Ethereum Name Service maintains their moat through legitimacy. You could copy paste the contract and start issuing .eth names of your own, but the ENS team is generally trusted by the community and thus their specific instance of the contract (at their contract address) is already widely integrated into products. You're right that social media dApps perhaps don't have a "moat" like that, which may be part of why we've seen so many of them blossom and fail, while none of them really catch on like with other types of services. Though that might be just as much due to the fact that social media is a low-value service compared to money transfer, and blockchains just haven't become scalable enough yet for a meaningful part of the social media stack to be run cost-efficiently on the blockchain. Personally I've always been less sold on cryptocurrency networks as a host for social media, as I believe traditional decentralized web2 schemes like ActivityPub (Mastodon) still have a long way to race in that regard before the scheme needs to be complicated with a blockchain integration. What I do believe will happen is similar to you explained, where just profile info (and maybe a profile image hash) is stored on the blockchain while other data is stored off-chain. Ethereum Name Service already acts as a profile service in a lot of ways as it already has records for your twitter handle, github handle, etc. as well as support for custom records. One global name standard like ENS would for example allow you to pick your Mastodon profile up and move it seamlessly to another instance, with the authorization of that cross-server move handled by the blockchain.