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> Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain. Well it’d be easier if crypto wasn’t every second word out of someone’s mouth when they talk about “web3”. T

> Don't conflate decentralization with blockchain. Well it’d be easier if crypto wasn’t every second word out of someone’s mouth when they talk about “web3”. The technology to do pretty much everything “web3” promises already exists, and works better than it’s crypto-equivalent. The Local-First software movement is a good example of this. If the proponents of “web3”actually cared about decentralisation/federation/user controlled data/etc they’d be pushing *actual solutions” instead of recruiting for yet another crypto Ponzi scheme. Worth noting, however, that I’m not saying there aren’t improvements to be made, but I have yet to see any demonstration that the crypto space can contribute anything actually meaningful to this space.

mattwilsonn888 5y ago
So what is the solution to posting sensitive information on an open platform where people can easily lie or cheat? Your version of Web3, despite its head start, is no better off than the so called 'grifter version' (grifters dog piling innovation doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of that innovation; see "Dot-Com Bubble"[1]). Let's start you off with the very basics; a low stakes example. What is a solution to email spam? You incur a small cost to honest senders and a large cost to mass senders. We'll call it Hashcash[2], and as a user you will only accept emails from senders with a header including your email and the date, which hashes to a sufficiently small value of your choosing, the smaller, the harder it was to send. Every sender gets a linear increase in amount of work to send, but for normal email users sending one email at a time its a small constant, while mass senders increase this value for each recipient. Because of the economics of spam email, where the profit is made off a few gullible recipients while the majority ignore it, Hashcash makes spam emails a losing strategy, at least in this simple example. This is an economic solution, and it is also exactly what the primary cryptocurrency does. Bitcoin is primitive, and its data throughput reflects that. I won't be shilling or giving you tips, but imagine a blockchain system which ensures openess (no Infura Problem[3] as is common in Ethereum sized blockchains) and a scalable model for pricing and putting data on chain. It may be more expensive or slower than a federated system, but a system with the proper economic incentives and deterrents is now capable of doing something a centralized or federated system cannot: hosting data for which there is massive economic incentive to distort without a profitable way to actually do so, or more specifically, a predictable cost of attack that rises with subsequent block confirmations (just like Bitcoin's security model). Now you can price your data, and wait the amount of time that correlates to the cost of attack that would not be worth the money it takes to cheat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [3] https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-ethereums-decentralization/ https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-...

mattwilsonn888 5y ago

So what is the solution to posting sensitive information on an open platform where people can easily lie or cheat? Your version of Web3, despite its head start, is no better off than the so called 'grifter version' (grifters dog piling innovation doesn't tell you anything about the legitimacy of that innovation; see "Dot-Com Bubble"[1]). Let's start you off with the very basics; a low stakes example. What is a solution to email spam? You incur a small cost to honest senders and a large cost to mass senders. We'll call it Hashcash[2], and as a user you will only accept emails from senders with a header including your email and the date, which hashes to a sufficiently small value of your choosing, the smaller, the harder it was to send. Every sender gets a linear increase in amount of work to send, but for normal email users sending one email at a time its a small constant, while mass senders increase this value for each recipient. Because of the economics of spam email, where the profit is made off a few gullible recipients while the majority ignore it, Hashcash makes spam emails a losing strategy, at least in this simple example. This is an economic solution, and it is also exactly what the primary cryptocurrency does. Bitcoin is primitive, and its data throughput reflects that. I won't be shilling or giving you tips, but imagine a blockchain system which ensures openess (no Infura Problem[3] as is common in Ethereum sized blockchains) and a scalable model for pricing and putting data on chain. It may be more expensive or slower than a federated system, but a system with the proper economic incentives and deterrents is now capable of doing something a centralized or federated system cannot: hosting data for which there is massive economic incentive to distort without a profitable way to actually do so, or more specifically, a predictable cost of attack that rises with subsequent block confirmations (just like Bitcoin's security model). Now you can price your data, and wait the amount of time that correlates to the cost of attack that would not be worth the money it takes to cheat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash [3] https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-ethereums-decentralization/ https://cryptobriefing.com/infura-outage-sparks-debate-over-...