15 ms·

Re: Moxie on Web3

209 points by telotortium 5y ago

raesene9 5y ago
It's interesting that the article touches on the reasons why end users might not want to run servers but doesn't mention at all one of the ones that comes to my mind most quickly, which is security. Running a production server on your home network is a risky thing to do as, if there's a vulnerability in the code (and historically this has been quite common, especially when products are new), it allows attackers into home networks which are very likely to have a load of easily compromised unpatched consumer IT products. Obviously it's possible to do this securely, if you have the right technical knowledge and the time and dedication to apply it, but I'd guess that it's a very small percentage of people who fall into that camp.
- masterofmisc 5y ago
  Your right. Ive been saying for years that routers should come with 2 networks (vlans) out of the box (colour coded red and blue) to make it easier to seperate out kit/appliances. One side for IoT stuff that you dont trust and the other side for our own equipment. But as you mention, even then consumers need to know how to set the networks up etc. As the old adage goes, you dont know what you dont know.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    The issue with two networks is that many IoT things work by interacting with other things/users. A Philips Hue bridge or a Chromecast need to be accessible from the network you're on. And they rely on things like multicast and UPnP to function, which are hard if not impossible to do cross-vlan ( i looked into putting my Chromecasts on a different vlan and the setup was quite heavy).
    - mg74 5y ago
      Agree. I even gave up on keeping the christmas light IoT device on the other network, because the whole point was to be able to control the lights with the phone, and having to switch my phone between networks was just too much. What needs to happen here is that my master devices (my phone, my laptop) need to be able to stay connected to many networks at the same time, and then I have to be able to assign different apps to different networks.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        It depends on how they work. IIRC the Hue bridge connection can be statically configured with an IP, and then some firewall rules should be enough ( authorise your main network to talk to the Hue IP).
        luma 5y ago
        That still doesn't fix the fact that it relies on network broadcasts for many core functionality (app discovery of the hub, etc). Putting your IoT devices on their own VLAN sounds like a good idea, but they usually aren't designed to work in that sort of situation and you're likely to create a bunch of usability and management problems that won't be solved with firewall rules.
  - mopsi 5y ago
    Many routers already come with two networks separated with vlans. It's a common feature on TP-Link devices, among many others. They call it "Guest network", which makes it really easy to understand.
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  There are lots of reasons why people don't do it today, I didn't list all of them because it's easy to come up with them as indeed you've done here. But again, note there's nothing fundamental about this problem. People routinely download and run arbitrary code on their desktops, laptops and smartphones, and most servers don't ever do that. If servers are less secure than web browsers it's a matter of effort put into the implementations, not something fundamental about human nature or computers.
  - fauigerzigerk 5y ago
    >But again, note there's nothing fundamental about this problem. People routinely download and run arbitrary code on their desktops, laptops and smartphones... But isn't that in fact the fundamental problem we're talking about? You get security without knowledge exactly if you give up all control over the device. What's the point of "running" your own server if all control you have left is that you can physically smash it to pieces? Yes you can take control, but only to the degree to which you acquire the knowledge to keep it secure. I think this is a very fundamental trade-off.
    - mike_hearn 5y ago
      I don't think giving up control is necessary to achieve security. Modern web browsers are pretty secure (even if web apps themselves aren't) and yet I can browse to whatever websites I want. There's a competitive marketplace of browsers to ensure that if one provider goes nuts I can switch to another. There are lots of different angles through which to make progress here. I don't think we should be defeatist about it.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > There's a competitive marketplace of browsers There isn't. There are exactly three independent browser vendors: - Google with Chrome. Chrome dominates the market to such an extent that Google pushes through its internal APIs as "standards" - Apple with Safari. They flat out refuse to implement many of Chrome's shenanigans, and also have issues with priorities and funding - Mozilla with Firefox. Much like Safari, they are increasingly refusing to implement Chrome's shenanigans. But Firefox is rapidly declining in relevance, and will be on the brink of extinction within a few years (it already has at best ~150-199 million users)
- cbsmith 5y ago
  > Obviously it's possible to do this securely, if you have the right technical knowledge and the time and dedication to apply it, but I'd guess that it's a very small percentage of people who fall into that camp. I think there's an underlying subtext that is missed in the article and this comment. Like, I don't disagree with the quoted bit above, but at the same time, I can't help but recognize that its truth is a consequence of design choices rather than an inevitability. Americans happily own cars, which are themselves quite dangerous, laborious to manage, expensive to operate, have to be insured, and require an extensive and constantly updated training to maintain. They are companies that offer rental models, rather than ownership models, but they are mostly used by urban dwellers with limited income and travelers. Most people would tell you they'd prefer to own one. It's just a cultural context. The same applies to servers. We could have servers that were well designed for people to self-manage with perhaps some basic training (certainly no more difficult than what is required than to pass a driving test), regular servicing, recalls, service stations spread throughout the nation, legal adjusted to favour ownership, etc. Really, from a practical standpoint, the difference between a server and so many other computers deployed in homes (routers, mobile phones, IoT devices, cars, laptops, etc.) is far more subtle than we're willing to acknowledge... and frankly we actually introduce a lot of systemic risk by NOT requiring basic skills, regular servicing, insurance, etc. for these "pseudo-servers".
jpgvm 5y ago
Both authors are conflating 2 different things and managing to talk past each other. Moxie did conflate the state of Ethereum with the technical state of blockchain technology as a whole. In practice I am not sure this conflation actually matters though as right now most of the interesting stuff that is happening -is- on Ethereum. For the most part Moxie's arguments are completely on point regarding deficiencies in the offerings and the improvements he suggests would both be simple and materially improve them (whilst not addressing Mike's main problem which is semi-centralisation). Mike manages to completely miss Moxie's point regarding how cryptography can be used to obviate some of (but not all) the problems with centralised infrastructure and work with the devices people actually have and use (mobile phones). He goes on to argue that if "people would just have desktops/linux servers at home this would all be different". But that isn't going to happen, that is a fantasy land. The world isn't going back to a fully decentralized web. There are very good practical, commercial and political reasons for this.
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I do agree with Moxie that encryption is under-used and can make many kinds of semi-centralized infrastructure private. But that's irrelevant in this case. The focus is on WhatsApp because Moxie likes to use the speed with which it rolled out e2e encryption as the canonical example of why centralized services are better for privacy (this isn't the only place he's made this claim). But it's meaningless: something switched on quickly on a whim can also be switched off quickly on a whim. And, note, we found out that WhatsApp was newly encrypted because of a blog post and some messages in the UI. It could be switched off again silently and who would notice? We know the answer to this because hardly anyone realizes there are forwarding limits, even though it's in their FAQ. Apparently there aren't any groups reverse engineering every WhatsApp update to figure out if it's still encrypting everything. With respect to the latter part, there might be a terminology issue here. I'm using "desktop" to mean any non-mobile/tablet/server device, including laptops or stick PCs. A whole lot of people have such devices and in particular the sort of people who create content do. The idea that people only have mobile phones is false. There certainly are plenty of people who only have mobile phones and they matter, but there is also a huge population of people who have more powerful computers as well. And even for those who don't, a big part of why is not inability to have one but because they don't see any reason to buy one. That's not exactly fundamental. Finally I would be very careful with predictions about technology trends. The computing industry has oscillated between big centralized computers and smaller more personal devices several times already. Even today the picture is quite ambiguous: as I argue in the article, a fully-bought-in Apple user is very much still a child of the PC revolution. Modern iPhones are as powerful hardware-wise as many PCs, just the form factor and usage model is different. The ecosystem there is very far from the canonical cloud-über-alles vision promoted by Google via the ChromeBooks.
bratwurst3000 5y ago
Hmmm he is at first criticizing moxie for not making a difference between bitcoin and ethereum and then he is throwing signal and whatssapp in the same bucket ….. But okey writeup
- krater23 5y ago
  Okay, explain me where is the technologic difference? Same cryptography, other controlling instance. One controlled from Moxie, one from Facebook. But both are forcing me to update the client sometimes. Why should I trust Moxie more than Facebook?
  - seanieb 5y ago
    Why stop there! Why trust your phone OS… When it comes to trust it’s turtles all the way down, you have to start somewhere.
    - bratwurst3000 5y ago
      Exaxtly … there is a fine line between paranoia and distrusting everything
  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    Thanks for the question. First of all I trust moxie because he has a trustworthy history. Thats TRUST and trust is based on gut feeling and history. And there is a difference between the two messengers. Whatsapp aint open source. They only implement the e2e encryption of signal and not the whole app. They can still gather metadata. Signal cant. I hope this clears up my statement. :) Edit: I dont trust facebook at all. I hope this shithole will one time go to hell.
  - hiq 5y ago
    > Same cryptography Not really, e.g. the logic to send messages is different, does WhatsApp have sealed senders? > Why should I trust Moxie more than Facebook? The point of E2EE is that you don't, especially since you can update on your own schedule. There is some trust somewhere ("this version has been released for 3 months, nobody complained, seems fine, should be fine"), but you don't have to trust Moxie.
Animats 5y ago
I’m excited to launch this product and the company behind it OK, so it's kind of an ad, although no product yet. He makes an interesting point. If you're going to have home servers so you own your data, they need to be in something you own and control that's always plugged into power. There's the router, but you usually don't own that. It belongs to the telco or the cable company. A "speaker", i.e. Alexa and friends? Amazon controls that. The TV? That's a slave to the TV maker, Google, or the cable company. The doorbell? That's run by Amazon and the cops. The refrigerator? Apple used to sell a box, their "Time Capsule", which was a home server. But Apple discontinued that. Apple became so cloud-oriented that their thermostat has to contact an external server to get the outside temperature. Most people now have no home electronics that isn't a slave to someone else. Where do you put a home server?
- keyme 5y ago
  Your phone? Double redundant networking, UPS protected power supply, and plenty of compute resources. Writing this from an android with 16G of RAM.
  - severine 5y ago
    Potentially? Yes. In practice, not so much. Do you think we'll get there?
- firecall 5y ago
  > Apple became so cloud-oriented that their thermostat has to contact an external server to get the outside temperature. Did you mean Google with their Nest devices? Apple don't sell a thermostat. Although I wouldn't be surprised if HomeKit enabled devices needed to do what you described LOL :-)
  - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    For that matter, how is that even a criticism? A thermostat sits on your (interior) wall; If you want it to be aware of the outside temperature for any reason, you either provide additional equipment that consumers need to mount outside their building (in such a way as to get an accurate reading whilst being weatherproof and having reliable power/connectivity)... or you just fetch it from an API based on your postal code like a sane person would
dmitriid 5y ago
> I agree with points 1 and 2, but there’s a conceptual problem with the argument: cryptography cannot impose any limits on an adversary that also controls the client doing the encryption. > Let’s put it less abstractly. And then goes on to very concretely criticise WhatsApp and Signal instead of addressing Moxie's point, or how any of the crypto technologies address Moxie's point. > Quick fixes > Firstly let’s look at mobile messengers. Why? Why look at them. If you're addressing Moxie's points, address them, and Moxie's article wasn't about the messengers. > Why don’t non technical users want to run servers? After all, they have done in the past via programs like BitTorrent and Gnutella. No. No, they haven't. While it was rather wide-spread, it still wasn't nearly as en masse as people pretend it was. An average non-technincal person wasn't running those clients. And, most importantly, the moment iTunes, then Steam, then Spotify appeared, people ditched running those torrent clients. I wonder why /s > They don’t do that today because the software industry outside of Cupertino isn’t interested in easily letting them do that. Apple apps are not servers. And users are not running them. What wild logic leaps! Apple's iTunes ba sically single-handedly reduced the number of people running their own servers aka torrent clients. > I’m excited to launch this product and the company behind it, So. A marketing message hidden behind a rather inconherent "response"
- Ygg2 5y ago
  As someone that indulges in both legal and pirated games, the benefits isn't in downloading content, but extra features. Stuff like auto-update, cloud saves, friends list, etc. I don't trust any store to keep list of my games forever, sooner or later they will all fail.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > the benefits isn't in downloading content, but extra features. Stuff like auto-update, cloud saves, friends list, etc. Features like donloading content is the main benefit. Or, rather, quick and painless access to content. iTunes/Apple Music and Spotify never had any friends lists etc. And there are no "auto updates" to music. Same goes for Netflix (and other streaming services). And yet they reduced piracy probably a hundredfold. Same goes for games. There are many features we associate with Steam these days, but many of those features weren't there for years, and still Steam was extremely successful and also significantly reduced piracy. People don't want to chase content somewhere and then chase cracks/unlocks that may or may not work, that may or may not contain any number of viruses etc.
shriphani 5y ago
People routinely run their own servers. A great example is bittorrent where the incentive design forces people to run actual file servers on their computer. People will run servers on their computer if it is (i) motivated the right way, (ii) as frictionless as possible. For the types of applications that web2 is great at (content creation / consumption), it makes no sense to run a server of course but computing is a lot bigger than that.
- manachar 5y ago
  "Routinely run their own servers" That's doing a lot of work. Sure, it happens, but that vast majority of humans (including programmers) will not be in that category.
  - ShamelessC 5y ago
    There are more common/accessible setups than just BitTorrent. Remote desktop software, media sharing e.g. Plex media center, doorbell cameras (and many other smart home IoT devices), PS/Xbox remote play, etc.
    - dochtman 5y ago
      I’d argue all of those setups combined would amount to less than 1% of internet users, so I’d hardly call them mainstream.
      - ShamelessC 5y ago
        Mainstream != routinely, and yes, I agree.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    Most printers and routers are running webservers. Some camera sd cards run servers. My ereader runs a webserver, it works well.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
ThePhysicist 5y ago
I share the view that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) provides strong security guarantees only if the clients used to exchange data/messages are fully under control of the end users. All it would take Signal to undermine their E2EE is a single update of their app that exfiltrates all chat messages (not saying that I think they would ever do that). Same story for WhatsApp. In my opinion, a necessary ingredient for secure E2EE is that you don't have to trust the central infrastructure operator, at all. And that just doesn't work if the provider controls the client software. Another problem is that almost all E2EE messengers can still be trivially man-in-the-middled (MITM) by the infrastructure operator, as there's no out-of-band verification of keys. The central server can just replace client keys in transit and decrypt all the data exchanged between two clients. This can only be detected by clients comparing their public keys over an out-of-band channel. Most E2EE messengers simply disregard this risk [1], while some provide functionality for out-of-band key verification (e.g. Threema). Always struck me as a bit odd as it's like using self-signed TLS certificates for your server, which leads to a security exception in all modern browsers but somehow seems to be fine for E2EE messengers. Keybase tried to solve this problem but unfortunately they got acquired by Zoom so I doubt they will continue working on that. [1] https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/ https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/
- telotortium 5y ago
  The article mentioned something I was not aware of - that WhatsApp has already started sending metadata (the number of times a message has been forwarded) in the clear: > This is not a theoretical argument. Disabling E2E encryption has already happened, although hardly anyone knows about it. In 2019 WhatsApp imposed forwarding limits on messages in order to “slow down the spread of rumors, viral messages, and fake news”. This represents a total defeat of the Signal protocol’s cryptographic objectives: a basic goal of any modern cryptographic scheme is to ensure the same message encrypted twice doesn’t encrypt to the same bytes. The point of this is to stop the adversary knowing when you’re repeatedly sending the same message and encryption modes that get this wrong (like AES/ECB) are discredited. Yet once Facebook — the adversary — became dominated by authoritarians who see unlimited communication as chaotic, they simply changed the client to include a forwarding counter outside the encrypted part of the message. There was nothing anyone could do about this. It just showed up one day, and all the fancy mathematics designed to stop this “attack” were irrelevant.
KaiserPro 5y ago
> But it’s still a big step up and would mean that if Facebook suddenly decided merely blocking forwarding isn’t enough to fight “rumors” or “fake news”, they’d be stopped by the auditors who’d (hopefully) refuse to sign the update that takes out the encryption. A central auditor, or a bunch of auditors that verify what updates are doing, and work out if they are changing functionality of the protocol? I mean that's never going to happen. Writing the constitution/contract for that is pretty hard, not to mention the cost. Plus all of this assumes that users will read the information provided (they wont) Then there is the verification of trust for the auditors, which is difficult. I do notice that the author makes a bold claim to say that the signal protocol doesn't work, as a way of attacking moxie (fair enough) but then goes on outline the problems with whatsapp. Now, Signal inc were contracted by whatsapp to add e2e on whatsapps "improved" XMPP. The claim appears to refer to this: > In 2019 WhatsApp imposed forwarding limits on messages in order to “slow down the spread of rumors, viral messages, and fake news”. This represents a total defeat of the Signal protocol’s cryptographic objectives. I mean that's not really the case, Adding client side limits to stop forwarding isn't a defeat of encryption. Its a limit of freedom of speech, perhaps, but not encryption. but more importantly the author appears to deliberately conflate the software company with the signal protocol
iamleppert 5y ago
It’s hilarious to me how the NFT app he built got its published NFT art delisted for “violating terms of service”. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know right there. Again, there’s nothing distributed about Web 3.0 and this new system won’t solve any of the “problems” of the current system, real or imagined. It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature, and that if we could just have the right technology they would go away and we would be living in a utopia. The fact is, the problems are with human behavior and any technology created will serve to further that behavior. If anything the past 20 years has shown us, technology has an uncanny ability to bring out and amplify the worst of human behaviors. Make of that what you will, it’s a good thing in some regards but also a bad thing. Of course, none of this will matter or have anything to do with how successful Web 3.0 will or will not be. Bitcoin never solved any of the problems it was originally intended to solve, and still a lot of people became quite rich from it. So Web 3.0 proponents need not be worried, hype is illogical by nature.
- illegalmemory 5y ago
  "It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature" Exactly! Computers will be sold somewhere, parts will be bought from some countries / vendors, using money issued by governments, connect to others using internet ( which again has 100s of regulations from state / central governments ). There are way too many factors to become truly decentralized.
- matesz 5y ago
  > Bitcoin never solved any of the problems it was originally intended to solve Private transactions allowing to buy drugs of the internet for example? Darknets actually reduce incentives for drug gangs, at least according to this undercover cop [1] - 11th minute but I recommend watch the whole thing. [1] https://youtu.be/y_TV4GuXFoA https://youtu.be/y_TV4GuXFoA
- lcam84 5y ago
  >It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature, and that if we could just have the right technology they would go away and we would be living in a utopia. The fact is, the problems are with human behavior and any technology created will serve to further that behavior. I agree with you. This can be applied to the solutions we are looking to solve climate change.
rezonant 5y ago
> briefly, the client app bootstraps connections to the P2P network as normal but sends a special message saying “please don’t send me the contents of every block or transaction, I only want to see transactions matching a filter” The gist I got from Moxie's post was that this can't be done on the web itself without an intermediary, and this is very relevant if this is "web3" versus "the blockchain ecosystem". Why can't we have a serverless wallet app on the web? Even if the underlying blockchain network supports lightweight clients, it is still not eliminating go-betweens in a way that makes it truly decentralized.
djaychela 5y ago
OK, potentially dumb, non-educated non-programmer comment here, so please be kind One of the points he makes is that it's not possible to tell if a Signal client is actually made from the source code in question. Is there no hash-based way to ensure that isn't the case? I know that producing code which self-reports wouldn't work (as the 'altered' version could just report the correct hash, as it were), but is there no way to have a third-party app which would produce hashes of installed APKs, and wouldn't be open to such? Or is it always possible to alter that app so that it self-reports correctly, even though it's lying about the hash of the signal app?
- feanaro 5y ago
  The term you're looking for is reproducible builds and it's unfortunately not trivial and a somewhat rare state of affairs. It's definitely crucial in the long run.
  - rhamzeh 5y ago
    On Android, Signal already offers reproducible builds[1]. [1] https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/
i386 5y ago
Read: I own a lot of digital tulips.
- niklasd 5y ago
  He states in the article that he currently does not own any cryptocurrencies.
  - i386 5y ago
    And you really believe that? He’s building a company on top of it.
    - pcthrowaway 5y ago
      Ah, the "I don't own any cryptocurrency (but I own a company that owns a lot of it)"
    - mike_hearn 5y ago
      My new company has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
    - kristofferR 5y ago
      So is Moxie, does that mean that we should blindly disregard everything he thinks about crypto too?
      - i386 5y ago
        Yes, when there’s absolutely crazy speculation over something with absolutely zero utility, a bunch of charlatans preaching for the web to run on it, and its adherents getting richer doing nothing but talking about it, absolutely yes.
- cyphertruck 5y ago
  The tulip bubble is a myth. But the funny thing about bubbles is they have a blow off top then deflate. Bitcoin has had 4 blow off tops and is at %200 of its last one. Not fitting the pattern.
edwnj 5y ago
We are all tech people here, lets not pretend like there is no difference between self hosting and cloud hosting. Pretty much everything you do on OpenSea requires indexing/processing, there is no way to do this on the blockchain (atm) so all of these platforms crawl the chain and keep their own indexes. OpenSea never claimed to be decentralised, its a centralised marketplace. The difference is, When they deplatform you, all they can do is remove their copy. They cant remove your nfts from the blockchain, they can delist you from the blockain and for the purposes of listing/curation, you can still see your nfts on other platforms.
- gnaman 5y ago
  > When they deplatform you, all they can do is remove their copy. > They cant remove your nfts from the blockchain, they can delist you from the blockain and for the purposes of listing/curation, you can still see your nfts on other platforms. The original article acknowledges this but also complaints that there is no easy way to access your NFTs once they are gone from OpenSea. All the major wallets are using OpenSea as a single source of truth and not pulling data directly from the chain. Defeats the point
  - huntertwo 5y ago
    > there is no easy way to access your NFTs once they are gone from OpenSea You go to etherscan for the relevant smart contract, query for the metadata URI for your token, and voila you have it. Writing a new page to do this is a 5 minute task.
    - keymone 5y ago
      did you miss the word "easy"? what should average joe on their iphone do to see their nft if it's removed from opensea?
      - huntertwo 5y ago
        It’s easy enough that if this is a problem you can 1) google it or 2) use a tool that was made in 5 minutes by some dev. Wallets don’t delete your transaction history. The average user knows their wallet address and any wallet I’ve ever used 1) doesn’t use OpenSea as a source of anything and 2) keeps a track of transactions you’ve performed using that wallet. This makes it easy to find the address of your NFT. This is analogous to knowing your credit card number and knowing how to look up the merchant of a transaction you made.
mjg59 5y ago
> As for Signal it’s at least open source, but there’s no way to check that the client I’m using, or my friend is using, actually matches that source code. This is… not true? Signal builds are reproducible. You can verify that the apk in the app store corresponds to a specific point in git history, and if you don't trust Google you can sideload that. > Even if there was it’s irrelevant. Centralized infrastructure can claim to provide privacy but can never provide control: they can openly alter the deal at any time and I’d be forced to continue using it, if I couldn’t get my friends to switch to something else. If you're using Signal because of the E2E properties, and Signal unilaterally changes its behaviour, you are absolutely not forced to continue using it. If you do wish to continue communicating with people who are using Signal, you're still able to reappraise what you feel comfortable saying now you know that the behaviour has changed. The claim that "Signal encryption doesn’t actually work" just seems inaccurate. We can verify that Signal has the properties it claims it has. "Signal encryption could stop working" would be true - the client could absolutely just choose to start sending everything in plaintext, but we're not relying on a centralised group to make that claim! Anyone can look at the commits to Signal and flag that the claimed properties no longer apply.
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  "You can verify that the apk in the app store corresponds to a specific point in git history" Is there an easy way to get a direct HTTPS download link from the Play Store? The app itself certainly doesn't let you get the direct APK, or if it does then this must be a very obscure or new feature because I've been using Android for years and never seen it. My understanding is that the Play Store protocol is quite complicated. Even if you can get such a link: • It's not the case for iOS. • It's not the case for WhatsApp. • You have to repeat the process for every update, of which there are many. • You don't know what version other people are running, which also matters. Consider group chats! This is really something possible only in theory, not something normal users can actually do, hence the threshold signing/auditing proposal. The claim that "Signal encryption doesn’t actually work" just seems inaccurate I see a bunch of people getting hung up on this point. It's missing the forest for the trees. Encryption in which you rely on your adversary to encrypt messages for you is conceptually broken. It doesn't matter if the encryption scheme works in theory in another context, in that context it's a failed setup. The example of WhatsApp (which uses the Signal encryption scheme) makes this clear: the Signal protocol in the abstract prevents the adversary learning when the same message is sent twice. In the most important concrete instantiation it actually doesn't: Facebook simply changed the client to expose that information unencrypted, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Signal could do the same for their own network tomorrow, and given the ideological trends in the Bay Area perhaps they will. Or maybe they already did for some people? We have no way to know, only faith. "If you do wish to continue communicating with people who are using Signal, you're still able to reappraise what you feel comfortable saying now you know that the behaviour has changed." I think you're agreeing with me. The point of encryption is to turn the infrastructure provider into a "dumb pipe" that doesn't have opinions on what you think. If one day Signal or WhatsApp change the deal - as indeed Facebook did in 2019 - and you suddenly have to care what random Facebook employees think - then we can no longer really claim the service is end-to-end encrypted.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
By creating commitments on state, Ethereum offers the possibility of ultra-light clients, where only the state root needs to be downloaded instead of all block headers, that Bitcoin doesn't.
- bhaak 5y ago
  That's not there, yet. That's one of the main criticisms of the original article. So many promises but so little actual functionality after a decade for Bitcoin and half a decade for Ethereum.
cyphertruck 5y ago
He’s right that ethereum is centralized, and “web3” even more so. If AWS disappeared Ethereum would too. It’s hilariously wrong to say that paying for things with bitcoin is no better now than in the past. The country of El Salvador adopted it as a currency and every merchant has the option of easily taking bitcoin via lightning network there— and everywhere else as well. Adoption around the world is growing rapidly. It hasn’t yet broken into mainstream awareness yet, but the graph is exponential. Lightning is one of those technologies that when you use it you feel like “wow it really is the future!”
- capableweb 5y ago
  > If AWS disappeared Ethereum would too. I'm sorry but no, Ethereum wouldn't disappear if AWS disappeared. Yes, a lot of the Ethereum nodes are hosted with hosting companies (~69% [1]). Yes, a lot of those are hosted with AWS (~44% [2]), but even so, AWS disappearing would not have a huge impact on Ethereum itself. - [1] - https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types (just nodes that opt-in, real number differ) - [2] - https://www.ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting https://www.ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting (just nodes that opt-in, real number differ)
- swalsh 5y ago
  Even wose, many blockchain nodes are running on AWS. Fortunately we know the problem exists.. and there are solutions people are working on to resolve it (for example https://akash.network/ https://akash.network/) The good part is that this infrastructure is a commodity and you can move relatively effortlessly.
throwawaycrylto 5y ago
"Ethereum isn’t actually decentralized" ok so now there's infighting among who's decentralized and who is not. I suppose driving some money away from ETH to other projects is a logical course of action. Everything else in this post reminds me of the golden rule of game development: to suspend disbelief in order to make the game sound plausible. Certainly a decentralized internet, with increased security and less government control sounds good, and plausible. Will this be delivered by a "Respected cryptographer". I doubt it. It is however fun to see how tech illiterate folks spend money on grand ideas that amount to nothing much but a ponzi scheme. Suppose scams had to be elevated to a new state just like anything else connected.
bawolff 5y ago
A weird mix of no true scotsman and tu quoque arguments. Sure there are other paths in crypto land that theoretically could have been better than what we got. It's besides the point though. Moxie's original argument wasn't against what is theoretically possible - it was about what actually happened.
greatgib 5y ago
> The filter in our implementation was a Bloom filter, so you could probabilistically hide what you were interested in. Very funny, this is not the first time that I hear about the 'bloom filter solution. But, it does not make much sense in practice: for your payment transactions, do you want the transaction to be 'safe' or 'probabilistically' safe? Is it that special day that you will do a 500k transfer that the probability will be against you and you will be ripped of your money...
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  The Bloom filter in this case was purely a privacy technique. It had no influence on probability of tx confirmation.
daveed 5y ago
I don't understand why this author is talking about bitcoin, when Moxie's article was about web3. I thought Moxie's article was more about what has happened with the ecosystem, versus what could happen.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
I wish Mike Hearn would rejoin the crypto world, in the Ethereum space. Ultimately his enormous contributuons to Bitcoin were mostly wasted by Bitcoin's leadership, when they prevented Bitcoin from achieving mass-adoption, but his talents would not be wasted on Ethereum, which already has a clear path to massive scalability and a pro-adoption leadership.
- brightstep 5y ago
  What does "leadership" mean here? I thought these systems were supposed to be decentralized and trustless?
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    They're supposed to eventually become leaderless, but they're not for the time being, especially as it relates to protocol evolution.
    - brightstep 5y ago
      What incentive do leaders have to give up authority?
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        It depends on the project and leader. Some leaders are incentivized by altruism, others by their large stake in the token supply, which could appreciate when the protocol becomes more decentralized/immutable. Some by the inertia and social pressure of community expectations, derived from long-published and widely discussed roadmaps. Some do not have an incentive to design themselves out of leadership positions.
md_ 5y ago
Mike's point seems to apply, practically speaking, to any software, including Bitcoin: - Most users of Bitcoin Wallet download it from the Play Store - Even if it's open source (as is the Signal client), "nobody's" reading through it and compiling their own builds This sort of sweeping argument--that e2ee doesn't work because most users don't read source code--applies to everything, and as such isn't at all illuminating.
thierryzoller 5y ago
What strikes me in this "comments/rebuttals" is that they mostly miss Moxies' main points and underlying critic. Some comments are pretty obvious and certainly understood my moxie...
tomohawk 5y ago
> If an encryption scheme can’t stop infrastructure providers having opinions on the moral value of messages, what’s the point of it? Good question.
mat0 5y ago
I actually found the article he's replying to much more interesting than this piece
agilob 5y ago
> As for Signal it’s at least open source, but there’s no way to check that the client I’m using, or my friend is using, actually matches that source code. It doesn't matter. Your keyboard isn't opensource and it can transmit all typing.
- skippygoober 5y ago
  https://system76.com/accessories/launch https://system76.com/accessories/launch
- mike_hearn 5y ago
  The Gboard app doesn't have internet permissions, so no, it can't.
  - approxim8ion 5y ago
    Google Play Services that is installed on almost every phone out of the box can, and Gboard can trivially communicate with it. So yes, it can.

209 points by telotortium 5y ago

It's interesting that the article touches on the reasons why end users might not want to run servers but doesn't mention at all one of the ones that comes to my mind most quickly, which is security. Running a production server on your home network is a risky thing to do as, if there's a vulnerability in the code (and historically this has been quite common, especially when products are new), it allows attackers into home networks which are very likely to have a load of easily compromised unpatched consumer IT products. Obviously it's possible to do this securely, if you have the right technical knowledge and the time and dedication to apply it, but I'd guess that it's a very small percentage of people who fall into that camp.

masterofmisc 5y ago
Your right. Ive been saying for years that routers should come with 2 networks (vlans) out of the box (colour coded red and blue) to make it easier to seperate out kit/appliances. One side for IoT stuff that you dont trust and the other side for our own equipment. But as you mention, even then consumers need to know how to set the networks up etc. As the old adage goes, you dont know what you dont know.
- sofixa 5y ago
  The issue with two networks is that many IoT things work by interacting with other things/users. A Philips Hue bridge or a Chromecast need to be accessible from the network you're on. And they rely on things like multicast and UPnP to function, which are hard if not impossible to do cross-vlan ( i looked into putting my Chromecasts on a different vlan and the setup was quite heavy).
  - mg74 5y ago
    Agree. I even gave up on keeping the christmas light IoT device on the other network, because the whole point was to be able to control the lights with the phone, and having to switch my phone between networks was just too much. What needs to happen here is that my master devices (my phone, my laptop) need to be able to stay connected to many networks at the same time, and then I have to be able to assign different apps to different networks.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      It depends on how they work. IIRC the Hue bridge connection can be statically configured with an IP, and then some firewall rules should be enough ( authorise your main network to talk to the Hue IP).
      - luma 5y ago
        That still doesn't fix the fact that it relies on network broadcasts for many core functionality (app discovery of the hub, etc). Putting your IoT devices on their own VLAN sounds like a good idea, but they usually aren't designed to work in that sort of situation and you're likely to create a bunch of usability and management problems that won't be solved with firewall rules.
- mopsi 5y ago
  Many routers already come with two networks separated with vlans. It's a common feature on TP-Link devices, among many others. They call it "Guest network", which makes it really easy to understand.
mike_hearn 5y ago
There are lots of reasons why people don't do it today, I didn't list all of them because it's easy to come up with them as indeed you've done here. But again, note there's nothing fundamental about this problem. People routinely download and run arbitrary code on their desktops, laptops and smartphones, and most servers don't ever do that. If servers are less secure than web browsers it's a matter of effort put into the implementations, not something fundamental about human nature or computers.
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  >But again, note there's nothing fundamental about this problem. People routinely download and run arbitrary code on their desktops, laptops and smartphones... But isn't that in fact the fundamental problem we're talking about? You get security without knowledge exactly if you give up all control over the device. What's the point of "running" your own server if all control you have left is that you can physically smash it to pieces? Yes you can take control, but only to the degree to which you acquire the knowledge to keep it secure. I think this is a very fundamental trade-off.
  - mike_hearn 5y ago
    I don't think giving up control is necessary to achieve security. Modern web browsers are pretty secure (even if web apps themselves aren't) and yet I can browse to whatever websites I want. There's a competitive marketplace of browsers to ensure that if one provider goes nuts I can switch to another. There are lots of different angles through which to make progress here. I don't think we should be defeatist about it.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > There's a competitive marketplace of browsers There isn't. There are exactly three independent browser vendors: - Google with Chrome. Chrome dominates the market to such an extent that Google pushes through its internal APIs as "standards" - Apple with Safari. They flat out refuse to implement many of Chrome's shenanigans, and also have issues with priorities and funding - Mozilla with Firefox. Much like Safari, they are increasingly refusing to implement Chrome's shenanigans. But Firefox is rapidly declining in relevance, and will be on the brink of extinction within a few years (it already has at best ~150-199 million users)
cbsmith 5y ago
> Obviously it's possible to do this securely, if you have the right technical knowledge and the time and dedication to apply it, but I'd guess that it's a very small percentage of people who fall into that camp. I think there's an underlying subtext that is missed in the article and this comment. Like, I don't disagree with the quoted bit above, but at the same time, I can't help but recognize that its truth is a consequence of design choices rather than an inevitability. Americans happily own cars, which are themselves quite dangerous, laborious to manage, expensive to operate, have to be insured, and require an extensive and constantly updated training to maintain. They are companies that offer rental models, rather than ownership models, but they are mostly used by urban dwellers with limited income and travelers. Most people would tell you they'd prefer to own one. It's just a cultural context. The same applies to servers. We could have servers that were well designed for people to self-manage with perhaps some basic training (certainly no more difficult than what is required than to pass a driving test), regular servicing, recalls, service stations spread throughout the nation, legal adjusted to favour ownership, etc. Really, from a practical standpoint, the difference between a server and so many other computers deployed in homes (routers, mobile phones, IoT devices, cars, laptops, etc.) is far more subtle than we're willing to acknowledge... and frankly we actually introduce a lot of systemic risk by NOT requiring basic skills, regular servicing, insurance, etc. for these "pseudo-servers".

jpgvm 5y ago

Both authors are conflating 2 different things and managing to talk past each other. Moxie did conflate the state of Ethereum with the technical state of blockchain technology as a whole. In practice I am not sure this conflation actually matters though as right now most of the interesting stuff that is happening -is- on Ethereum. For the most part Moxie's arguments are completely on point regarding deficiencies in the offerings and the improvements he suggests would both be simple and materially improve them (whilst not addressing Mike's main problem which is semi-centralisation). Mike manages to completely miss Moxie's point regarding how cryptography can be used to obviate some of (but not all) the problems with centralised infrastructure and work with the devices people actually have and use (mobile phones). He goes on to argue that if "people would just have desktops/linux servers at home this would all be different". But that isn't going to happen, that is a fantasy land. The world isn't going back to a fully decentralized web. There are very good practical, commercial and political reasons for this.

mike_hearn 5y ago
For what it's worth, I do agree with Moxie that encryption is under-used and can make many kinds of semi-centralized infrastructure private. But that's irrelevant in this case. The focus is on WhatsApp because Moxie likes to use the speed with which it rolled out e2e encryption as the canonical example of why centralized services are better for privacy (this isn't the only place he's made this claim). But it's meaningless: something switched on quickly on a whim can also be switched off quickly on a whim. And, note, we found out that WhatsApp was newly encrypted because of a blog post and some messages in the UI. It could be switched off again silently and who would notice? We know the answer to this because hardly anyone realizes there are forwarding limits, even though it's in their FAQ. Apparently there aren't any groups reverse engineering every WhatsApp update to figure out if it's still encrypting everything. With respect to the latter part, there might be a terminology issue here. I'm using "desktop" to mean any non-mobile/tablet/server device, including laptops or stick PCs. A whole lot of people have such devices and in particular the sort of people who create content do. The idea that people only have mobile phones is false. There certainly are plenty of people who only have mobile phones and they matter, but there is also a huge population of people who have more powerful computers as well. And even for those who don't, a big part of why is not inability to have one but because they don't see any reason to buy one. That's not exactly fundamental. Finally I would be very careful with predictions about technology trends. The computing industry has oscillated between big centralized computers and smaller more personal devices several times already. Even today the picture is quite ambiguous: as I argue in the article, a fully-bought-in Apple user is very much still a child of the PC revolution. Modern iPhones are as powerful hardware-wise as many PCs, just the form factor and usage model is different. The ecosystem there is very far from the canonical cloud-über-alles vision promoted by Google via the ChromeBooks.

bratwurst3000 5y ago

Hmmm he is at first criticizing moxie for not making a difference between bitcoin and ethereum and then he is throwing signal and whatssapp in the same bucket ….. But okey writeup

krater23 5y ago
Okay, explain me where is the technologic difference? Same cryptography, other controlling instance. One controlled from Moxie, one from Facebook. But both are forcing me to update the client sometimes. Why should I trust Moxie more than Facebook?
- seanieb 5y ago
  Why stop there! Why trust your phone OS… When it comes to trust it’s turtles all the way down, you have to start somewhere.
  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    Exaxtly … there is a fine line between paranoia and distrusting everything
- bratwurst3000 5y ago
  Thanks for the question. First of all I trust moxie because he has a trustworthy history. Thats TRUST and trust is based on gut feeling and history. And there is a difference between the two messengers. Whatsapp aint open source. They only implement the e2e encryption of signal and not the whole app. They can still gather metadata. Signal cant. I hope this clears up my statement. :) Edit: I dont trust facebook at all. I hope this shithole will one time go to hell.
- hiq 5y ago
  > Same cryptography Not really, e.g. the logic to send messages is different, does WhatsApp have sealed senders? > Why should I trust Moxie more than Facebook? The point of E2EE is that you don't, especially since you can update on your own schedule. There is some trust somewhere ("this version has been released for 3 months, nobody complained, seems fine, should be fine"), but you don't have to trust Moxie.

Animats 5y ago

I’m excited to launch this product and the company behind it OK, so it's kind of an ad, although no product yet. He makes an interesting point. If you're going to have home servers so you own your data, they need to be in something you own and control that's always plugged into power. There's the router, but you usually don't own that. It belongs to the telco or the cable company. A "speaker", i.e. Alexa and friends? Amazon controls that. The TV? That's a slave to the TV maker, Google, or the cable company. The doorbell? That's run by Amazon and the cops. The refrigerator? Apple used to sell a box, their "Time Capsule", which was a home server. But Apple discontinued that. Apple became so cloud-oriented that their thermostat has to contact an external server to get the outside temperature. Most people now have no home electronics that isn't a slave to someone else. Where do you put a home server?

keyme 5y ago
Your phone? Double redundant networking, UPS protected power supply, and plenty of compute resources. Writing this from an android with 16G of RAM.
- severine 5y ago
  Potentially? Yes. In practice, not so much. Do you think we'll get there?
firecall 5y ago
> Apple became so cloud-oriented that their thermostat has to contact an external server to get the outside temperature. Did you mean Google with their Nest devices? Apple don't sell a thermostat. Although I wouldn't be surprised if HomeKit enabled devices needed to do what you described LOL :-)
- BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
  For that matter, how is that even a criticism? A thermostat sits on your (interior) wall; If you want it to be aware of the outside temperature for any reason, you either provide additional equipment that consumers need to mount outside their building (in such a way as to get an accurate reading whilst being weatherproof and having reliable power/connectivity)... or you just fetch it from an API based on your postal code like a sane person would

dmitriid 5y ago

> I agree with points 1 and 2, but there’s a conceptual problem with the argument: cryptography cannot impose any limits on an adversary that also controls the client doing the encryption. > Let’s put it less abstractly. And then goes on to very concretely criticise WhatsApp and Signal instead of addressing Moxie's point, or how any of the crypto technologies address Moxie's point. > Quick fixes > Firstly let’s look at mobile messengers. Why? Why look at them. If you're addressing Moxie's points, address them, and Moxie's article wasn't about the messengers. > Why don’t non technical users want to run servers? After all, they have done in the past via programs like BitTorrent and Gnutella. No. No, they haven't. While it was rather wide-spread, it still wasn't nearly as en masse as people pretend it was. An average non-technincal person wasn't running those clients. And, most importantly, the moment iTunes, then Steam, then Spotify appeared, people ditched running those torrent clients. I wonder why /s > They don’t do that today because the software industry outside of Cupertino isn’t interested in easily letting them do that. Apple apps are not servers. And users are not running them. What wild logic leaps! Apple's iTunes ba sically single-handedly reduced the number of people running their own servers aka torrent clients. > I’m excited to launch this product and the company behind it, So. A marketing message hidden behind a rather inconherent "response"

Ygg2 5y ago
As someone that indulges in both legal and pirated games, the benefits isn't in downloading content, but extra features. Stuff like auto-update, cloud saves, friends list, etc. I don't trust any store to keep list of my games forever, sooner or later they will all fail.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > the benefits isn't in downloading content, but extra features. Stuff like auto-update, cloud saves, friends list, etc. Features like donloading content is the main benefit. Or, rather, quick and painless access to content. iTunes/Apple Music and Spotify never had any friends lists etc. And there are no "auto updates" to music. Same goes for Netflix (and other streaming services). And yet they reduced piracy probably a hundredfold. Same goes for games. There are many features we associate with Steam these days, but many of those features weren't there for years, and still Steam was extremely successful and also significantly reduced piracy. People don't want to chase content somewhere and then chase cracks/unlocks that may or may not work, that may or may not contain any number of viruses etc.

shriphani 5y ago

People routinely run their own servers. A great example is bittorrent where the incentive design forces people to run actual file servers on their computer. People will run servers on their computer if it is (i) motivated the right way, (ii) as frictionless as possible. For the types of applications that web2 is great at (content creation / consumption), it makes no sense to run a server of course but computing is a lot bigger than that.

manachar 5y ago
"Routinely run their own servers" That's doing a lot of work. Sure, it happens, but that vast majority of humans (including programmers) will not be in that category.
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  There are more common/accessible setups than just BitTorrent. Remote desktop software, media sharing e.g. Plex media center, doorbell cameras (and many other smart home IoT devices), PS/Xbox remote play, etc.
  - dochtman 5y ago
    I’d argue all of those setups combined would amount to less than 1% of internet users, so I’d hardly call them mainstream.
    - ShamelessC 5y ago
      Mainstream != routinely, and yes, I agree.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  Most printers and routers are running webservers. Some camera sd cards run servers. My ereader runs a webserver, it works well.
quickthrower2 5y ago

ThePhysicist 5y ago

I share the view that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) provides strong security guarantees only if the clients used to exchange data/messages are fully under control of the end users. All it would take Signal to undermine their E2EE is a single update of their app that exfiltrates all chat messages (not saying that I think they would ever do that). Same story for WhatsApp. In my opinion, a necessary ingredient for secure E2EE is that you don't have to trust the central infrastructure operator, at all. And that just doesn't work if the provider controls the client software. Another problem is that almost all E2EE messengers can still be trivially man-in-the-middled (MITM) by the infrastructure operator, as there's no out-of-band verification of keys. The central server can just replace client keys in transit and decrypt all the data exchanged between two clients. This can only be detected by clients comparing their public keys over an out-of-band channel. Most E2EE messengers simply disregard this risk [1], while some provide functionality for out-of-band key verification (e.g. Threema). Always struck me as a bit odd as it's like using self-signed TLS certificates for your server, which leads to a security exception in all modern browsers but somehow seems to be fine for E2EE messengers. Keybase tried to solve this problem but unfortunately they got acquired by Zoom so I doubt they will continue working on that. [1] https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/ https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/

telotortium 5y ago
The article mentioned something I was not aware of - that WhatsApp has already started sending metadata (the number of times a message has been forwarded) in the clear: > This is not a theoretical argument. Disabling E2E encryption has already happened, although hardly anyone knows about it. In 2019 WhatsApp imposed forwarding limits on messages in order to “slow down the spread of rumors, viral messages, and fake news”. This represents a total defeat of the Signal protocol’s cryptographic objectives: a basic goal of any modern cryptographic scheme is to ensure the same message encrypted twice doesn’t encrypt to the same bytes. The point of this is to stop the adversary knowing when you’re repeatedly sending the same message and encryption modes that get this wrong (like AES/ECB) are discredited. Yet once Facebook — the adversary — became dominated by authoritarians who see unlimited communication as chaotic, they simply changed the client to include a forwarding counter outside the encrypted part of the message. There was nothing anyone could do about this. It just showed up one day, and all the fancy mathematics designed to stop this “attack” were irrelevant.

KaiserPro 5y ago

> But it’s still a big step up and would mean that if Facebook suddenly decided merely blocking forwarding isn’t enough to fight “rumors” or “fake news”, they’d be stopped by the auditors who’d (hopefully) refuse to sign the update that takes out the encryption. A central auditor, or a bunch of auditors that verify what updates are doing, and work out if they are changing functionality of the protocol? I mean that's never going to happen. Writing the constitution/contract for that is pretty hard, not to mention the cost. Plus all of this assumes that users will read the information provided (they wont) Then there is the verification of trust for the auditors, which is difficult. I do notice that the author makes a bold claim to say that the signal protocol doesn't work, as a way of attacking moxie (fair enough) but then goes on outline the problems with whatsapp. Now, Signal inc were contracted by whatsapp to add e2e on whatsapps "improved" XMPP. The claim appears to refer to this: > In 2019 WhatsApp imposed forwarding limits on messages in order to “slow down the spread of rumors, viral messages, and fake news”. This represents a total defeat of the Signal protocol’s cryptographic objectives. I mean that's not really the case, Adding client side limits to stop forwarding isn't a defeat of encryption. Its a limit of freedom of speech, perhaps, but not encryption. but more importantly the author appears to deliberately conflate the software company with the signal protocol

iamleppert 5y ago

It’s hilarious to me how the NFT app he built got its published NFT art delisted for “violating terms of service”. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know right there. Again, there’s nothing distributed about Web 3.0 and this new system won’t solve any of the “problems” of the current system, real or imagined. It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature, and that if we could just have the right technology they would go away and we would be living in a utopia. The fact is, the problems are with human behavior and any technology created will serve to further that behavior. If anything the past 20 years has shown us, technology has an uncanny ability to bring out and amplify the worst of human behaviors. Make of that what you will, it’s a good thing in some regards but also a bad thing. Of course, none of this will matter or have anything to do with how successful Web 3.0 will or will not be. Bitcoin never solved any of the problems it was originally intended to solve, and still a lot of people became quite rich from it. So Web 3.0 proponents need not be worried, hype is illogical by nature.

illegalmemory 5y ago
"It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature" Exactly! Computers will be sold somewhere, parts will be bought from some countries / vendors, using money issued by governments, connect to others using internet ( which again has 100s of regulations from state / central governments ). There are way too many factors to become truly decentralized.
matesz 5y ago
> Bitcoin never solved any of the problems it was originally intended to solve Private transactions allowing to buy drugs of the internet for example? Darknets actually reduce incentives for drug gangs, at least according to this undercover cop [1] - 11th minute but I recommend watch the whole thing. [1] https://youtu.be/y_TV4GuXFoA https://youtu.be/y_TV4GuXFoA
lcam84 5y ago
>It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature, and that if we could just have the right technology they would go away and we would be living in a utopia. The fact is, the problems are with human behavior and any technology created will serve to further that behavior. I agree with you. This can be applied to the solutions we are looking to solve climate change.

rezonant 5y ago

> briefly, the client app bootstraps connections to the P2P network as normal but sends a special message saying “please don’t send me the contents of every block or transaction, I only want to see transactions matching a filter” The gist I got from Moxie's post was that this can't be done on the web itself without an intermediary, and this is very relevant if this is "web3" versus "the blockchain ecosystem". Why can't we have a serverless wallet app on the web? Even if the underlying blockchain network supports lightweight clients, it is still not eliminating go-betweens in a way that makes it truly decentralized.

djaychela 5y ago

OK, potentially dumb, non-educated non-programmer comment here, so please be kind One of the points he makes is that it's not possible to tell if a Signal client is actually made from the source code in question. Is there no hash-based way to ensure that isn't the case? I know that producing code which self-reports wouldn't work (as the 'altered' version could just report the correct hash, as it were), but is there no way to have a third-party app which would produce hashes of installed APKs, and wouldn't be open to such? Or is it always possible to alter that app so that it self-reports correctly, even though it's lying about the hash of the signal app?

feanaro 5y ago
The term you're looking for is reproducible builds and it's unfortunately not trivial and a somewhat rare state of affairs. It's definitely crucial in the long run.
- rhamzeh 5y ago
  On Android, Signal already offers reproducible builds[1]. [1] https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

i386 5y ago

Read: I own a lot of digital tulips.

niklasd 5y ago
He states in the article that he currently does not own any cryptocurrencies.
- i386 5y ago
  And you really believe that? He’s building a company on top of it.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    Ah, the "I don't own any cryptocurrency (but I own a company that owns a lot of it)"
  - mike_hearn 5y ago
    My new company has nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
  - kristofferR 5y ago
    So is Moxie, does that mean that we should blindly disregard everything he thinks about crypto too?
    - i386 5y ago
      Yes, when there’s absolutely crazy speculation over something with absolutely zero utility, a bunch of charlatans preaching for the web to run on it, and its adherents getting richer doing nothing but talking about it, absolutely yes.
cyphertruck 5y ago
The tulip bubble is a myth. But the funny thing about bubbles is they have a blow off top then deflate. Bitcoin has had 4 blow off tops and is at %200 of its last one. Not fitting the pattern.

edwnj 5y ago

We are all tech people here, lets not pretend like there is no difference between self hosting and cloud hosting. Pretty much everything you do on OpenSea requires indexing/processing, there is no way to do this on the blockchain (atm) so all of these platforms crawl the chain and keep their own indexes. OpenSea never claimed to be decentralised, its a centralised marketplace. The difference is, When they deplatform you, all they can do is remove their copy. They cant remove your nfts from the blockchain, they can delist you from the blockain and for the purposes of listing/curation, you can still see your nfts on other platforms.

gnaman 5y ago
> When they deplatform you, all they can do is remove their copy. > They cant remove your nfts from the blockchain, they can delist you from the blockain and for the purposes of listing/curation, you can still see your nfts on other platforms. The original article acknowledges this but also complaints that there is no easy way to access your NFTs once they are gone from OpenSea. All the major wallets are using OpenSea as a single source of truth and not pulling data directly from the chain. Defeats the point
- huntertwo 5y ago
  > there is no easy way to access your NFTs once they are gone from OpenSea You go to etherscan for the relevant smart contract, query for the metadata URI for your token, and voila you have it. Writing a new page to do this is a 5 minute task.
  - keymone 5y ago
    did you miss the word "easy"? what should average joe on their iphone do to see their nft if it's removed from opensea?
    - huntertwo 5y ago
      It’s easy enough that if this is a problem you can 1) google it or 2) use a tool that was made in 5 minutes by some dev. Wallets don’t delete your transaction history. The average user knows their wallet address and any wallet I’ve ever used 1) doesn’t use OpenSea as a source of anything and 2) keeps a track of transactions you’ve performed using that wallet. This makes it easy to find the address of your NFT. This is analogous to knowing your credit card number and knowing how to look up the merchant of a transaction you made.

mjg59 5y ago

> As for Signal it’s at least open source, but there’s no way to check that the client I’m using, or my friend is using, actually matches that source code. This is… not true? Signal builds are reproducible. You can verify that the apk in the app store corresponds to a specific point in git history, and if you don't trust Google you can sideload that. > Even if there was it’s irrelevant. Centralized infrastructure can claim to provide privacy but can never provide control: they can openly alter the deal at any time and I’d be forced to continue using it, if I couldn’t get my friends to switch to something else. If you're using Signal because of the E2E properties, and Signal unilaterally changes its behaviour, you are absolutely not forced to continue using it. If you do wish to continue communicating with people who are using Signal, you're still able to reappraise what you feel comfortable saying now you know that the behaviour has changed. The claim that "Signal encryption doesn’t actually work" just seems inaccurate. We can verify that Signal has the properties it claims it has. "Signal encryption could stop working" would be true - the client could absolutely just choose to start sending everything in plaintext, but we're not relying on a centralised group to make that claim! Anyone can look at the commits to Signal and flag that the claimed properties no longer apply.

mike_hearn 5y ago
"You can verify that the apk in the app store corresponds to a specific point in git history" Is there an easy way to get a direct HTTPS download link from the Play Store? The app itself certainly doesn't let you get the direct APK, or if it does then this must be a very obscure or new feature because I've been using Android for years and never seen it. My understanding is that the Play Store protocol is quite complicated. Even if you can get such a link: • It's not the case for iOS. • It's not the case for WhatsApp. • You have to repeat the process for every update, of which there are many. • You don't know what version other people are running, which also matters. Consider group chats! This is really something possible only in theory, not something normal users can actually do, hence the threshold signing/auditing proposal. The claim that "Signal encryption doesn’t actually work" just seems inaccurate I see a bunch of people getting hung up on this point. It's missing the forest for the trees. Encryption in which you rely on your adversary to encrypt messages for you is conceptually broken. It doesn't matter if the encryption scheme works in theory in another context, in that context it's a failed setup. The example of WhatsApp (which uses the Signal encryption scheme) makes this clear: the Signal protocol in the abstract prevents the adversary learning when the same message is sent twice. In the most important concrete instantiation it actually doesn't: Facebook simply changed the client to expose that information unencrypted, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Signal could do the same for their own network tomorrow, and given the ideological trends in the Bay Area perhaps they will. Or maybe they already did for some people? We have no way to know, only faith. "If you do wish to continue communicating with people who are using Signal, you're still able to reappraise what you feel comfortable saying now you know that the behaviour has changed." I think you're agreeing with me. The point of encryption is to turn the infrastructure provider into a "dumb pipe" that doesn't have opinions on what you think. If one day Signal or WhatsApp change the deal - as indeed Facebook did in 2019 - and you suddenly have to care what random Facebook employees think - then we can no longer really claim the service is end-to-end encrypted.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

By creating commitments on state, Ethereum offers the possibility of ultra-light clients, where only the state root needs to be downloaded instead of all block headers, that Bitcoin doesn't.

bhaak 5y ago
That's not there, yet. That's one of the main criticisms of the original article. So many promises but so little actual functionality after a decade for Bitcoin and half a decade for Ethereum.

cyphertruck 5y ago

He’s right that ethereum is centralized, and “web3” even more so. If AWS disappeared Ethereum would too. It’s hilariously wrong to say that paying for things with bitcoin is no better now than in the past. The country of El Salvador adopted it as a currency and every merchant has the option of easily taking bitcoin via lightning network there— and everywhere else as well. Adoption around the world is growing rapidly. It hasn’t yet broken into mainstream awareness yet, but the graph is exponential. Lightning is one of those technologies that when you use it you feel like “wow it really is the future!”

capableweb 5y ago
> If AWS disappeared Ethereum would too. I'm sorry but no, Ethereum wouldn't disappear if AWS disappeared. Yes, a lot of the Ethereum nodes are hosted with hosting companies (~69% [1]). Yes, a lot of those are hosted with AWS (~44% [2]), but even so, AWS disappearing would not have a huge impact on Ethereum itself. - [1] - https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types (just nodes that opt-in, real number differ) - [2] - https://www.ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting https://www.ethernodes.org/networkType/Hosting (just nodes that opt-in, real number differ)
swalsh 5y ago
Even wose, many blockchain nodes are running on AWS. Fortunately we know the problem exists.. and there are solutions people are working on to resolve it (for example https://akash.network/ https://akash.network/) The good part is that this infrastructure is a commodity and you can move relatively effortlessly.

throwawaycrylto 5y ago

"Ethereum isn’t actually decentralized" ok so now there's infighting among who's decentralized and who is not. I suppose driving some money away from ETH to other projects is a logical course of action. Everything else in this post reminds me of the golden rule of game development: to suspend disbelief in order to make the game sound plausible. Certainly a decentralized internet, with increased security and less government control sounds good, and plausible. Will this be delivered by a "Respected cryptographer". I doubt it. It is however fun to see how tech illiterate folks spend money on grand ideas that amount to nothing much but a ponzi scheme. Suppose scams had to be elevated to a new state just like anything else connected.

bawolff 5y ago

A weird mix of no true scotsman and tu quoque arguments. Sure there are other paths in crypto land that theoretically could have been better than what we got. It's besides the point though. Moxie's original argument wasn't against what is theoretically possible - it was about what actually happened.

greatgib 5y ago

> The filter in our implementation was a Bloom filter, so you could probabilistically hide what you were interested in. Very funny, this is not the first time that I hear about the 'bloom filter solution. But, it does not make much sense in practice: for your payment transactions, do you want the transaction to be 'safe' or 'probabilistically' safe? Is it that special day that you will do a 500k transfer that the probability will be against you and you will be ripped of your money...

mike_hearn 5y ago
The Bloom filter in this case was purely a privacy technique. It had no influence on probability of tx confirmation.

daveed 5y ago

I don't understand why this author is talking about bitcoin, when Moxie's article was about web3. I thought Moxie's article was more about what has happened with the ecosystem, versus what could happen.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

I wish Mike Hearn would rejoin the crypto world, in the Ethereum space. Ultimately his enormous contributuons to Bitcoin were mostly wasted by Bitcoin's leadership, when they prevented Bitcoin from achieving mass-adoption, but his talents would not be wasted on Ethereum, which already has a clear path to massive scalability and a pro-adoption leadership.

brightstep 5y ago
What does "leadership" mean here? I thought these systems were supposed to be decentralized and trustless?
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  They're supposed to eventually become leaderless, but they're not for the time being, especially as it relates to protocol evolution.
  - brightstep 5y ago
    What incentive do leaders have to give up authority?
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      It depends on the project and leader. Some leaders are incentivized by altruism, others by their large stake in the token supply, which could appreciate when the protocol becomes more decentralized/immutable. Some by the inertia and social pressure of community expectations, derived from long-published and widely discussed roadmaps. Some do not have an incentive to design themselves out of leadership positions.

md_ 5y ago

Mike's point seems to apply, practically speaking, to any software, including Bitcoin: - Most users of Bitcoin Wallet download it from the Play Store - Even if it's open source (as is the Signal client), "nobody's" reading through it and compiling their own builds This sort of sweeping argument--that e2ee doesn't work because most users don't read source code--applies to everything, and as such isn't at all illuminating.

thierryzoller 5y ago

What strikes me in this "comments/rebuttals" is that they mostly miss Moxies' main points and underlying critic. Some comments are pretty obvious and certainly understood my moxie...

tomohawk 5y ago

> If an encryption scheme can’t stop infrastructure providers having opinions on the moral value of messages, what’s the point of it? Good question.

mat0 5y ago

I actually found the article he's replying to much more interesting than this piece

agilob 5y ago

> As for Signal it’s at least open source, but there’s no way to check that the client I’m using, or my friend is using, actually matches that source code. It doesn't matter. Your keyboard isn't opensource and it can transmit all typing.

skippygoober 5y ago
https://system76.com/accessories/launch https://system76.com/accessories/launch
mike_hearn 5y ago
The Gboard app doesn't have internet permissions, so no, it can't.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  Google Play Services that is installed on almost every phone out of the box can, and Gboard can trivially communicate with it. So yes, it can.