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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 block

by 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.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  Your argument is pretty much that you can't/shouldn't trust WhatsApp/Signal and Moxie's argument is you don't need to if the cryptography is implemented correctly. It can't be just switched off, any update to the applications gets reversed within hours of release well before it's rolled out to a significant population of the users because exploits in both are quite prized. As someone else pointed out WhatsApp RCEs go for ~$1.5M USD, that is in a similar class to iMessage. Signals relay system is effectively untrusted at the protocol layer, this isn't much different from Bitcoin. The only real difference is the only people running it are the Signal folk. Is it an improvement to have a decentralized backend? Only arguably. From a user perspective it's actually often worse as fully decentralized peer-to-peer systems often perform worse and can't implement optimisations that are possible in centralised systems. From a purely "I can't trust anyone" perspective then no, but even Bitcoin and friends aren't that either. You trust the Bitcoin developers to not alter the protocol in a subtle way to weaken it just like you trust the Signal developers and server infrastructure not to subley subvert the cryptosystem. What I am saying is I think trusting the protocol developers of blockchain like systems isn't substantially different from trusting the Signal developers with the exception that it would be easier to fork a blockchain if you disagreed while spinning up your own Signal infrastructure would be quite a lot more work. As for powerful wall connected devices I do think you are being a bit facetious here. The vast majority of the population the mobile phone is their primary computing device. This is true across most of Asia, India and Africa. More modern developed countries have a wider proliferation of powerful consumer computing hardware but even there non-mobile computing is dwindling and while devices like iPad/tablets are becoming more popular they are prone to the same shortcomings of mobile devices (locked down OS, little/no background processing capability, unreliably connectivity). Also I wouldn't cling too quickly to the idea that Apple is selling you something drastically different from Google. If you look at their recent earnings reports they are now generating more and more of their profits as a precentage from their services business. They very much are attempting to follow the Google model, they just weren't as aggressive in the route they took. I don't actually see that as a problem though. If they can pursue a very cloud heavy model that is privacy preserving and protected by sufficient cryptography I don't see a problem. If however they keep going down the path of the device local CSAM scanning and the like... well I guess I won't be buying more Apple products. At the end of the day user experience is king. Everything else fades away under the weight of sheer amounts of money that comes from bowing to consumerism. If all this Web 3.0 stuff has a poor user experience vs what is being peddled by Google/Apple then don't expect it survive for that long.
cbsmith 5y ago
> 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. I don't know. I'm looking around my home, and I have a WiFi router, an Android phone, a Chromebook, a Kindle, and a car. The distinction between those five devices and a linux desktop/server is pretty subtle --to the point of being a matter of semantics more than anything else. ;-)

by jpgvm 5y ago

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.

jpgvm 5y ago
Your argument is pretty much that you can't/shouldn't trust WhatsApp/Signal and Moxie's argument is you don't need to if the cryptography is implemented correctly. It can't be just switched off, any update to the applications gets reversed within hours of release well before it's rolled out to a significant population of the users because exploits in both are quite prized. As someone else pointed out WhatsApp RCEs go for ~$1.5M USD, that is in a similar class to iMessage. Signals relay system is effectively untrusted at the protocol layer, this isn't much different from Bitcoin. The only real difference is the only people running it are the Signal folk. Is it an improvement to have a decentralized backend? Only arguably. From a user perspective it's actually often worse as fully decentralized peer-to-peer systems often perform worse and can't implement optimisations that are possible in centralised systems. From a purely "I can't trust anyone" perspective then no, but even Bitcoin and friends aren't that either. You trust the Bitcoin developers to not alter the protocol in a subtle way to weaken it just like you trust the Signal developers and server infrastructure not to subley subvert the cryptosystem. What I am saying is I think trusting the protocol developers of blockchain like systems isn't substantially different from trusting the Signal developers with the exception that it would be easier to fork a blockchain if you disagreed while spinning up your own Signal infrastructure would be quite a lot more work. As for powerful wall connected devices I do think you are being a bit facetious here. The vast majority of the population the mobile phone is their primary computing device. This is true across most of Asia, India and Africa. More modern developed countries have a wider proliferation of powerful consumer computing hardware but even there non-mobile computing is dwindling and while devices like iPad/tablets are becoming more popular they are prone to the same shortcomings of mobile devices (locked down OS, little/no background processing capability, unreliably connectivity). Also I wouldn't cling too quickly to the idea that Apple is selling you something drastically different from Google. If you look at their recent earnings reports they are now generating more and more of their profits as a precentage from their services business. They very much are attempting to follow the Google model, they just weren't as aggressive in the route they took. I don't actually see that as a problem though. If they can pursue a very cloud heavy model that is privacy preserving and protected by sufficient cryptography I don't see a problem. If however they keep going down the path of the device local CSAM scanning and the like... well I guess I won't be buying more Apple products. At the end of the day user experience is king. Everything else fades away under the weight of sheer amounts of money that comes from bowing to consumerism. If all this Web 3.0 stuff has a poor user experience vs what is being peddled by Google/Apple then don't expect it survive for that long.

cbsmith 5y ago

> 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. I don't know. I'm looking around my home, and I have a WiFi router, an Android phone, a Chromebook, a Kindle, and a car. The distinction between those five devices and a linux desktop/server is pretty subtle --to the point of being a matter of semantics more than anything else. ;-)