21 ms·

Zooko: Decentralized, immutable and uncensorable microblogging

112 points by abriosi 5y ago

dqpb 5y ago
> These children remind of me of Lord of the Flies. I think most people in blockchain Discord "servers" are actually children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the same palpable feeling that I'm talking to teenagers. It's odd.
- fnord77 5y ago
  possibly adults who have not matured intellectually beyond teen levels.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  A lot of dopey young people who have medium-sized inheritances/trust funds that they're gambling with in the hope that they'll never have to work, mixed with overpaid tech workers fresh out of college hoping to buy Bay Area homes.
verdverm 5y ago
Handshake has been co-opted by the same person who took over Freenode. That handshake has become toxic should come at no surprise. I feel for this dev, I had a similarly unpleasant experience with the Aragon team and decided the community was not for me.
- publiush 5y ago
  If we're talking about the same person, he was the only one who actually encouraged what I was doing and even gave me the idea for Zooko. However, the admins on their discord, were less than encouraging. EDIT: As per the same person's advice, I'm going to start a new discord community without the toxicity.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    I walked away from the crypto community at large, highly recommended. There are many more meaningful things to put you talents towards.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Have you talked to Zooko about using his name for your project? He might not appreciate you trading on his reputation this way, particularly if your designs or implementations turn out to be fundamentally flawed.
    - gojomo 5y ago
      Indeed - the developer here could ask Zooko, & be open to consider other names that convey homage & inspirations without wholesale endorsement. (1st thing that comes to mind: 'Zooter', combining suggestive fragments of 'zooko' & 'twitter'.) Even cypherpunks soured on conventional IP often believe in folk trademarks, enforced by the reputational pressures to not mislead.
    - publiush 5y ago
      I e-mailed him about it days ago. By the way, are you familiar with Zooko's triangle?
      - kragen 5y ago
        Are you joking? You emailed him and then launched your project with his name on it without waiting for a reply?
        no_butterscotch 5y ago
        The dude doesn't own the name Zooko just 'cause his parents named that, if he has a problem with it the dev can remove the part of the README that mentions it's named in honor of him. That doesn't mean this Zooko person (my first time hearing of him) can demand or should demand the name of the project change. My 2 cents but you seem a bit too incredulous over it.
webmaven 5y ago
Naming this after Zooko is a nice hat tip. I remember back when he was interleaving his last names to form O'Whielacronx.
nottorp 5y ago
I guess this is addressed to whoever lives in the crypto bubble. I don't understand what a handshake is, why it passes dns records and if it can be used to publish twitter like messages who is going to read them and how. Also from the little i know about this current fad: If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?
- verdverm 5y ago
  Handshake is a blockchain based alternative for ICANN. DNS resolvers still work the same, and HNS could play nice with ICANN, but largely seem to want to replace it rather than be peers with it. The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and verification.
  - nottorp 5y ago
    I could attach TXT records to my own domain and publish "tweets" like that couldn't I?
    - verdverm 5y ago
      Yes, but as the author points out, these can be blocked. Typically one sets up their handshake node with a DNS resolver to serve records, so in theory, if everyone used handshake node ups for DNS, this could be uncensorable
    - sowbug 5y ago
      That's roughly how people used to use Unix .plan files, with finger being a convenient way to check out what someone else was up to. Which reminds me of a story. At Google in the mid-2000s, we used a corporate version of Google Chat, embedded in Gmail, much as it is today. One key difference in the UI was that your status appeared as text right below your name in other people's contact lists. Your status could be active, idle, away, or any freeform text that you set it to. The status lines in the contacts list updated in real time (ordinary today but remarkable back then). So people figured out that they could have an odd kind of one-to-many chat conversation by frequently updating their statuses. Not everyone was in everyone else's contacts list, so it was actually one-to-who-knows-how-many. And people used it accordingly, as if they were shouting stuff in a large room -- "does anyone know what's for lunch today?" "I heard it's lasagna" "beef or vegetarian?" etc. Anyway, Evan Williams worked at Google back then, and I assume he saw these ephemeral messages flickering across his screen, same as I did. I wonder whether that planted the seed for Twitter.
navbaker 5y ago
I understand the very basics of blockchain technology, but I guess I'm missing some context or background that would allow me to make the mental connection between "blockchain" and "unblockable microblog". Does anyone have a good pointer to something that would explain this more in-depth/like I'm 5?
- wepple 5y ago
  My guess is that because blockchain is decentralized, in theory nobody could censor or block it, because nobody “controls” the blockchain. Compared with any modern social media site which is mutable and controlled by an organization who gets to police content Edit: a good example of this is that folks have put malicious content into the various blockchains (ascii images of child harm material, or strings of data that trigger antivirus). You can’t stop it being added, and once it’s there you cannot remove it.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > You can’t stop it being added It really depends what you mean by “you”, of course I can't, but miners can since they are the one actively adding stuff to the chain. In fact, they may even be legally responsible for what they add to a blockchain (IANAL though), and since miners are physical entities most of whom have a publicly known IP address, it may even be realistically enforceable.
- m3kw9 5y ago
  Eventually a company providing a UI layer will be the central access point for all the content coming from the block chain. The central point will then be able to censor posts. This is no different from OpenSea, or Coinbase.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  I think it's embedding posts directly into the chain, so if you can sync the chain then you can access everyone's posts. Since these posts are cryptographically embedded in the chain you can't block any of them without blocking access to the entire chain, or attacking the chain and rewriting history.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
"Uncensorable" if all nodes go down it's down. It's like that torrent/magnet you really want to have but it's at 0/0.
an-allen 5y ago
Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no one has asked for!
- hobs 5y ago
  It's almost like twitter users have been asking for an edit button for N years, so let's make everything EVEN MORE immutable!
  - mcculley 5y ago
    An edit button should also come with an immutable history of edits.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Maybe not directly, but I actually see plenty of complaints about link rot and news publications silently editing or removing old articles.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    While at the same time, people are still receiving consequences after the discovery of things they said and did a long time ago. What a world!
  - Kadin 5y ago
    Nothing about "put it on a blockchain" helps that. If you are actually putting the page contents onto the blockchain, you have basically constructed an append-only, replicated database. Which will almost certainly become unmanageably large over time. (Why would a user want to maintain a local archive of this content? There's no incentive for them to keep it on their machine, aside from wanting a copy of the content for themselves, which they could achieve in any number of other ways. Like just... saving it to disk.) If you aren't actually putting the content into the blockchain itself, but are really just storing a URL that points to the content, you haven't solved the linkrot problem at all. You've just created a very roundabout way to send people URLs. You could put something like a PURL in there, or a DOI, but that just moves the problem around. Again, the blockchain isn't solving anything. Here's an easier solution, if you want to try and ensure the availability of a piece of content into the future: strip it down to its most minimal, plaintext version, and post that to a well-known (and subject-appropriate) Usenet group. It will immediately be archived in several places across the world, which have a pretty good track record of keeping ahead of the flow of incoming content and keeping it available. No, you don't get a guaranteed URL, but the Message-ID is a very unique search string that can be used later on to find it.
roughly 5y ago
People keep using immutable like it’s a good thing. Any of y’all who still want to fully stand by the things you said, did, and thought 20 years ago might need to reflect a bit.
akvadrako 5y ago
I think this is the most interesting part: https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake
- publiush 5y ago
  I've decided to begin my own community. Those toxic admins can't control the blockchain.
  - NetOpWibby 5y ago
    Huh?! No one controls the blockchain.
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    Unless there's some conversation not shown here, it reads to me like they are using "garbage" to refer to random contents of people's messages and/or posts (and saying that the whitepaper is not garbage, as opposed to random messages and posts, which are not "useful" on chain). I don't think they meant to call your project garbage, just that it adds garbage to the chain.
    - publiush 5y ago
      It's been an on-going conversation that's been going on a few days.
m3kw9 5y ago
So you pay to post, otherwise who will pay miners to post blocks? That will surely disincentivize too much posting and solve inherent scalability issues. This service is a no go.
codespin 5y ago
I'm excited to try this out, I was toying with the idea of creating something similar. I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko goes farther in the right direction.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  This seems like a different definition of "control"- sure, your posts can't be deleted by anyone else, but they can't be deleted or edited by you. They are preserved and public forever. I'm not sure that's what people think of when they think of having control of their data?
  - macintux 5y ago
    Seems analogous to the discussion of which licensing type gives the developer more freedom: GPL or BSD. The answer depends on how you define freedom.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    Yes, like it or not that's practically how the internet works. You don't believe Facebook actually deletes your messages, do you?
    - roywiggins 5y ago
      Right. But that's what I mean by this thing not giving you "control over your data." If I post something on Facebook and regret it, I have some control over it- sure, I can't delete it off Facebook's internal tape archives, but that's really going to be one of a handful of places it will stick around after I delete it. If I embed something in plaintext on a blockchain it will be public, to everyone, forever. This seems like having less control, or at least no more control.
      - magicjosh 5y ago
        Interesting point about what "control" means. If I can put up a message that can never be taken down, is that control? The case here is "yes", that's a certain type of control: the ability to put something up and never take it down. Kind of permissions on a disk where you can only write subsequent files but no one (including you) can delete old files. That is more control compared to someone who can write files but an admin can delete them.
acdha 5y ago
This is “uncensorable” in the same way that “sovereign citizens” are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something which is actually illegal, they’ll learn how useful blockchains are for prosecutors. The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths: 1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch. 2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  The readme does explain that you could censor it by blocking access the chain entirely, it's not pretending otherwise. But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since you can do all that offline.
  - phoe-krk 5y ago
    As long as there is illegal content on the blockchain, they can simply state that you are hosting a node connected to a network that downloads and shares illegal content, which will be true, and therefore that you possess it, which will also be true. And that can be enough to get you prosecuted regardless of how many crypto bros are going to try to convince you, or them, otherwise.
    - roywiggins 5y ago
      Well, sure. They could make owning a computer illegal, or whatever. Anything outside your skull is censorable. The readme doesn't pretend that this works if you can't access the Handshake chain.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Since it isn't really clear, Handshake protocol is an attempt to create an alternative DNS without authoritative root name servers, where instead users auction names priced in Handshake coins, the initial bulk of which were gifted to various FOSS developers and organizations to try and keep rich people from hoarding everything. Instead of querying root servers for TLDs, you query a blockchain to get the records. This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records, and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed, the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you can now never delete or edit a Tweet.
KETpXDDzR 5y ago
I stopped reading after "Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them." The claim that Handshake isn't easy to abuse lacks proof.
endisneigh 5y ago
I don’t understand the popularity of immutability and uncensor- ability. What if someone posts naked photos of their girlfriend on this? Furthermore it says you can block access to the chain completely do it doesn’t even do what it claims.
- klyrs 5y ago
  I was thinking about the children™, personally. I wouldn't touch this technology with a 10 foot pole.
- dannyw 5y ago
  some people believe information should be free, period. There's am argument to be made that the drawbacks of revenge porn are outweighed by the benefits of free access to information.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    you don't need this to have free access to info tho.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    > some people believe information should be free, period. There is nothing wrong believing some ideology. However, enforcing your beliefs without caring about consequences is called extremism. You can believe information must be free but acknowledge that it don’t include revenge porn. Or you can act like it doesn’t matter but then, you are a danger for the society.
  - timeon 5y ago
    Dystopia is created when context and adaptation is not considered while implementing the Utopia.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Every technology has pros and cons. The pro here is that some blog about corruption can't be knocked offline by some government authority lest they block the entire network, which would be a problem if any businesses use such a decentralized network for their own means. The con is that everything is immutable and unchangeable, and that has consequences - for reference, despite that the story about CP being on Bitcoin is false[0], it's definitely possible if anyone ever wanted to spend a few hundred thousands in gas fees to store an arbitrary jpeg on ethereum. 0: https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockchain/ https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockcha...
vannevar 5y ago
Anyone interested in this field should also check out Freenet, a distributed, encrypted and censor-resistant platform that's been around for 20 years. https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/
flubflub 5y ago
How much does this cost to use yourself as it is on a blockchain?
rvz 5y ago
Maybe all these projects that have typical Discord chats talking about blockchains, DAOs, NFTs, etc are full of kids given that some users can get easily upset and hate your pet project and they don't give any reasons other than character attacks. I always see this when someone attaches their own identity to a technology or project that once someone criticises the project (but not you directly) they feel 'personally attacked'. Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this project. I don't see any character attacks on the user from the project devs. In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to have 'won'.
romaniitedomum 5y ago
Oh dear. Another allegedly censorship resistant platform, and where do they put their code? On the most censored and censorable place possible, github. It's just one DMCA complaint away from being taken down, or Microsoft may decide to just lock out some or all of the developers.
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rvz 5y ago
  There you go. It is no wonder that these projects that claim to be 'decentralised' still relying on using centralised services like Discord, GitHub, Etherscan, Coinmarketcap, Coinbase, Binance and Twitter, and they scream about 'web3'. Whatever that means. On your point towards Github there is a solution and that is to self-host the source code via using something like GitLab, cgit, gerrit, etc in which many free and open source projects already do this.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  Nothing stops a developer from putting their code elsewhere, should it be taken off github. Choosing a different host than GitHub to begin with is basically self-censorship (as fewer will see it).
- benpiper 5y ago
  Exactly. The platform is only as decentralized as the codebase. Most people are going to blindly download and run whatever the developers put out. Decentralization and immutability are illusions. See: Ethereum DAO fork.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Recent and presumably related: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 - Dec 2021 (186 comments)
tablespoon 5y ago
> Zooko was named after Zooko Wilcox O'Hearn, one of the few remaining, original, Cypherpunks. It's super weird to name a project after someone who's not dead, and in this case not even that old (Wikipedia says he's 47).
- SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
  It's extra weird when you know Zooko. One of his kids shared a kindergarten class with my oldest and I used to hang out with him. Clicked on this to see if it was something he'd done.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  And most importantly, seemingly not involved in the project at all.
  - tromp 5y ago
    No; but quite involved in running another blockchain...
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Right...but the issue is that this project is trading on his extremely unique nickname and reputation. It's nice that is inspired by him, and maybe it is the case that he would agree with its purpose and direction (or maybe he wouldn't, I have no idea). But what happens if down the line it goes in a direction he doesn't agree with?
- kragen 5y ago
  It's not weird (is there anything wrong with being weird?), but if it's done without his consent, it's bad.
fsiefken 5y ago
i wonder how the handshake protocol compares with the hypercore protocol or scuttlebut and if there are other similar suitable protocols for social media. for example iris.to uses hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ https://hypercore-protocol.org/
benpiper 5y ago
This already exists. It's called Usenet.
ThinkBeat 5y ago
Something I always like to figure out in any decentralized system is where it is stored. Here it is stored on a blockchain. (yay) But where is this actually stored? Is it expected that N users will store it for everyone else? Will everyone have a copy of the entire thing? If this were to become popular I presume it would grow pretty big.

112 points by abriosi 5y ago

dqpb 5y ago

> These children remind of me of Lord of the Flies. I think most people in blockchain Discord "servers" are actually children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the same palpable feeling that I'm talking to teenagers. It's odd.

fnord77 5y ago
possibly adults who have not matured intellectually beyond teen levels.
pessimizer 5y ago
A lot of dopey young people who have medium-sized inheritances/trust funds that they're gambling with in the hope that they'll never have to work, mixed with overpaid tech workers fresh out of college hoping to buy Bay Area homes.

verdverm 5y ago

Handshake has been co-opted by the same person who took over Freenode. That handshake has become toxic should come at no surprise. I feel for this dev, I had a similarly unpleasant experience with the Aragon team and decided the community was not for me.

publiush 5y ago
If we're talking about the same person, he was the only one who actually encouraged what I was doing and even gave me the idea for Zooko. However, the admins on their discord, were less than encouraging. EDIT: As per the same person's advice, I'm going to start a new discord community without the toxicity.
- verdverm 5y ago
  I walked away from the crypto community at large, highly recommended. There are many more meaningful things to put you talents towards.
- kragen 5y ago
  Have you talked to Zooko about using his name for your project? He might not appreciate you trading on his reputation this way, particularly if your designs or implementations turn out to be fundamentally flawed.
  - gojomo 5y ago
    Indeed - the developer here could ask Zooko, & be open to consider other names that convey homage & inspirations without wholesale endorsement. (1st thing that comes to mind: 'Zooter', combining suggestive fragments of 'zooko' & 'twitter'.) Even cypherpunks soured on conventional IP often believe in folk trademarks, enforced by the reputational pressures to not mislead.
  - publiush 5y ago
    I e-mailed him about it days ago. By the way, are you familiar with Zooko's triangle?
    - kragen 5y ago
      Are you joking? You emailed him and then launched your project with his name on it without waiting for a reply?
      - no_butterscotch 5y ago
        The dude doesn't own the name Zooko just 'cause his parents named that, if he has a problem with it the dev can remove the part of the README that mentions it's named in honor of him. That doesn't mean this Zooko person (my first time hearing of him) can demand or should demand the name of the project change. My 2 cents but you seem a bit too incredulous over it.

webmaven 5y ago

Naming this after Zooko is a nice hat tip. I remember back when he was interleaving his last names to form O'Whielacronx.

nottorp 5y ago

I guess this is addressed to whoever lives in the crypto bubble. I don't understand what a handshake is, why it passes dns records and if it can be used to publish twitter like messages who is going to read them and how. Also from the little i know about this current fad: If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?

verdverm 5y ago
Handshake is a blockchain based alternative for ICANN. DNS resolvers still work the same, and HNS could play nice with ICANN, but largely seem to want to replace it rather than be peers with it. The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and verification.
- nottorp 5y ago
  I could attach TXT records to my own domain and publish "tweets" like that couldn't I?
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Yes, but as the author points out, these can be blocked. Typically one sets up their handshake node with a DNS resolver to serve records, so in theory, if everyone used handshake node ups for DNS, this could be uncensorable
  - sowbug 5y ago
    That's roughly how people used to use Unix .plan files, with finger being a convenient way to check out what someone else was up to. Which reminds me of a story. At Google in the mid-2000s, we used a corporate version of Google Chat, embedded in Gmail, much as it is today. One key difference in the UI was that your status appeared as text right below your name in other people's contact lists. Your status could be active, idle, away, or any freeform text that you set it to. The status lines in the contacts list updated in real time (ordinary today but remarkable back then). So people figured out that they could have an odd kind of one-to-many chat conversation by frequently updating their statuses. Not everyone was in everyone else's contacts list, so it was actually one-to-who-knows-how-many. And people used it accordingly, as if they were shouting stuff in a large room -- "does anyone know what's for lunch today?" "I heard it's lasagna" "beef or vegetarian?" etc. Anyway, Evan Williams worked at Google back then, and I assume he saw these ephemeral messages flickering across his screen, same as I did. I wonder whether that planted the seed for Twitter.

navbaker 5y ago

I understand the very basics of blockchain technology, but I guess I'm missing some context or background that would allow me to make the mental connection between "blockchain" and "unblockable microblog". Does anyone have a good pointer to something that would explain this more in-depth/like I'm 5?

wepple 5y ago
My guess is that because blockchain is decentralized, in theory nobody could censor or block it, because nobody “controls” the blockchain. Compared with any modern social media site which is mutable and controlled by an organization who gets to police content Edit: a good example of this is that folks have put malicious content into the various blockchains (ascii images of child harm material, or strings of data that trigger antivirus). You can’t stop it being added, and once it’s there you cannot remove it.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > You can’t stop it being added It really depends what you mean by “you”, of course I can't, but miners can since they are the one actively adding stuff to the chain. In fact, they may even be legally responsible for what they add to a blockchain (IANAL though), and since miners are physical entities most of whom have a publicly known IP address, it may even be realistically enforceable.
m3kw9 5y ago
Eventually a company providing a UI layer will be the central access point for all the content coming from the block chain. The central point will then be able to censor posts. This is no different from OpenSea, or Coinbase.
roywiggins 5y ago
I think it's embedding posts directly into the chain, so if you can sync the chain then you can access everyone's posts. Since these posts are cryptographically embedded in the chain you can't block any of them without blocking access to the entire chain, or attacking the chain and rewriting history.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago

"Uncensorable" if all nodes go down it's down. It's like that torrent/magnet you really want to have but it's at 0/0.

an-allen 5y ago

Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no one has asked for!

hobs 5y ago
It's almost like twitter users have been asking for an edit button for N years, so let's make everything EVEN MORE immutable!
- mcculley 5y ago
  An edit button should also come with an immutable history of edits.
thebean11 5y ago
Maybe not directly, but I actually see plenty of complaints about link rot and news publications silently editing or removing old articles.
- rhizome 5y ago
  While at the same time, people are still receiving consequences after the discovery of things they said and did a long time ago. What a world!
- Kadin 5y ago
  Nothing about "put it on a blockchain" helps that. If you are actually putting the page contents onto the blockchain, you have basically constructed an append-only, replicated database. Which will almost certainly become unmanageably large over time. (Why would a user want to maintain a local archive of this content? There's no incentive for them to keep it on their machine, aside from wanting a copy of the content for themselves, which they could achieve in any number of other ways. Like just... saving it to disk.) If you aren't actually putting the content into the blockchain itself, but are really just storing a URL that points to the content, you haven't solved the linkrot problem at all. You've just created a very roundabout way to send people URLs. You could put something like a PURL in there, or a DOI, but that just moves the problem around. Again, the blockchain isn't solving anything. Here's an easier solution, if you want to try and ensure the availability of a piece of content into the future: strip it down to its most minimal, plaintext version, and post that to a well-known (and subject-appropriate) Usenet group. It will immediately be archived in several places across the world, which have a pretty good track record of keeping ahead of the flow of incoming content and keeping it available. No, you don't get a guaranteed URL, but the Message-ID is a very unique search string that can be used later on to find it.

roughly 5y ago

People keep using immutable like it’s a good thing. Any of y’all who still want to fully stand by the things you said, did, and thought 20 years ago might need to reflect a bit.

akvadrako 5y ago

I think this is the most interesting part: https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake

publiush 5y ago
I've decided to begin my own community. Those toxic admins can't control the blockchain.
- NetOpWibby 5y ago
  Huh?! No one controls the blockchain.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  Unless there's some conversation not shown here, it reads to me like they are using "garbage" to refer to random contents of people's messages and/or posts (and saying that the whitepaper is not garbage, as opposed to random messages and posts, which are not "useful" on chain). I don't think they meant to call your project garbage, just that it adds garbage to the chain.
  - publiush 5y ago
    It's been an on-going conversation that's been going on a few days.

m3kw9 5y ago

So you pay to post, otherwise who will pay miners to post blocks? That will surely disincentivize too much posting and solve inherent scalability issues. This service is a no go.

codespin 5y ago

I'm excited to try this out, I was toying with the idea of creating something similar. I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko goes farther in the right direction.

roywiggins 5y ago
This seems like a different definition of "control"- sure, your posts can't be deleted by anyone else, but they can't be deleted or edited by you. They are preserved and public forever. I'm not sure that's what people think of when they think of having control of their data?
- macintux 5y ago
  Seems analogous to the discussion of which licensing type gives the developer more freedom: GPL or BSD. The answer depends on how you define freedom.
- dannyw 5y ago
  Yes, like it or not that's practically how the internet works. You don't believe Facebook actually deletes your messages, do you?
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    Right. But that's what I mean by this thing not giving you "control over your data." If I post something on Facebook and regret it, I have some control over it- sure, I can't delete it off Facebook's internal tape archives, but that's really going to be one of a handful of places it will stick around after I delete it. If I embed something in plaintext on a blockchain it will be public, to everyone, forever. This seems like having less control, or at least no more control.
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      Interesting point about what "control" means. If I can put up a message that can never be taken down, is that control? The case here is "yes", that's a certain type of control: the ability to put something up and never take it down. Kind of permissions on a disk where you can only write subsequent files but no one (including you) can delete old files. That is more control compared to someone who can write files but an admin can delete them.

acdha 5y ago

This is “uncensorable” in the same way that “sovereign citizens” are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something which is actually illegal, they’ll learn how useful blockchains are for prosecutors. The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths: 1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch. 2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.

roywiggins 5y ago
The readme does explain that you could censor it by blocking access the chain entirely, it's not pretending otherwise. But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since you can do all that offline.
- phoe-krk 5y ago
  As long as there is illegal content on the blockchain, they can simply state that you are hosting a node connected to a network that downloads and shares illegal content, which will be true, and therefore that you possess it, which will also be true. And that can be enough to get you prosecuted regardless of how many crypto bros are going to try to convince you, or them, otherwise.
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    Well, sure. They could make owning a computer illegal, or whatever. Anything outside your skull is censorable. The readme doesn't pretend that this works if you can't access the Handshake chain.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Since it isn't really clear, Handshake protocol is an attempt to create an alternative DNS without authoritative root name servers, where instead users auction names priced in Handshake coins, the initial bulk of which were gifted to various FOSS developers and organizations to try and keep rich people from hoarding everything. Instead of querying root servers for TLDs, you query a blockchain to get the records. This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records, and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed, the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you can now never delete or edit a Tweet.

KETpXDDzR 5y ago

I stopped reading after "Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them." The claim that Handshake isn't easy to abuse lacks proof.

endisneigh 5y ago

I don’t understand the popularity of immutability and uncensor- ability. What if someone posts naked photos of their girlfriend on this? Furthermore it says you can block access to the chain completely do it doesn’t even do what it claims.

klyrs 5y ago
I was thinking about the children™, personally. I wouldn't touch this technology with a 10 foot pole.
dannyw 5y ago
some people believe information should be free, period. There's am argument to be made that the drawbacks of revenge porn are outweighed by the benefits of free access to information.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  you don't need this to have free access to info tho.
- pjerem 5y ago
  > some people believe information should be free, period. There is nothing wrong believing some ideology. However, enforcing your beliefs without caring about consequences is called extremism. You can believe information must be free but acknowledge that it don’t include revenge porn. Or you can act like it doesn’t matter but then, you are a danger for the society.
- timeon 5y ago
  Dystopia is created when context and adaptation is not considered while implementing the Utopia.
judge2020 5y ago
Every technology has pros and cons. The pro here is that some blog about corruption can't be knocked offline by some government authority lest they block the entire network, which would be a problem if any businesses use such a decentralized network for their own means. The con is that everything is immutable and unchangeable, and that has consequences - for reference, despite that the story about CP being on Bitcoin is false[0], it's definitely possible if anyone ever wanted to spend a few hundred thousands in gas fees to store an arbitrary jpeg on ethereum. 0: https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockchain/ https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockcha...

vannevar 5y ago

Anyone interested in this field should also check out Freenet, a distributed, encrypted and censor-resistant platform that's been around for 20 years. https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/

flubflub 5y ago

How much does this cost to use yourself as it is on a blockchain?

rvz 5y ago

Maybe all these projects that have typical Discord chats talking about blockchains, DAOs, NFTs, etc are full of kids given that some users can get easily upset and hate your pet project and they don't give any reasons other than character attacks. I always see this when someone attaches their own identity to a technology or project that once someone criticises the project (but not you directly) they feel 'personally attacked'. Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this project. I don't see any character attacks on the user from the project devs. In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to have 'won'.

romaniitedomum 5y ago

Oh dear. Another allegedly censorship resistant platform, and where do they put their code? On the most censored and censorable place possible, github. It's just one DMCA complaint away from being taken down, or Microsoft may decide to just lock out some or all of the developers.

dang 5y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rvz 5y ago
There you go. It is no wonder that these projects that claim to be 'decentralised' still relying on using centralised services like Discord, GitHub, Etherscan, Coinmarketcap, Coinbase, Binance and Twitter, and they scream about 'web3'. Whatever that means. On your point towards Github there is a solution and that is to self-host the source code via using something like GitLab, cgit, gerrit, etc in which many free and open source projects already do this.
alkonaut 5y ago
Nothing stops a developer from putting their code elsewhere, should it be taken off github. Choosing a different host than GitHub to begin with is basically self-censorship (as fewer will see it).
benpiper 5y ago
Exactly. The platform is only as decentralized as the codebase. Most people are going to blindly download and run whatever the developers put out. Decentralization and immutability are illusions. See: Ethereum DAO fork.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dang 5y ago

Recent and presumably related: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 - Dec 2021 (186 comments)

tablespoon 5y ago

> Zooko was named after Zooko Wilcox O'Hearn, one of the few remaining, original, Cypherpunks. It's super weird to name a project after someone who's not dead, and in this case not even that old (Wikipedia says he's 47).

SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
It's extra weird when you know Zooko. One of his kids shared a kindergarten class with my oldest and I used to hang out with him. Clicked on this to see if it was something he'd done.
oh_sigh 5y ago
And most importantly, seemingly not involved in the project at all.
- tromp 5y ago
  No; but quite involved in running another blockchain...
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Right...but the issue is that this project is trading on his extremely unique nickname and reputation. It's nice that is inspired by him, and maybe it is the case that he would agree with its purpose and direction (or maybe he wouldn't, I have no idea). But what happens if down the line it goes in a direction he doesn't agree with?
kragen 5y ago
It's not weird (is there anything wrong with being weird?), but if it's done without his consent, it's bad.

fsiefken 5y ago

i wonder how the handshake protocol compares with the hypercore protocol or scuttlebut and if there are other similar suitable protocols for social media. for example iris.to uses hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ https://hypercore-protocol.org/

benpiper 5y ago

This already exists. It's called Usenet.

ThinkBeat 5y ago

Something I always like to figure out in any decentralized system is where it is stored. Here it is stored on a blockchain. (yay) But where is this actually stored? Is it expected that N users will store it for everyone else? Will everyone have a copy of the entire thing? If this were to become popular I presume it would grow pretty big.