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How will you pay for things in “web4”? If the answer is “you don’t” it makes tons of things impossible (any sort of large scale hosting, storage, commerce) If

How will you pay for things in “web4”? If the answer is “you don’t” it makes tons of things impossible (any sort of large scale hosting, storage, commerce) If it’s credit cards..we’ll now you’ve created a massive centralized link in your “p2p” system.

eternityforest 5y ago
That's fine. It's what we have now , and centralized finance has a huge advantage in that there is human review to reverse fraud and theft. I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most. A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4. Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine. Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want. In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing. This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models). An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public. If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand. Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment processor has the ability to take down your service (by blocking payments) you might as well be hosting the service itself on a centralized system too! I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments. Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications. Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud. Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases. Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled. For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue. P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.

eternityforest 5y ago

That's fine. It's what we have now , and centralized finance has a huge advantage in that there is human review to reverse fraud and theft. I am perfectly fine using centralised finance to buy things that are mostly already inherently centralized, which is pretty much all common purchases for most people, since buying anything that can be made cheaply by an individual is rare for most. A huge number of things can be done purely P2P with no payments, with almost no infrastructure. That should be the core feature of Web4. Even more things can be done semi-decentralized as in BitTorrent+a seedbox, and that works just fine. Some of those things can even be donation supported in a profitable way and don't need payment from most users in any way that actually connects to the service. They can just put a PayPal and bitcoin link and people can donate however they want. In Wikipedia can do it, Facebook and maybe even Youtube can, with appropriate P2P load balancing. This is almost essential because the competing centralized services are totally free(via you-are-the-product models). An email service or something that costs money and requires linking your bank to some coin payment service is going to have a hard time competing with gmail for the general public. If something needs payment, it probably shouldn't be a core layer of the whole system. The first priority should be make things too cheap to meter where you can, and then figure out how to decentralize the remaining stuff, assuming there is demand. Blockchain inherently can't do offline first LAN apps properly, you can't have consensus without communication. If I can't talk to someone on a mesh network without internet, a large amount of the advantage of P2P is gone.

thebean11 5y ago
Using a centralized form of payment completely defeats the purpose of a peer to peer system. The system is as strong as its weakest link; if your payment processor has the ability to take down your service (by blocking payments) you might as well be hosting the service itself on a centralized system too! I agree that not everything requires payment, but the things that do cannot truly be p2p without p2p payments. Let me pose the question in a different way: why do you see p2p filesharing, hosting, communication etc as valuable but p2p payments as non-valuable?
- eternityforest 5y ago
  The main value I see in everything else P2P is that they're resistant to network failure. If a wannabe Kaczynski somehow takes out all the data centers, you'll still be able to set up a mesh and have essential communications. Uncensorable payments are important for some and detrimental for others, since the majority of people have no need or desire to do anything that would get them shut down by a bank, and in fact actively benefit from the ability to "censor" fraud. Putting something like that in the core of a protocol as a mandatory element doesn't make a lot of sense. There's an incredible amount of overhead involved, and it means the protocol is no longer general purpose, it's optimized for doing stuff payment processors don't want you to do, at the expense of the other use cases. Which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that almost all p2p projects have become money-centric, and payment free P2P has almost totally stalled. For most use cases, payments aren't really a weak link. Their tech is highly reliable. If I were to host something with 3 different cheap seedboxes, I'd expect very good reliability, because mastercard probably won't have a long enough outage to make an invoice overdue. P2P payments are definitely valuable, just a bit more niche.