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P2P is a big component of blockchains. The "expensive" part is competition for the limited capacity in global consensus (block space), which is necessary if you

P2P is a big component of blockchains. The "expensive" part is competition for the limited capacity in global consensus (block space), which is necessary if you want to interact with global systems that deal with high value objects. Blockchains can't exist without P2P, but P2P is not sufficient. There are plenty of use cases that require global consensus, and that part is expensive.

cowtools 4y ago
Sure, but you would think that P2P is mostly sufficient for a social media replacement (e.g. PeerTube, Mastodon, etc.). Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)
- lekevicius 4y ago
  For sure! Until we can figure out how to make global consensus ridiculously scalable, I don't see "web3 social" being successful at all. It's using a very expensive resource for a frivolous need.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    "web3 social" will never be successful because censorship is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach), but this is going to be "running an email server" times a million in terms of how abusable that "censorship-resistance" is going to end up being. You will need "spam assassin for social media" immediately and it will be a continuous battle. Spammers are perfectly happy to pay-per-impression if that's what it takes to get ads (or botnet droppers, etc) in front of victims. They are more willing to pay than an actual user is, really.
    - exdsq 4y ago
      Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming addresses and it starts to work a little better.
      - paulmd 4y ago
        > Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Oh, so, if I have $1m I can register a bunch of accounts and kick people I don't like off the platform? You said this thing was supposed to be censorship-resistant, right? Hell people will do it for free if they disagree with someone, you don't need $1m of accounts, you just need to say something that angers 100k people who report you and get you banned... isn't that something that people specifically complain about with regards to "censorship" with current platforms? Like I'm not saying they have to read it, but if others have the ability to stop me from publishing than that's not really censorship-resistant, it's just mob-controlled censorship. Censorship-resistance is something like IPFS - you have no control over what I put on IPFS. You don't have to access it, but you can't stop me either. Also, if I register enough accounts so that 100k people never complain about any one account do they gradually go back to being healthy accounts? Or if not, then when I spam a bunch of people then I can get them kicked off they will be banned permanently (or have to pay another $10 to restore access), right? How long will this service last when I'm kicking every single user off every single day? "Consensus" will always take into account the consensus of attackers too... sure you can always have a trusted party who oversees censorship and you can depend on to make unbiased and fair decisions that 100% of individuals will agree with (lol) - but in that case, why do we need crypto at all? Why not just let that guy run the server/why not let him build blocklists for the mastodon server? it's the SMTP copypasta except the thing you have chosen to ignore is sybil attacks, and the massively complex thing you are handwaving as being trivial is building a reputation system, and that would solve all the problems for the non-crypto space too. https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt (really, it's the exact same problem, it doesn't matter whether the format is facebook posts or emails. Email is actually an extremely decentralized and censorship-resistant protocol - there is no central authority who can stop me from putting my message into your mail server, or even see what I'm sending you (if we connect directly). We can have completely private conversations that no central authority can stop! And what's what makes it terrible, because it turns into utter white noise with vague "reputational" signals like "dirty IPs" - those are your "blacklisted commenters" on facebook, and spam emails are still a problem. Or at least they were, until a centralized authority (Google) effectively came to take over the market and solved the problem for us... but then there's censorship again. And if you are winding up about "PGP message signing" or anything else, you need to go back to the "spam solutions" copypasta and find the bits that apply to you, because people thought of that 40 years ago before crypto was a gleam in satoshi's eye. Is spam solved? No, because your idea doesn't work.) Spammers have been willing to "pay per account" forever, and that's the problem, they are more willing to pay than the actual users are. So any model needs to survive in the face of an asymmetric foe that has more resources than you... and almost all of the "asymmetric" strategies will require either a huge amount of cooperation between "honest" participants, or a few "super participants" who have actual power (ie censorship) over the system. And remember - the original idea behind bitcoin literally came from HashCash - which was an attempt to reduce spamming by requiring a unique proof-of-work for each message.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin) Those are the only credible use-case(s) that the cryptocurrency folks should be looking at. I can see a few projects surviving like Stellar [0], Ripple (XRP) [1], Algorand [2] and Nano [3], ENS [4], Handshake [5] and Skiff [6]. Unlike the other projects that are slapping blockchain, crypto on to anything they can find and are filled with scams being reported, daily on web3isgoinggreat, there are a few that are not silly meme coins / tokens, or vaporware but stuck to their goals / whitepaper(s) and seem to be still useful and have a use-case. This is what these skeptics won't tell you and will ignore and filter out. [0] https://stellar.org https://stellar.org [1] https://xrpl.org https://xrpl.org [2] https://algorand.com https://algorand.com [3] https://nano.org https://nano.org [4] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains [5] https://handshake.org https://handshake.org [6] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com
  - exdsq 4y ago
    Algorand was the first blockchain I ever used without knowing it - to hold the results of games on the official FIDE chess online tournaments - and I found that pretty cool. No costs etc, just a log on the chain with my matches and scores. This is coming from someone who spent 18 months working on Cardano, too.
  - topranks 4y ago
    I’m familiar with some of these, and yes they are the less scammy and more serious projects. Bitcoin itself was a genuine attempt at peer to peer cash too. Problem is the technology sucks and can’t scale. The trade offs are immense. DNS works great and is decentralised in all the meaningful ways. Nano network is currently struggling cos of one script kiddie, and puts everyone’s bank balance out there for the world to see. Honest intentions and even innovative ideas are all well and good. But replacing the current financial system, or DNS or whatever is a massive technical challenge. The trade offs in efficiency, scalability, even privacy with blockchain solutions, just to get decentralisation, are far too high.

cowtools 4y ago

Sure, but you would think that P2P is mostly sufficient for a social media replacement (e.g. PeerTube, Mastodon, etc.). Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin)

lekevicius 4y ago
For sure! Until we can figure out how to make global consensus ridiculously scalable, I don't see "web3 social" being successful at all. It's using a very expensive resource for a frivolous need.
- paulmd 4y ago
  "web3 social" will never be successful because censorship is a desirable feature of a social-media platform. If there is no way to censor a group of people, there is no way to censor spammers either. You will be able to filter at the client level of course, or set up maintained filter-lists (which will be trivial to game with a "sybil" approach), but this is going to be "running an email server" times a million in terms of how abusable that "censorship-resistance" is going to end up being. You will need "spam assassin for social media" immediately and it will be a continuous battle. Spammers are perfectly happy to pay-per-impression if that's what it takes to get ads (or botnet droppers, etc) in front of victims. They are more willing to pay than an actual user is, really.
  - exdsq 4y ago
    Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Or maybe it's just paid out on a long delay. Now spamming costs quite a bit. Add to that a blacklist feature and a shared consensus on spamming addresses and it starts to work a little better.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      > Require a stake to setup an account, say $10, and if a spammer is too spammy and too many people complain they lose the stake. Oh, so, if I have $1m I can register a bunch of accounts and kick people I don't like off the platform? You said this thing was supposed to be censorship-resistant, right? Hell people will do it for free if they disagree with someone, you don't need $1m of accounts, you just need to say something that angers 100k people who report you and get you banned... isn't that something that people specifically complain about with regards to "censorship" with current platforms? Like I'm not saying they have to read it, but if others have the ability to stop me from publishing than that's not really censorship-resistant, it's just mob-controlled censorship. Censorship-resistance is something like IPFS - you have no control over what I put on IPFS. You don't have to access it, but you can't stop me either. Also, if I register enough accounts so that 100k people never complain about any one account do they gradually go back to being healthy accounts? Or if not, then when I spam a bunch of people then I can get them kicked off they will be banned permanently (or have to pay another $10 to restore access), right? How long will this service last when I'm kicking every single user off every single day? "Consensus" will always take into account the consensus of attackers too... sure you can always have a trusted party who oversees censorship and you can depend on to make unbiased and fair decisions that 100% of individuals will agree with (lol) - but in that case, why do we need crypto at all? Why not just let that guy run the server/why not let him build blocklists for the mastodon server? it's the SMTP copypasta except the thing you have chosen to ignore is sybil attacks, and the massively complex thing you are handwaving as being trivial is building a reputation system, and that would solve all the problems for the non-crypto space too. https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt (really, it's the exact same problem, it doesn't matter whether the format is facebook posts or emails. Email is actually an extremely decentralized and censorship-resistant protocol - there is no central authority who can stop me from putting my message into your mail server, or even see what I'm sending you (if we connect directly). We can have completely private conversations that no central authority can stop! And what's what makes it terrible, because it turns into utter white noise with vague "reputational" signals like "dirty IPs" - those are your "blacklisted commenters" on facebook, and spam emails are still a problem. Or at least they were, until a centralized authority (Google) effectively came to take over the market and solved the problem for us... but then there's censorship again. And if you are winding up about "PGP message signing" or anything else, you need to go back to the "spam solutions" copypasta and find the bits that apply to you, because people thought of that 40 years ago before crypto was a gleam in satoshi's eye. Is spam solved? No, because your idea doesn't work.) Spammers have been willing to "pay per account" forever, and that's the problem, they are more willing to pay than the actual users are. So any model needs to survive in the face of an asymmetric foe that has more resources than you... and almost all of the "asymmetric" strategies will require either a huge amount of cooperation between "honest" participants, or a few "super participants" who have actual power (ie censorship) over the system. And remember - the original idea behind bitcoin literally came from HashCash - which was an attempt to reduce spamming by requiring a unique proof-of-work for each message.
rvz 4y ago
> Consensus is only really nessisary for solving problems like payments or namespacing (e.g. namecoin) Those are the only credible use-case(s) that the cryptocurrency folks should be looking at. I can see a few projects surviving like Stellar [0], Ripple (XRP) [1], Algorand [2] and Nano [3], ENS [4], Handshake [5] and Skiff [6]. Unlike the other projects that are slapping blockchain, crypto on to anything they can find and are filled with scams being reported, daily on web3isgoinggreat, there are a few that are not silly meme coins / tokens, or vaporware but stuck to their goals / whitepaper(s) and seem to be still useful and have a use-case. This is what these skeptics won't tell you and will ignore and filter out. [0] https://stellar.org https://stellar.org [1] https://xrpl.org https://xrpl.org [2] https://algorand.com https://algorand.com [3] https://nano.org https://nano.org [4] https://ens.domains https://ens.domains [5] https://handshake.org https://handshake.org [6] https://skiff.com https://skiff.com
- exdsq 4y ago
  Algorand was the first blockchain I ever used without knowing it - to hold the results of games on the official FIDE chess online tournaments - and I found that pretty cool. No costs etc, just a log on the chain with my matches and scores. This is coming from someone who spent 18 months working on Cardano, too.
- topranks 4y ago
  I’m familiar with some of these, and yes they are the less scammy and more serious projects. Bitcoin itself was a genuine attempt at peer to peer cash too. Problem is the technology sucks and can’t scale. The trade offs are immense. DNS works great and is decentralised in all the meaningful ways. Nano network is currently struggling cos of one script kiddie, and puts everyone’s bank balance out there for the world to see. Honest intentions and even innovative ideas are all well and good. But replacing the current financial system, or DNS or whatever is a massive technical challenge. The trade offs in efficiency, scalability, even privacy with blockchain solutions, just to get decentralisation, are far too high.