4 ms·

The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No Clothes" situations I've seen in my

The characterization of crypto stuff as an alternative to Big Tech is, frankly, one of the most bewildering "Emperor Has No Clothes" situations I've seen in my life. And I've seen a few tech hype cycles.

EGreg 4y ago
What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf
- colinsane 4y ago
  > What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so. point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone. financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect. the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Thank you! You gave me a lot to think about. Is there any chance we can connect (by email or zoom) to discuss this further? My work has brought me in contact with people ranging from economics (Thomas Greco) to politics (Andrew Yang, Forward Party, Noam Chomsky) to distributed systems (Leslie Lamport, Petary Maymounkov) to regulations (Sara Hanks) and so on. I'm constantly looking for what systems work best for certain things, how they work, etc. I'm often seen advocating for UBI and single payer health insurance, and collaborative open source movements instead of closed-source silos. My work is at the intersection of Web1 (publishing and speech) Web2 (collaboration and communication) and Web3 (transactions and governance) so naturally a lot of this comes up. Example: https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalism-in-2021-interview-with-noam-chomsky-political-commentator https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalis... So I'd be very interested to hear and discuss your ideas about fostering a participatory economy that helps protect against the emergence of hierarchies and extraction of rent. How can we prevent people banding together and forming organizations that dominate others? You can contact me through the email in my profile. Or is there a way I can contact you?
    - colinsane 4y ago
      i've added to my HN profile a link to my about page, which has email/matrix/etc. my answers to your economic questions may be less concrete or justified than you'd hope for. they're generally aligned by some broad goal of "decrease the cost of baseline human existence to $0, and leave the culture to figure out the rest." in a previous era that would be phrased in terms of "post scarcity" of the base needs like food and shelter. from the scarcity angle, automation is the way out and if it's widely replicable then many of the incentives that drive hostile behavior are reduced. in a previous life i was active in personal manufacturing, and creator/maintainer of some 3d-printing firmware that later expanded into open source pick-and-place machines. today i'm more active in the base layer of computation: how can we fabricate logic gates/integrated circuits without costly, centralized fabs. i'm wrapping up some experiments around ferromagnetic logic gates. such logic gates would use materials that you can assemble safely on a SLS printer; for now i have only the repo -- i hope to write something more accessible in a month or so. https://git.uninsane.org/colin/fdtd-coremem https://git.uninsane.org/colin/fdtd-coremem
- logisticseh 4y ago
  > What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? LOL. I've been working on distributed systems for... a while. I've even had a few conversations with Lamport, pre-Turing award. Apparently today BFT is a buzzword used by alt-suits to hawk unnecessary solutions to fake problems. > With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? 1. That's... not what byzantine fault tolerance gives you. 2. Fault tolerance was a huge problem in the 90s and 00s but today is in most practical cases a solved problem (and without any use of "crypto"). > For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf Lots of nudity AFAICT.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    I know that BFT doesnt automatically imply the data has redundancies built in, which is why I mentioned it separately. As for fault tolerance being “solved”, how’s Google Reader treating you? Are you able to control your Facebook or Instagram experience? I hear they know their new changes will irk people but will do them anyway. You think trusting others and giving them all the control to change something under you at any time is good because they trust themselves? That’s cute. Maybe they’ll even call their offering “the cloud” and you’ll believe it is like the Internet. Put all your photos there and don’t make any backups. Heck, put all your legal agreements there too! Who needs multiple distrusting parties to secure a ledger? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagram-video-shift-kardashian/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagr... Don’t worry, though. You’ll own nothing and be happy. Software as a service. DRM books that can be removed. Centralizing all the data in one place can attract all kinds of government agencies and advertisers hungry for cheap data. Heck, if government agents want, they can even impersonate you, and all they have to do is send one letter to people you never met! How nice: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill How can Hackers support these “anti Hacking bills” that let the governments and police hack your accounts and impersonate you… I guess I should come out with several flavors of ice cream for many in the HN crowd — it’s bootlickin good!
    - 4y ago

EGreg 4y ago

What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf

colinsane 4y ago
> What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? as for data availability, bittorrent works stupidly well today without any monetization. it turns out that upload/download ratio works as a pretty decent metric to combat tragedy of the commons for larger torrent communities that really want to protect against it. for websites, i've been surprised in the past when i let a domain expire, and then it pops up a month later because somebody who enjoyed it had archived it and brought it back online themselves. that's more satisfying to me than if it had been kept available because i paid some distant/dispassionate person $1 to do so. point is, the future i want is largely one of reciprocity. decrease hierarchy and encourage participants to act as both consumer and producer. financialization doesn't do this: it encourages large, efficient producers to compete with each other to serve consumers. i don't want my 20,000-person retro-arcade community to be served by 5 people who've provisioned 4x10Gbps uplinks charging us for BW. then it's just some extractive thing (these producers are likely directing their proceeds to things unrelated to the community) and the magic's gone. financialization helps when the capital cost of entry is otherwise too high. say, using loans that are repaid by usage-based micropayments as a way to get mesh power/data networks off the ground since these require costly physical equipment. such networks would be beneficial both from the redundancy/fault-tolerance perspective you care about and also from the social angle i care about of being able to participate in more of the things around me. but after deployment, continued monetization works against that latter aspect. the one crypto project which financialized data networks (Helium) completely failed at the participatory aspect. its users (gateway operators) are merely providers for a different set of consumers (LoRa users). you may have good intentions, and you may build something better than FB/AWS, but if it's built around monetization it will only ever be a stopgap. stopgaps are fine and often good, but the places we need them are already shrinking. federated chat/social networks and peer-based media/streaming applications are developed and advancing rapidly enough for me to take them seriously today. another "big tech" alternative -- open SW/HW stacks for mobile phones as an alternative to Apple -- is in a similar state and crypto hasn't even started any parallel project that i know of. search alternatives are the furthest behind, but is anyone using crypto to build an alternative to Google? my understanding of search is that it's a tough problem to solve because of the money incentives (if a click results in profit via commerce or ads, then there's an incentive to pay for more clicks, either via backchannel payments or SEO), and that social ranking of search results is one of the only ways to overcome this.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Thank you! You gave me a lot to think about. Is there any chance we can connect (by email or zoom) to discuss this further? My work has brought me in contact with people ranging from economics (Thomas Greco) to politics (Andrew Yang, Forward Party, Noam Chomsky) to distributed systems (Leslie Lamport, Petary Maymounkov) to regulations (Sara Hanks) and so on. I'm constantly looking for what systems work best for certain things, how they work, etc. I'm often seen advocating for UBI and single payer health insurance, and collaborative open source movements instead of closed-source silos. My work is at the intersection of Web1 (publishing and speech) Web2 (collaboration and communication) and Web3 (transactions and governance) so naturally a lot of this comes up. Example: https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalism-in-2021-interview-with-noam-chomsky-political-commentator https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalis... So I'd be very interested to hear and discuss your ideas about fostering a participatory economy that helps protect against the emergence of hierarchies and extraction of rent. How can we prevent people banding together and forming organizations that dominate others? You can contact me through the email in my profile. Or is there a way I can contact you?
  - colinsane 4y ago
    i've added to my HN profile a link to my about page, which has email/matrix/etc. my answers to your economic questions may be less concrete or justified than you'd hope for. they're generally aligned by some broad goal of "decrease the cost of baseline human existence to $0, and leave the culture to figure out the rest." in a previous era that would be phrased in terms of "post scarcity" of the base needs like food and shelter. from the scarcity angle, automation is the way out and if it's widely replicable then many of the incentives that drive hostile behavior are reduced. in a previous life i was active in personal manufacturing, and creator/maintainer of some 3d-printing firmware that later expanded into open source pick-and-place machines. today i'm more active in the base layer of computation: how can we fabricate logic gates/integrated circuits without costly, centralized fabs. i'm wrapping up some experiments around ferromagnetic logic gates. such logic gates would use materials that you can assemble safely on a SLS printer; for now i have only the repo -- i hope to write something more accessible in a month or so. https://git.uninsane.org/colin/fdtd-coremem https://git.uninsane.org/colin/fdtd-coremem
logisticseh 4y ago
> What do you think byzantine-fault-tolerant networks are? LOL. I've been working on distributed systems for... a while. I've even had a few conversations with Lamport, pre-Turing award. Apparently today BFT is a buzzword used by alt-suits to hawk unnecessary solutions to fake problems. > With redundancies built in, so your data is guaranteed to be online regardless of any third party, and so on? 1. That's... not what byzantine fault tolerance gives you. 2. Fault tolerance was a huge problem in the 90s and 00s but today is in most practical cases a solved problem (and without any use of "crypto"). > For example, everything I've built and given away over the last 10 years has been building towards an alternative to Big Tech: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf Lots of nudity AFAICT.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I know that BFT doesnt automatically imply the data has redundancies built in, which is why I mentioned it separately. As for fault tolerance being “solved”, how’s Google Reader treating you? Are you able to control your Facebook or Instagram experience? I hear they know their new changes will irk people but will do them anyway. You think trusting others and giving them all the control to change something under you at any time is good because they trust themselves? That’s cute. Maybe they’ll even call their offering “the cloud” and you’ll believe it is like the Internet. Put all your photos there and don’t make any backups. Heck, put all your legal agreements there too! Who needs multiple distrusting parties to secure a ledger? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagram-video-shift-kardashian/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/27/instagr... Don’t worry, though. You’ll own nothing and be happy. Software as a service. DRM books that can be removed. Centralizing all the data in one place can attract all kinds of government agencies and advertisers hungry for cheap data. Heck, if government agents want, they can even impersonate you, and all they have to do is send one letter to people you never met! How nice: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/australia-surveillance-bill How can Hackers support these “anti Hacking bills” that let the governments and police hack your accounts and impersonate you… I guess I should come out with several flavors of ice cream for many in the HN crowd — it’s bootlickin good!
  - 4y ago