7 ms·

Now you know why there are still some people that still take "web3" seriously. It's the only system where you are not at the mercy of some external entity to be

Now you know why there are still some people that still take "web3" seriously. It's the only system where you are not at the mercy of some external entity to be always benevolent. Seriously, ENS and Handshake alone should be enough of a reason to silence all of those who keep repeating "but blockchain has no real world applications".

denton-scratch 4y ago
What does Ethereum Name Service have to do with email domains? How does one receive email from e.g. one's bank, at a Handshake domain? The "real world" in which Handshake and ENS are useful isn't the world I'm living in.
- LadyCailin 4y ago
  I’m not necessarily defending web3, but you’re asking the wrong question. Your same question could have been asked about email in general in the early aughts. But clearly, mass adoption happened, and the calculus changed. Sure, your statement is strictly correct, but completely uninteresting.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    What question did I ask that was "the wrong question"? I thought both the questions I put were rhetorical. Let's try: "What does email have to do with email domains?" "How does one receive email from e.g. one's bank, at an email domain?" No, I don't think my questions could equally have been asked about email in the early aughts (nor at any other time - those rewritten questions don't make sense). Mass adoption had already happened by the early aughts; email was adopted universally in the corporate world in the mid-nineties. Of course, what is interesting to you is your business.
- rglullis 4y ago
  All you need is to have DNS servers reading ENS' equivalent of MX records. Failing that, you can even have that implemented at the email client or OS level.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Sorry, but that seems to require that my bank and all my friends adopt some skanky modified DNS resolver. Is that right? How exactly does that benefit them? And the alternative you're suggesting is that they replace their OS, or adopt some mutant mail client? Few of my friends have ever used a proper email client at all. And which alternative OS implements this? And again, what incentive do my correspondents have to switch OS? Really, if this is "all I need", it's clearly not a proposal that has much to do with the real world.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      > How exactly does that benefit them? If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. > replace their OS or adopt some mutant mail client? No, there is nothing stopping MS or Apple from adding this functionality to their own systems. All it would take is for them to see increased demand for it. > not a proposal that has much to do with the real world. What I am describing is a possible solution for a very specific problem, namely the lack of distributed identity systems (domain names) that are permissionless and censorship-resistant. You are right that this is not a concern for the majority of people "in the real world", but the whole conversation started because someone is talking about how many people lost access to their emails and domains due to abuse/mismanagement/arbitrary rule enforcement from different domain registrars. IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you. But consider yourself privileged and don't dismiss the complaints of those who are building and asking for better alternatives.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        > If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. OK; if the blockage is that authoritative DNS records are unavailable, this system could help. At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack. But most websites subject to DNS blocking just move to a new domain; TPB seems to manage. More generally, you could simply move your DNS hosting out of the reach of the problematic authority. Unless the website owner made the mistake of using a subdomain of e.g. a repressive CCTLD. > IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you. I'm not OK with the status-quo; we know DNS is problematic. But you suggested that this system is simple ("All you need is..."). You didn't mention that (a) the problem it addresses is constrained to the blocking of authoritative DNS, nor (b) that no alternative mail client or OS actually exists.
moffkalast 4y ago
Well you are still at the mercy of whoever's maintaining the network, aka some random-ass people all over the world. Aside from the few main ones, crypto networks are infamously ever changing and you're more likely to register a domain on something that won't even exist in 2 years because it collapsed completely. Maybe Eth is to big to fail now, but maybe it isn't.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  anti-fragility, permission to fail, rapid iteration basically risk isn't controversial, and it rapidly iterates to more and more resilient systems
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Well it certainly needs another decade or two of iterations before it can replace what we have now, I imagine.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      I don't think it needs to replace anything, that's not a goal to me I think it needs to be permissionless and autonomous I think it needs to compete on overhead costs and payment style (pay to write once, store and read indefinitely for free. compared to a SaaS service)
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    “Permission to fail” is a desirable property in a research setting, not a global name service. This justification is in tension with the one offered above, and there’s been no evidence so far that “web3” is becoming more resilient instead of less resilient.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Not all products are suited for all market participants. Figure out where you are on the gradient and act accordingly. Ethereum Name Service was launched in May 2017, there are many name service competitors. > and there’s been no evidence so far that “web3” is becoming more resilient instead of less resilient. based on? some frequency of a type of headline you saw? quantified against..... anything?
latexr 4y ago
> It's the only system where you are not at the mercy of some external entity to be always benevolent. Until the owners of the network run away after extracting all the value they can, or they decide to fork it because it’s in their best interest, or they end it because it’s not as profitable as they wanted, or your exchange decides to halt trading so they don’t lose money, or, or, or.
- rglullis 4y ago
  - Ethereum has no "owners". ENS is fully decentralized. There is no "they" to fork anything. - There is no need to have exchanges involved in that. - ENS has a token, but is not required for people who just want to buy a domain (they use ETH) Quit the senseless FUD
  - judge2020 4y ago
    > There is no "they" to fork anything. What? ENS is BSD licensed. Anyone can ‘fork’ it at any time.
    - detaro 4y ago
      That's clearly not what forking means in this context. You can't make the existing "instance" run different code, and it's users don't have to care if you run your own modified copy.
    - T0Bi 4y ago
      > What? ENS is BSD licensed. Anyone can ‘fork’ it at any time. Forking a blockchain and forking a repository are completely different things. The comment was talking about the former.
    - jkepler 4y ago
      If a project is actually decentralized, you can't simply fork the code to fork the community. In truly decentralized systems, the consensus rules define whether one is into the system or not. The big problem here is that most of the systems in crypto are really startups run by a small group of founders. Very few of these projects are really decentralized.
fHr 4y ago
Ofcourse it could be part of the solution but just slapping current available solutions onto this problem won't solve it. It could be part of a solution I agree but in it's current state I rather not complicate this further with a technology in it's infancy.
simias 4y ago
And that's why web3 frustrates me to no end. Decentralized services were common in the "old" internet, web3 just takes than and adds a layer of ponzi and speculation on top of them. If bittorent was invented today you'd have to buy into some pyramid scheme to use it. Beyond that having a trusted third party does suck for some things, but at least it means that I have a recourse if something goes wrong. With cryptocrap I'm one hack away from losing my life savings, my domain, the history of all my transactions and even my monkey pictures!
- rglullis 4y ago
  Tell me how decentralized services allow applications to be permissionless, censorship- and sybil-resistant without a blockchain. I will make both of us rich.
  - williamtrask 4y ago
    Tell me how blockchain makes anything Sybil-resistant and I’ll bite. I can create as many Bitcoin/eth/etc wallets as I want.
    - Kerbonut 4y ago
      Ethereum combats that with the concept of gas. You have to pay to play, which is a concept I’ve heard repeated tons of places for ending spam email.
      - pdpi 4y ago
        Gas doesn't do much for Cybil resistance, it's largely meant to stop you from clogging up the network by publishing a transaction that executes the busy beaver function on some nasty input, or something similarly hostile.
    - pdpi 4y ago
      There's plenty of really good criticisms of cryptocurrencies, but that's not one of them. The whole point of proof of work is Sybil-resistance. Because your voting power is tied to your hash rate, you can't just conjure up a bunch of voting power by creating as many wallets as you want. Ethereum's move to proof of stake keeps Sybil resistance but trades the power consumption of PoW for some amount of centralisation (because you need to hold funds to vote).
Enhex 4y ago
a better alternative to email is to use public key cryptography for authentication
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Public Key Cryptography isn't an alternative to email. Public keys aren't a convenient way to refer to addressees, and PK algorithms are a very inefficient way of sending messages, which is why they are generally used to send the key for a symmetrically-encrypted transmission.
delusional 4y ago
For the sake of argument, let's say that all email was hosted on ENS. Let's say that somebody, doesn't matter who, went ahead and forked the chain into ENS'. We now have two disconnected chains, ENS and ENS'. If I were to buy a domain on ENS', i would not also own the domain on ENS, so someone else buys that. Who now receives the mail sent to that domain? If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper.
- rglullis 4y ago
  That has so many misunderstandings about how internet protocols and cryptography works, I don't even know where to start responding.
  - delusional 4y ago
    Give it a shot.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      > If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper. This is a strawman. If you are talking about a decentralized system, you don't need the mail provider to send the message for you. Your email application would (and should) be able to resolve the IP address of the destination server for you, and it would (and should) be able to verify that the end server is who the sender expects it to be. So, what would happen is that if you are on ENS', your view of the network would follow the consensus established by the ENS' chain. If you try to send a message to an email server that is on ENS, they would fail to provide a valid confirmation that they can respond for the IP address that you think they are on. It would be akin to failing a DNSSEC query.
- immibis 4y ago
  That's the beauty of it - we'd have a decentralized marketplace for deciding which one counts! Every email sender can choose to use one or the other, and the best one should win in the marketplace of ideas! /s
superkuh 4y ago
Handshake was co-founded by the guy claiming to be a Korean prince who attacked (and killed) freenode and was very abusive to the open source projects formerly there. I wouldn't touch it. He is extremely litigative. ref: http://www.hashedpost.com/2018/11/hashed-people-handshake-co-founders.html http://www.hashedpost.com/2018/11/hashed-people-handshake-co... The first part of his attack on Freenode was his attempt to push his Handshake cryptocurrency on the users there. It escalated quickly after this failed. ref: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/08/02/handshake-revealed-vcs-back-plan-to-give-away-100-million-in-crypto/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/08/02/handshake-reveal...
TheRealPomax 4y ago
It's not that it has no applications, it's that almost all applications it's suggested for wouldn't actually be improved by having a persistent history, write-only, distributed data backing. Until someone writes a blockchain protocol that allows data to be purged by an individual in a way that forces everyone else's records to update accordingly (i.e. to comply with laws around PII) web3 isn't a solution, it just makes the problem harder.
immibis 4y ago
It has its own problems though: what if you lose access to your key? The other day someone suggested making real estate NFTs. What happens if the "owner" of some real estate loses their key?
- rglullis 4y ago
  > what if you lose access to your key? Social recovery: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html > The other day someone suggested making real estate NFTs. Looking at the current implementations, it is a terrible idea. But it doesn't mean that the problem can not be solved. > What happens if the "owner" of some real estate loses their key? Just spitballing here: take the idea of social recovery further to include the current legal institutions as a backup instead of the main authority. For example, a contract that manages such high-value NFTs could require a set of government-sanctioned notaries who would have permission to transfer the NFT to any new address. So if you are the owner and you lose the key (or you get hacked), you could be made whole by presenting some type of "real world" legal evidence to the notary.
  - immibis 4y ago
    But then it's just a government database. Might as well just use a government database - much simpler.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      For underlying security, of course. The point is that the ability to also tokenize a real physical asset opens a world of possibilities. Can you take a collaterized loan on a share of your home from anyone in the world, if you have only the government database? Can we have a "decentralized AirBnB" where you have can the NFT represents who have access to the house with "just a government database"? Can you pool the resources from thousands of strangers to form a "REIT DAO", who then go on to invest on a scale that is only accessible for the Vanguards and Blackrocks around? This would be simply too risky to be even considered by people if we constrain ourselves only to digital assets, but if we can have a system where the institutions work as a safeguard, why not leverage it?
mmcnl 4y ago
Web 3 introduces new problems because of decentralization. It's not a solution, it's an alternative.

denton-scratch 4y ago

What does Ethereum Name Service have to do with email domains? How does one receive email from e.g. one's bank, at a Handshake domain? The "real world" in which Handshake and ENS are useful isn't the world I'm living in.

LadyCailin 4y ago
I’m not necessarily defending web3, but you’re asking the wrong question. Your same question could have been asked about email in general in the early aughts. But clearly, mass adoption happened, and the calculus changed. Sure, your statement is strictly correct, but completely uninteresting.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  What question did I ask that was "the wrong question"? I thought both the questions I put were rhetorical. Let's try: "What does email have to do with email domains?" "How does one receive email from e.g. one's bank, at an email domain?" No, I don't think my questions could equally have been asked about email in the early aughts (nor at any other time - those rewritten questions don't make sense). Mass adoption had already happened by the early aughts; email was adopted universally in the corporate world in the mid-nineties. Of course, what is interesting to you is your business.
rglullis 4y ago
All you need is to have DNS servers reading ENS' equivalent of MX records. Failing that, you can even have that implemented at the email client or OS level.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Sorry, but that seems to require that my bank and all my friends adopt some skanky modified DNS resolver. Is that right? How exactly does that benefit them? And the alternative you're suggesting is that they replace their OS, or adopt some mutant mail client? Few of my friends have ever used a proper email client at all. And which alternative OS implements this? And again, what incentive do my correspondents have to switch OS? Really, if this is "all I need", it's clearly not a proposal that has much to do with the real world.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > How exactly does that benefit them? If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. > replace their OS or adopt some mutant mail client? No, there is nothing stopping MS or Apple from adding this functionality to their own systems. All it would take is for them to see increased demand for it. > not a proposal that has much to do with the real world. What I am describing is a possible solution for a very specific problem, namely the lack of distributed identity systems (domain names) that are permissionless and censorship-resistant. You are right that this is not a concern for the majority of people "in the real world", but the whole conversation started because someone is talking about how many people lost access to their emails and domains due to abuse/mismanagement/arbitrary rule enforcement from different domain registrars. IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you. But consider yourself privileged and don't dismiss the complaints of those who are building and asking for better alternatives.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      > If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. OK; if the blockage is that authoritative DNS records are unavailable, this system could help. At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack. But most websites subject to DNS blocking just move to a new domain; TPB seems to manage. More generally, you could simply move your DNS hosting out of the reach of the problematic authority. Unless the website owner made the mistake of using a subdomain of e.g. a repressive CCTLD. > IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you. I'm not OK with the status-quo; we know DNS is problematic. But you suggested that this system is simple ("All you need is..."). You didn't mention that (a) the problem it addresses is constrained to the blocking of authoritative DNS, nor (b) that no alternative mail client or OS actually exists.

moffkalast 4y ago

Well you are still at the mercy of whoever's maintaining the network, aka some random-ass people all over the world. Aside from the few main ones, crypto networks are infamously ever changing and you're more likely to register a domain on something that won't even exist in 2 years because it collapsed completely. Maybe Eth is to big to fail now, but maybe it isn't.

yieldcrv 4y ago
anti-fragility, permission to fail, rapid iteration basically risk isn't controversial, and it rapidly iterates to more and more resilient systems
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well it certainly needs another decade or two of iterations before it can replace what we have now, I imagine.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    I don't think it needs to replace anything, that's not a goal to me I think it needs to be permissionless and autonomous I think it needs to compete on overhead costs and payment style (pay to write once, store and read indefinitely for free. compared to a SaaS service)
- woodruffw 4y ago
  “Permission to fail” is a desirable property in a research setting, not a global name service. This justification is in tension with the one offered above, and there’s been no evidence so far that “web3” is becoming more resilient instead of less resilient.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Not all products are suited for all market participants. Figure out where you are on the gradient and act accordingly. Ethereum Name Service was launched in May 2017, there are many name service competitors. > and there’s been no evidence so far that “web3” is becoming more resilient instead of less resilient. based on? some frequency of a type of headline you saw? quantified against..... anything?

latexr 4y ago

> It's the only system where you are not at the mercy of some external entity to be always benevolent. Until the owners of the network run away after extracting all the value they can, or they decide to fork it because it’s in their best interest, or they end it because it’s not as profitable as they wanted, or your exchange decides to halt trading so they don’t lose money, or, or, or.

rglullis 4y ago
- Ethereum has no "owners". ENS is fully decentralized. There is no "they" to fork anything. - There is no need to have exchanges involved in that. - ENS has a token, but is not required for people who just want to buy a domain (they use ETH) Quit the senseless FUD
- judge2020 4y ago
  > There is no "they" to fork anything. What? ENS is BSD licensed. Anyone can ‘fork’ it at any time.
  - detaro 4y ago
    That's clearly not what forking means in this context. You can't make the existing "instance" run different code, and it's users don't have to care if you run your own modified copy.
  - T0Bi 4y ago
    > What? ENS is BSD licensed. Anyone can ‘fork’ it at any time. Forking a blockchain and forking a repository are completely different things. The comment was talking about the former.
  - jkepler 4y ago
    If a project is actually decentralized, you can't simply fork the code to fork the community. In truly decentralized systems, the consensus rules define whether one is into the system or not. The big problem here is that most of the systems in crypto are really startups run by a small group of founders. Very few of these projects are really decentralized.

fHr 4y ago

Ofcourse it could be part of the solution but just slapping current available solutions onto this problem won't solve it. It could be part of a solution I agree but in it's current state I rather not complicate this further with a technology in it's infancy.

simias 4y ago

And that's why web3 frustrates me to no end. Decentralized services were common in the "old" internet, web3 just takes than and adds a layer of ponzi and speculation on top of them. If bittorent was invented today you'd have to buy into some pyramid scheme to use it. Beyond that having a trusted third party does suck for some things, but at least it means that I have a recourse if something goes wrong. With cryptocrap I'm one hack away from losing my life savings, my domain, the history of all my transactions and even my monkey pictures!

rglullis 4y ago
Tell me how decentralized services allow applications to be permissionless, censorship- and sybil-resistant without a blockchain. I will make both of us rich.
- williamtrask 4y ago
  Tell me how blockchain makes anything Sybil-resistant and I’ll bite. I can create as many Bitcoin/eth/etc wallets as I want.
  - Kerbonut 4y ago
    Ethereum combats that with the concept of gas. You have to pay to play, which is a concept I’ve heard repeated tons of places for ending spam email.
    - pdpi 4y ago
      Gas doesn't do much for Cybil resistance, it's largely meant to stop you from clogging up the network by publishing a transaction that executes the busy beaver function on some nasty input, or something similarly hostile.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    There's plenty of really good criticisms of cryptocurrencies, but that's not one of them. The whole point of proof of work is Sybil-resistance. Because your voting power is tied to your hash rate, you can't just conjure up a bunch of voting power by creating as many wallets as you want. Ethereum's move to proof of stake keeps Sybil resistance but trades the power consumption of PoW for some amount of centralisation (because you need to hold funds to vote).

Enhex 4y ago

a better alternative to email is to use public key cryptography for authentication

denton-scratch 4y ago
Public Key Cryptography isn't an alternative to email. Public keys aren't a convenient way to refer to addressees, and PK algorithms are a very inefficient way of sending messages, which is why they are generally used to send the key for a symmetrically-encrypted transmission.

delusional 4y ago

For the sake of argument, let's say that all email was hosted on ENS. Let's say that somebody, doesn't matter who, went ahead and forked the chain into ENS'. We now have two disconnected chains, ENS and ENS'. If I were to buy a domain on ENS', i would not also own the domain on ENS, so someone else buys that. Who now receives the mail sent to that domain? If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper.

rglullis 4y ago
That has so many misunderstandings about how internet protocols and cryptography works, I don't even know where to start responding.
- delusional 4y ago
  Give it a shot.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    > If your choice in any way depends on the configuration of the mail server then your decentralized system has accomplished absolutely nothing, because the mail provider is still the gatekeeper. This is a strawman. If you are talking about a decentralized system, you don't need the mail provider to send the message for you. Your email application would (and should) be able to resolve the IP address of the destination server for you, and it would (and should) be able to verify that the end server is who the sender expects it to be. So, what would happen is that if you are on ENS', your view of the network would follow the consensus established by the ENS' chain. If you try to send a message to an email server that is on ENS, they would fail to provide a valid confirmation that they can respond for the IP address that you think they are on. It would be akin to failing a DNSSEC query.
immibis 4y ago
That's the beauty of it - we'd have a decentralized marketplace for deciding which one counts! Every email sender can choose to use one or the other, and the best one should win in the marketplace of ideas! /s

superkuh 4y ago

Handshake was co-founded by the guy claiming to be a Korean prince who attacked (and killed) freenode and was very abusive to the open source projects formerly there. I wouldn't touch it. He is extremely litigative. ref: http://www.hashedpost.com/2018/11/hashed-people-handshake-co-founders.html http://www.hashedpost.com/2018/11/hashed-people-handshake-co... The first part of his attack on Freenode was his attempt to push his Handshake cryptocurrency on the users there. It escalated quickly after this failed. ref: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/08/02/handshake-revealed-vcs-back-plan-to-give-away-100-million-in-crypto/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/08/02/handshake-reveal...

TheRealPomax 4y ago

It's not that it has no applications, it's that almost all applications it's suggested for wouldn't actually be improved by having a persistent history, write-only, distributed data backing. Until someone writes a blockchain protocol that allows data to be purged by an individual in a way that forces everyone else's records to update accordingly (i.e. to comply with laws around PII) web3 isn't a solution, it just makes the problem harder.

immibis 4y ago

It has its own problems though: what if you lose access to your key? The other day someone suggested making real estate NFTs. What happens if the "owner" of some real estate loses their key?

rglullis 4y ago
> what if you lose access to your key? Social recovery: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html > The other day someone suggested making real estate NFTs. Looking at the current implementations, it is a terrible idea. But it doesn't mean that the problem can not be solved. > What happens if the "owner" of some real estate loses their key? Just spitballing here: take the idea of social recovery further to include the current legal institutions as a backup instead of the main authority. For example, a contract that manages such high-value NFTs could require a set of government-sanctioned notaries who would have permission to transfer the NFT to any new address. So if you are the owner and you lose the key (or you get hacked), you could be made whole by presenting some type of "real world" legal evidence to the notary.
- immibis 4y ago
  But then it's just a government database. Might as well just use a government database - much simpler.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    For underlying security, of course. The point is that the ability to also tokenize a real physical asset opens a world of possibilities. Can you take a collaterized loan on a share of your home from anyone in the world, if you have only the government database? Can we have a "decentralized AirBnB" where you have can the NFT represents who have access to the house with "just a government database"? Can you pool the resources from thousands of strangers to form a "REIT DAO", who then go on to invest on a scale that is only accessible for the Vanguards and Blackrocks around? This would be simply too risky to be even considered by people if we constrain ourselves only to digital assets, but if we can have a system where the institutions work as a safeguard, why not leverage it?

mmcnl 4y ago

Web 3 introduces new problems because of decentralization. It's not a solution, it's an alternative.