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The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about
by Ericson2314 4y ago
The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin.
Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
- k__ 4y agoPlus, if these protocols are built on top of cryptographic methods, it might not be so easy for the providers to do something fishy in the first place.
- npc12345 4y agoSure, Binance could run off with your money tomorrow if they wanted you, but if you keep most of your money in your actual Bitcoin wallet and only deposit what you need to, your money is 100% safe.
- nico 4y agoBig lesson learned from Mtgox. Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives and thus access to their crypto. No silver bullet.
- npc12345 4y ago
- andirk 4y agoDidn't the Mtgox people finally get their BTC back but only after a few years and the price 100x'd ironically? Either way, diversify ones portfolio including where the moneys are kept.
- nico 4y agoDon’t know if distribution has happened yet. But there were at least a few investors buying claims, so plenty of people were able to cash out. You could say that’s actually a better outcome than losing your private key.
- k__ 4y agoWeb3auth/Torus and Argent trying to solve that problem. But yeah, the moment you have key recovery, even if it's decentralised and requires multiple parties, you aren't 100% in charge anymore. But, it's probably a good alternative to being 0% in charge with custodial wallets.
- bombcar 4y ago100% safe from some forms of loss but you still have various risks associated with passwords, key phrases, wallet phrases, software bugs, backups, etc.
- somenameforme 4y agoSince somebody chose to downvote the above comment, I think it bears elaboration for those who might not understand. A contemporary example is domain names. The current domain system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay companies a never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do literally less than nothing. A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. You're paying never-ending rent to them for them to not go out of their way to delete your entry. Relying on a centralized competitor to offer something better would be dubious. If they gain substantial marketshare there's nothing stopping them from deciding to simply swap back to our current system. It could even be done retroactively since everybody has those lines in their terms and conditions that amount to 'We can do anything, and you can't do anything about it.' But with a decentralized system you have the possibility of a new type of domain where while one operator may be able to be the only one that can create them, once they transfer that domain to you it becomes literally impossible for them to access, change, or affect it in any way, shape, or form. Decentralization is able to turn various digital goods into something much closer to their physical counterpart where you are buying something that is no longer connected to the seller after checkout. And this can really help ensure the integrity of services that otherwise might be susceptible to bait and switch business models.
- PontifexMinimus 4y ago> A contemporary example is domain names. The current domain system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay companies a never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do literally less than nothing. A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. Is there any legal or technical reason why someone can't set up a DNS server that resolves domain names to different IP addresses than those traditionally used?
- somenameforme 4y agoBeyond network effect, nope. This is one of the more convenient ways to block in-app ads on mobile. Set your DNS to something like AdGuard's servers, and they'll resolve ad delivering domains to a no-op. And suddenly all major third party ads in apps or the web alike are gone.
- andrewflnr 4y agoJust to clarify, are you thinking of something like E2EE?
- apichat 4y agoI agree. A few years ago, I wrote an article on this subject : hello@joe — greeting, editorial rule and name on the Internet http://apichat.fr/doku.php?id=hello_joe_greeting_editorial_rule_and_name_on_the_internet http://apichat.fr/doku.php?id=hello_joe_greeting_editorial_r...
- teddyh 4y agoNot if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing neighboring kingdom. To bring the topic back to networking, it has been said that decentralization is the worst form of networking except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
- Ericson2314 4y agoI bring up open protocols because I think they is necessary, if not sufficient, to keep the switching costs low.
- thrown_22 4y ago> Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing neighboring kingdom. That was how the US grew between 1700 and 1914. Everyone in Europe sick of monarchies just moved out to the new world. When there isn't a finite amount of land to squat it becomes a viable long term solution.
- teddyh 4y agoThe U.S. isn’t (and wasn’t) a kingdom.
- anonporridge 4y ago> Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. This seems to be one of the key goals of Jack Dorsey's bluesky over Mastadon. Mastadon apparently has a lot of friction when trying to switch servers, even though it's a federated protocol. Bluesky claims to want make it much more trivial to take your identity to any provider on the federated network.
- neilk 4y agoYou are correct. The greatest threat to someone providing a service based on an open protocol is that users might pick up and leave. Consequently, a service provider will plow enormous resources into differentiating their service, and generating other lock-in effects, so the users find it hard to leave. A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. The monopolist can make their service better and better with cash and execution, but meanwhile the protocol is stuck at a baseline since a varied ecosystem doesn't upgrade itself as quickly. So it is less and less attractive.
- the_other 4y ago> A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. At first I thought "email seems a good example of this: most people don't want to leave Google, I don't want to leave FastMail"... but then I remembered that I could just leave FastMail and take my email to Google. Which proves the upthread point about the open protocol being a safety net for users. Can you talk about some examples of monopolised open protocols?
- neilk 4y agoEmail is the paradigmatic example. You can export your mailbox and use `pine` if that's your jam. But in the real world, most users of Gmail will depend on at least one feature of Gmail that isn't easily replicable elsewhere.