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I would love for most of the Blockchain trend to be converted in efforts towards BitTorrent style projects. Distributed File Sharing or computation without the

I would love for most of the Blockchain trend to be converted in efforts towards BitTorrent style projects. Distributed File Sharing or computation without the whole tokenomics that, while interesting, creates too much attention from scammers.

comboy 4y ago
One can't scale without the other.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Pilottwave 4y ago
While I understand where you are coming from, this argument is basically "money attracts attention from scammers". As a counter I would say "Money attracts attention, period" and attention is an important resource to foster growth. Decentralized tech would never be where it is today if it weren't for investor attention and the potential for gains. We just have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and remain vigilant for bad actors.
- 2fast4you 4y ago
  *blockchain tech would never be where it is today… I’ll bet blockchain is only as popular as it is because of the money. But other forms of decentralization like Mastodon or Matrix are pretty separate from the whole crypto sphere
  - dist1ll 4y ago
    Matrix is separate from the crypto sphere, because it solves a different problem. Federated platforms appeal to the privacy-oriented "f** big tech" mindset, which is pretty common in the hacker & FOSS crowds. I'd put it in the same category as VPNs, E2E messengers and TOR.
    - olivierduval 4y ago
      VPN are really usefull for business to link different locations with internet instead of using (awfully costly) dedicated link... or to allow remote work So VPN are not really in the same category
      - mikepurvis 4y ago
        VPN as a technology, yes. But I think "VPN" in this discussion is referring specifically to the myriad of consumer-oriented paid solutions (SurfShark, NordVPN, whatever) that are pitched as being about protecting your online security, pirating with impunity, and bypassing region-locks.
  - Labo333 4y ago
    Totally agree on that. Big corps only invest in blockchain because of the buzz words that are used as marketing by the consulting firms to sell their "expertise" and by VCs to sell their companies. Sure they hope to gain some money, like luxury brands wanting to sell to crypto-billionaires. But crypto was a useful toy, then Ponzi scheme and now it's a closed loop. How long will the bubble last?
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Where exactly is decentralized tech today? Nobody around me ever uses any of it. Old p2p networks (gnutella, kademlia, emule) had way larger impact on society 20 years ago.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Email and the web are more decentralized than they look. Just think that different FOSS and closed source user agents and servers interoperate without any problem, especially for email.
    - feanaro 4y ago
      And in non-web space, there's Matrix (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org).
    - ricardobeat 4y ago
      They were talking about crypto. Email and the web were born out of research & universities, not the “potential to attract investors”.
  - blamestross 4y ago
    BitTorrent isn't getting any smaller. Mainline DHT is still 10x bigger than Bitcoin.
- Labo333 4y ago
  What I mean is that the current signal-to-noise ratio is way too weak. This created a lot of bubbles. NFTs are already down by a lot, now yield farming (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...) just took a big hit from the FTX case. I see way too many "revolutionnary" projects from fresh graduates. There is no way that tens of thousands of inexperienced people with barely enough CS education to pass programming interviews would magically create innovation just because VCs put a ton of money on them. Also, can you tell me more about where decentralized tech is today? BitTorrent was a revolution as a way of information sharing, Onion was a revolution for privacy and Bitcoin was a revolution for decentralized ledgers. Starting from that, IPFS is the continuation of BitTorrent with more features and Ethereum is a more efficient (especially since The Merge) and customizable (smart contracts are advanced checkers for write operations) ledger. But what are the real world applications of those technologies? What are concrete use cases of Ethereum and IPFS besides payments, records and file sharing? Surely there are exciting progresses to be made on the technical side like zk-SNARKS but how useful will they be to society? I think we already have all the technical blocks we need. If there is no real-world adoption maybe we should just wait another 10 years before pumping crazy amounts of money.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  The "chaff" and the bad actors are in it for the money. Without them, "decentralized tech" indeed wouldn't be where it is today -- meaning, it wouldn't be overwhelmingly associated with crypto-adjacent grifts. The real decentralized tech, the one that serves a purpose other than emptying the wallets of naïve crypto-enthusiasts, does just fine without a profit motive. You don't need get-rich-quick promises to get an audience if you're actually doing something useful.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > Decentralized tech would never be where it is today if it weren't for investor attention That’s exactly why blockchains haven’t found Product Market Fit. Investors != Users
- deleted 4y ago
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college_physics 4y ago
Imho the "print-your-own-money" siren call is only one of the aspects that hampered the whole blockchain world from delivering the disruption it so much craved. The core architectures themselves are somehow too overengineered for broad applicability. Maybe that is what was needed to support the digital gold use case, but it is manifestly not needed for all sorts of other very relevant decentralized applications (bittorrent, fediverse, messaging, email etc) Its a mute point whether the whole crypto/blockchain period was a net positive. It certainly made a noisy case for "re-decentralization" given the very real and mostly harmful status quo. One could also argue that it diverted vital resources to potentially dead-end or limited use areas. The recurrent scams may also give decentralization a bad name to an uninformed public that can't distinguish all the different versions. What matters next is that projects that deliver real benefits to users get attention and traction. Worth keeping in mind that the real trouble starts when you get noticed by vested interests as a potential threat.
boramalper 4y ago
> Distributed File Sharing or computation without the whole tokenomics They went hand in hand even back in the day: private torrent trackers were all about tokenomics where tokens were the number of bytes you've seeded (uploaded) minus you've downloaded. I'm not saying it's impossible to imagine distributed file sharing otherwise, but to "guarantee" the availability of (especially unpopular) content, you need some incentive mechanisms either built in to the protocol or externally imposed.
birracerveza 4y ago
From the project's readme: >Please do not use the public swarm to process sensitive data. We ask for that because it is an open network, and it is technically possible for peers serving model layers to recover input data and model outputs or modify them in a malicious way. Instead, you can set up a private Petals swarm hosted by people and organization you trust, who are authorized to process your data. This is what blockchain and staking tokens is for. (Part of the reason, at least) You act maliciously, the network slashes your stake. "pinky promise not to do bad stuff" only goes so far... and it's really not far at all. You can trust "trusted" organizations or private individuals, but they have no incentives to ensure that the service works as intended, regardless of intent.
- amelius 4y ago
  A blockchain does not magically solve security issues. In fact, it adds traceability. And data stored in it can never be deleted. Just to name a few issues.
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    > A blockchain does not magically solve security issues. No, but staking is certainly an improvement over "pinky promise", and it requires a public blockchain. > issues I'm fairly sure those are features, not issues. You are free to disagree.
  - menzoic 4y ago
    > A blockchain does not magically solve security issues. This is a weird statement. Blockchain security is real and it isn't "magic". Blockchain is specifically designed to secure decentralized applications. > In fact, it adds traceability. And data stored in it can never be deleted. Just to name a few issues. These aren't issues, these are part of the security model. Traceability is fine here because everything is pseudonymous, if you want to avoid that use a chain that has untraceable transactions with zero knowledge proofs (zero traceability). > And data stored in it can never be deleted. Just to name a few issues. Storing data on blockchain is extremely expensive. Only hashes are stored on chain, not the data itself. Hashes are much different from encryption because they're irreversible.
Galanwe 4y ago
I agree that unfortunately a lot of crypto projects are way too tokenomics centered, instead of utility centered. BitTorrent style projects are far more restrictive for a lot of applications though. If something is without cost, then it becomes open to abuse. Take domain names for instance. I would love to have a decentralized name registry, so that no country have censorship power on the _whole_ internet, as we've seen with recent US intervention at the tld level. DNS is a good example because it's quite trivial to implement with a plain old DHT. The problem though is how do you prevent scammers and squatters in this model? There needs to be a cost on a distributed database, otherwise after 1 year it will be fully squatted, used as free hosting, store illegal content, DDoS'd for fun, etc. How to set this cost though, while keeping the distributed nature of this database ? the simplest solution is to let the users decide, over the price of a token, sold by people running nodes, bought by people using the service. Honestly I love this idea. The problem with crypto currently is that a whole bunch of parasites jump on these tokens to speculate on their price without giving a.. about the underlying utility. This completely screws the price optimum and creates a inflated price bubble, in turn preventing adoption.
- scotty79 4y ago
  > ... bunch of parasites jump on these tokens to speculate on their price without giving a.. about the underlying utility. This completely screws the price optimum and creates a inflated price bubble, in turn preventing ... We have exactly the same problem with real life systems like food, raw materials and real estate.
  - Galanwe 4y ago
    Not quite as much I would say, because crypto tokens are priced based on an over speculation of their potential long term explosion, rather than their more down to earth utility function.This is because their current utility is still to be discovered. Take the DNS example for instance, this was implemented on Ethereum by "ENS", but the price of ETH/gas at the time made a single ".eth" domain name cost something like $500.
    - 4y ago
vintermann 4y ago
That's not going to happen, because "distributed" was always a misnomer when it came to blockchain things. "Massively redundantly replicated" would be better. If work is distributed, every participant has a little piece of the work to do, but in e.g. blockchain contracts, all the participants need to do the whole calculation.
- bluelightning2k 4y ago
  This is a very articulate and interesting way to put it. "Massively redundantly replicated"
- javajosh 4y ago
  I don't know much about it, but I would assume that some effort would be made by miners to look in different parts of the search space - you don't want 1000 machines looking checking the same hashes, in order, after all.
- z3c0 4y ago
  Why not just "decentralized"? I'm not sure I ever saw a blockchain that was posited as "distributed".
  - croes 4y ago
    Blockchain is a distributed ledger.
    - z3c0 4y ago
      Looking into it, you're correct, but only insofar as we're referring to two different meanings of distributed. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger, as in "fault tolerant". But the consensus mechanism is decentralized. Thus, the decision-making is not distributed. A distributed consensus mechanism would segment the decisions amongst nodes, not poll for a unanimous response.
- dsco 4y ago
  How would you incentivize nodes long-term without a reward/token system?
nukemandan 4y ago
https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io sans the filecoin aspect that creates incentives for long term/proven storage of data is what you are likely asking for.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Well-designed tokenomics with strong utility are incredibly powerful tools to not only incentivize usage, but also direct governance and reissue profits as dividends to participants. Of course its abused by shady operators out to make a quick buck, but issuing tokens, when done right, is a great innovation by itself.
O__________O 4y ago
Anyone aware of an open source token-based system that allows users to pool hardware assets, but allow some sort of priority and fairness enforcement to reduce network abuse?
aortega 4y ago
While superficially similar, BitTorrent and a blockchain are inherently different designs that target different problems. Blockchain is massive data replication, BitTorrent is massive data distribution (with some replication too). That's why you can actually attack and shut down a bittorrent network, by targeting the index servers, that are not massively replicated. I.E. The Piratebay is often down. As a solution for this, I'll shamelessly plug my small project here, that combines bittorrents with the blockchain as a invulnerable piratebay-like bittorrent index server, called Blockchain Bay: https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay It's command line, and don't use any tokenomic scams. You pay the blockchain only for the data you need to upload, that is fortunately, very little as bittorrent magnet links are very small.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

comboy 4y ago

One can't scale without the other.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Pilottwave 4y ago

While I understand where you are coming from, this argument is basically "money attracts attention from scammers". As a counter I would say "Money attracts attention, period" and attention is an important resource to foster growth. Decentralized tech would never be where it is today if it weren't for investor attention and the potential for gains. We just have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and remain vigilant for bad actors.

2fast4you 4y ago
*blockchain tech would never be where it is today… I’ll bet blockchain is only as popular as it is because of the money. But other forms of decentralization like Mastodon or Matrix are pretty separate from the whole crypto sphere
- dist1ll 4y ago
  Matrix is separate from the crypto sphere, because it solves a different problem. Federated platforms appeal to the privacy-oriented "f** big tech" mindset, which is pretty common in the hacker & FOSS crowds. I'd put it in the same category as VPNs, E2E messengers and TOR.
  - olivierduval 4y ago
    VPN are really usefull for business to link different locations with internet instead of using (awfully costly) dedicated link... or to allow remote work So VPN are not really in the same category
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      VPN as a technology, yes. But I think "VPN" in this discussion is referring specifically to the myriad of consumer-oriented paid solutions (SurfShark, NordVPN, whatever) that are pitched as being about protecting your online security, pirating with impunity, and bypassing region-locks.
- Labo333 4y ago
  Totally agree on that. Big corps only invest in blockchain because of the buzz words that are used as marketing by the consulting firms to sell their "expertise" and by VCs to sell their companies. Sure they hope to gain some money, like luxury brands wanting to sell to crypto-billionaires. But crypto was a useful toy, then Ponzi scheme and now it's a closed loop. How long will the bubble last?
ricardobeat 4y ago
Where exactly is decentralized tech today? Nobody around me ever uses any of it. Old p2p networks (gnutella, kademlia, emule) had way larger impact on society 20 years ago.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Email and the web are more decentralized than they look. Just think that different FOSS and closed source user agents and servers interoperate without any problem, especially for email.
  - feanaro 4y ago
    And in non-web space, there's Matrix (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org).
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    They were talking about crypto. Email and the web were born out of research & universities, not the “potential to attract investors”.
- blamestross 4y ago
  BitTorrent isn't getting any smaller. Mainline DHT is still 10x bigger than Bitcoin.
Labo333 4y ago
What I mean is that the current signal-to-noise ratio is way too weak. This created a lot of bubbles. NFTs are already down by a lot, now yield farming (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankman-fried-described-yield-farming-and-left-matt-levine-stunned https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...) just took a big hit from the FTX case. I see way too many "revolutionnary" projects from fresh graduates. There is no way that tens of thousands of inexperienced people with barely enough CS education to pass programming interviews would magically create innovation just because VCs put a ton of money on them. Also, can you tell me more about where decentralized tech is today? BitTorrent was a revolution as a way of information sharing, Onion was a revolution for privacy and Bitcoin was a revolution for decentralized ledgers. Starting from that, IPFS is the continuation of BitTorrent with more features and Ethereum is a more efficient (especially since The Merge) and customizable (smart contracts are advanced checkers for write operations) ledger. But what are the real world applications of those technologies? What are concrete use cases of Ethereum and IPFS besides payments, records and file sharing? Surely there are exciting progresses to be made on the technical side like zk-SNARKS but how useful will they be to society? I think we already have all the technical blocks we need. If there is no real-world adoption maybe we should just wait another 10 years before pumping crazy amounts of money.
sdiacom 4y ago
The "chaff" and the bad actors are in it for the money. Without them, "decentralized tech" indeed wouldn't be where it is today -- meaning, it wouldn't be overwhelmingly associated with crypto-adjacent grifts. The real decentralized tech, the one that serves a purpose other than emptying the wallets of naïve crypto-enthusiasts, does just fine without a profit motive. You don't need get-rich-quick promises to get an audience if you're actually doing something useful.
yunohn 4y ago
> Decentralized tech would never be where it is today if it weren't for investor attention That’s exactly why blockchains haven’t found Product Market Fit. Investors != Users
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

college_physics 4y ago

Imho the "print-your-own-money" siren call is only one of the aspects that hampered the whole blockchain world from delivering the disruption it so much craved. The core architectures themselves are somehow too overengineered for broad applicability. Maybe that is what was needed to support the digital gold use case, but it is manifestly not needed for all sorts of other very relevant decentralized applications (bittorrent, fediverse, messaging, email etc) Its a mute point whether the whole crypto/blockchain period was a net positive. It certainly made a noisy case for "re-decentralization" given the very real and mostly harmful status quo. One could also argue that it diverted vital resources to potentially dead-end or limited use areas. The recurrent scams may also give decentralization a bad name to an uninformed public that can't distinguish all the different versions. What matters next is that projects that deliver real benefits to users get attention and traction. Worth keeping in mind that the real trouble starts when you get noticed by vested interests as a potential threat.

boramalper 4y ago

> Distributed File Sharing or computation without the whole tokenomics They went hand in hand even back in the day: private torrent trackers were all about tokenomics where tokens were the number of bytes you've seeded (uploaded) minus you've downloaded. I'm not saying it's impossible to imagine distributed file sharing otherwise, but to "guarantee" the availability of (especially unpopular) content, you need some incentive mechanisms either built in to the protocol or externally imposed.

birracerveza 4y ago

From the project's readme: >Please do not use the public swarm to process sensitive data. We ask for that because it is an open network, and it is technically possible for peers serving model layers to recover input data and model outputs or modify them in a malicious way. Instead, you can set up a private Petals swarm hosted by people and organization you trust, who are authorized to process your data. This is what blockchain and staking tokens is for. (Part of the reason, at least) You act maliciously, the network slashes your stake. "pinky promise not to do bad stuff" only goes so far... and it's really not far at all. You can trust "trusted" organizations or private individuals, but they have no incentives to ensure that the service works as intended, regardless of intent.

amelius 4y ago
A blockchain does not magically solve security issues. In fact, it adds traceability. And data stored in it can never be deleted. Just to name a few issues.
- birracerveza 4y ago
  > A blockchain does not magically solve security issues. No, but staking is certainly an improvement over "pinky promise", and it requires a public blockchain. > issues I'm fairly sure those are features, not issues. You are free to disagree.
- menzoic 4y ago
  > A blockchain does not magically solve security issues. This is a weird statement. Blockchain security is real and it isn't "magic". Blockchain is specifically designed to secure decentralized applications. > In fact, it adds traceability. And data stored in it can never be deleted. Just to name a few issues. These aren't issues, these are part of the security model. Traceability is fine here because everything is pseudonymous, if you want to avoid that use a chain that has untraceable transactions with zero knowledge proofs (zero traceability). > And data stored in it can never be deleted. Just to name a few issues. Storing data on blockchain is extremely expensive. Only hashes are stored on chain, not the data itself. Hashes are much different from encryption because they're irreversible.

Galanwe 4y ago

I agree that unfortunately a lot of crypto projects are way too tokenomics centered, instead of utility centered. BitTorrent style projects are far more restrictive for a lot of applications though. If something is without cost, then it becomes open to abuse. Take domain names for instance. I would love to have a decentralized name registry, so that no country have censorship power on the _whole_ internet, as we've seen with recent US intervention at the tld level. DNS is a good example because it's quite trivial to implement with a plain old DHT. The problem though is how do you prevent scammers and squatters in this model? There needs to be a cost on a distributed database, otherwise after 1 year it will be fully squatted, used as free hosting, store illegal content, DDoS'd for fun, etc. How to set this cost though, while keeping the distributed nature of this database ? the simplest solution is to let the users decide, over the price of a token, sold by people running nodes, bought by people using the service. Honestly I love this idea. The problem with crypto currently is that a whole bunch of parasites jump on these tokens to speculate on their price without giving a.. about the underlying utility. This completely screws the price optimum and creates a inflated price bubble, in turn preventing adoption.

scotty79 4y ago
> ... bunch of parasites jump on these tokens to speculate on their price without giving a.. about the underlying utility. This completely screws the price optimum and creates a inflated price bubble, in turn preventing ... We have exactly the same problem with real life systems like food, raw materials and real estate.
- Galanwe 4y ago
  Not quite as much I would say, because crypto tokens are priced based on an over speculation of their potential long term explosion, rather than their more down to earth utility function.This is because their current utility is still to be discovered. Take the DNS example for instance, this was implemented on Ethereum by "ENS", but the price of ETH/gas at the time made a single ".eth" domain name cost something like $500.
  - 4y ago

vintermann 4y ago

That's not going to happen, because "distributed" was always a misnomer when it came to blockchain things. "Massively redundantly replicated" would be better. If work is distributed, every participant has a little piece of the work to do, but in e.g. blockchain contracts, all the participants need to do the whole calculation.

bluelightning2k 4y ago
This is a very articulate and interesting way to put it. "Massively redundantly replicated"
javajosh 4y ago
I don't know much about it, but I would assume that some effort would be made by miners to look in different parts of the search space - you don't want 1000 machines looking checking the same hashes, in order, after all.
z3c0 4y ago
Why not just "decentralized"? I'm not sure I ever saw a blockchain that was posited as "distributed".
- croes 4y ago
  Blockchain is a distributed ledger.
  - z3c0 4y ago
    Looking into it, you're correct, but only insofar as we're referring to two different meanings of distributed. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger, as in "fault tolerant". But the consensus mechanism is decentralized. Thus, the decision-making is not distributed. A distributed consensus mechanism would segment the decisions amongst nodes, not poll for a unanimous response.
dsco 4y ago
How would you incentivize nodes long-term without a reward/token system?

nukemandan 4y ago

https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io sans the filecoin aspect that creates incentives for long term/proven storage of data is what you are likely asking for.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Well-designed tokenomics with strong utility are incredibly powerful tools to not only incentivize usage, but also direct governance and reissue profits as dividends to participants. Of course its abused by shady operators out to make a quick buck, but issuing tokens, when done right, is a great innovation by itself.

O__________O 4y ago

Anyone aware of an open source token-based system that allows users to pool hardware assets, but allow some sort of priority and fairness enforcement to reduce network abuse?

aortega 4y ago

While superficially similar, BitTorrent and a blockchain are inherently different designs that target different problems. Blockchain is massive data replication, BitTorrent is massive data distribution (with some replication too). That's why you can actually attack and shut down a bittorrent network, by targeting the index servers, that are not massively replicated. I.E. The Piratebay is often down. As a solution for this, I'll shamelessly plug my small project here, that combines bittorrents with the blockchain as a invulnerable piratebay-like bittorrent index server, called Blockchain Bay: https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/blockchainbay It's command line, and don't use any tokenomic scams. You pay the blockchain only for the data you need to upload, that is fortunately, very little as bittorrent magnet links are very small.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]