5 ms·
Persistent pseudonyms seem to be required for voting-based communities to work. Without them, what is a vote? Whose votes do I trust? Distributing reddit is a
by natrius 11y ago
Persistent pseudonyms seem to be required for voting-based communities to work. Without them, what is a vote? Whose votes do I trust?
Distributing reddit is a hard problem, but making it anonymous is even harder. It'll be easier to start with cryptographic identities and add anonymity later. In the meantime, users can generate new identities for every action. They will be ignored by other users, since reputation is the easiest way to separate signal from noise.
Building this system will be much easier if you investigate the toolkits for building distributed systems that have been built since Aether started. Ethereum has three building blocks for distributed systems: a blockchain for storing data that requires consensus, like the identities of the creators and moderators of a community; Whisper, a messaging system for sending data that doesn't require consensus, like broadcasting the existence of a sub-forum; and Swarm, a distributed data store for things like discussion archives and the HTML, CSS and Javascript that such a discussion system could be built from to run on every device that every user owns. (For an example of an application with this sort of architecture, see Augur. http://augur.net http://augur.net)
Besides the development speed gained from using these tools, your system will gain benevolent forkability. You want developers with ideas about decentralized communities to write forks that effectively don't steal users since everyone's using the same data sources to read from and write to. But using a homegrown distributed system makes that less likely. If it were built on Ethereum's toolkit, even if a developer disagrees with most of what you've done, it's in their interest to use the same data source even if they rewrite everything. The userbase of benevolently forkable distributed systems never needs to be split, which is a powerful characteristic for growth.
Aether is fantastic, and it's where the web is heading. Good luck!
- curiousjorge 11y agoEthereum is super interesting but I'm kinda turned off by seeing "Licensing" and looks like it's aimed at some sort of profiteering, which I don't think is compatible with the sort of architecture we are going for, but I might be wrong here, please feel free to correct me.
- natrius 11y agoThe licensing page lists three buckets of free, open source licenses for various parts of the project. I don't understand. https://ethereum.org/licensing https://ethereum.org/licensing
- nadams 11y agoI like to think that I understand most open source licenses - but that is just making my head spin. > The core of Ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licences. Then why aren't they considering MIT? That's about as liberal as you can get. > it will come with an amendment allowing it to be linked to be statically linked to software for which source code is not available. NO NO NO NO STOP NO. Do not attempt to modify open source licenses without consulting with a lawyer. It seems innocent enough - but it could cause problems down the road. There is also some rules that say you cannot call it GPL anymore if you modify it [1]. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL
- badsock 11y agoWait, the sentence above the second one that you quote is: "In this way, while we have not arrived at a final licence, we expect to select one of the MIT licence, the MPL licence or the LGPL licence." They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit? I definitely agree with you about the amendment thing.
- nadams 11y ago> They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit? Perhaps my head was spinning from the vagueness of their license decision and I just overlooked it.
- curiousjorge 11y agoIs it MIT or BSD? Thats what I mean ant by profiteering, it doesn't fit with the model of distributed, p2p, anonymous, decentralized and secure architecture it seems to be speaking about while at the same time promoting so business. My reason is not that profiteering is bad, but in this particular case, I just don't see how you can compromise anonymity with copyright and a business around it. For this to be truly anonymous, I just don't see how a business can be attached but cause at the end of the day we are still coupled to the original writers. What's I'd love to see is something like ethereum but without a business or copyright attached to it. I hope this makes sense, to truly build a decentralized and anonymous networ, can you try to also build a profitable business on top of it? Maybe I've misunderstood. I'd love to start working with it, however, I realize how his is still have he early day. The future is a completely decentralized, anonymous p2p network that has no overwhelming force from a single agent to censor or corrupt information. Imagine if facebook, Google, all of it could run on our phones, tsblets, desktop. You can't shut it down. By the n I assume we will have some sort of mesh networking where we don't even need to go through an isp, just a cluster of trusted and self healing network nodes.