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
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
Lots of nudity AFAICT.
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/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
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!
LOL you started by asking me if I know what BFT even is and now you're going on a rant about totally unrelated things.
BFT is a mathematical property about models of distributed computer systems. A property I'm now willing to bet you don't understand. and which you are now also invoking, vaguely, as part of a sweeping social critiques. This is such a silly pitch. I genuinely can't believe people fall for it.
Why do you drag no less than half a dozen vaguely related hot-button emotional topics with your sales pitch? The only thing they have in common is the constituency you're trying to exploit. People reading this for whom the parent post resonated: you're the fucking mark.
What's the point of this rhetoric? What are you trying to sell? To whom?
The solution to the Social Media Problem is really very simple:
Step 1: log off.
Step 2: Lobby for better privacy laws.
Step 3: Avoid repeating the original mistake; the crypto bros make the tech bros look like saints.
The problem with social media not primarily that it's centralized, so the fact that anything other than "log off and pass privacy laws" is pitched as a solution to FB/Instagram is probably the most astounding "Emporer Has No Clothes" situation I've ever seen.
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.
Example: 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?
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