Brave Integration Deepens Support for Unstoppable Domains
brave.com
brave.com
Really sad to see so much energy put into this space. Out of all the web3 use cases, maybe 5% at the most are truly useful to have on the blockchain, while the rest are just databases wearing blockchain clothing. The really useful cases probably aren't as valuable as selling a landgrab, however.
I don't see that as the underlying desire for Web3. Not in the slightest.
I don't see that at all. What I see are a bunch of predatory projects trying to make a bunch of money before the music stops.
If a particular set of ideals are being used in marketing for only one space, that space is going to attract people who care about those ideals. Currently I see those people flocking to Web3, if there's an alternative I'd be interested to hear about it.
Amway, Avon, and door-to-door knife sales were three that I recall.
Freenet is decentralized and so far is unstoppable. You probably would not like 80% of information that’s being exchanged there… but that’s actually a sign of quality, if you think about it.
Speaking of which , if I say write an anti-Putin manifesto on Web3 - will Putin’s thugs be able to stop me digitally or biologically? What are my protections?
Regarding your protections - I'd say anonymity is still the #1 protection in most online environments. Of course, adding money adds 'skin in the game', but you have a lot more control over how much of your identity you want to risk on any one manifesto.
It's simple, and I don't know why people are confused. New technology (value-neutral) comes around that promises decentralization. Grifters come into the space with a bunch of centralized garbage (stablecoins, CEX, etc). And "idiots" (I want to be respectful, but it's hard to find a better word) throw away the technology along with the bathwater. Result: enjoy CBDCs and the government being able to institute transaction taxes, implement negative interest rates, and freeze your bank account at will. Good thing you didn't get scammed!
SideShift.ai for example or Bisq.
Check out https://kycnot.me/
[0] Heavy downvoting of the parent, + three replies all saying "don't see it". A decent place to start: https://vitalik.ca/index.html
Yes. Peer-to-peer networks have existed long before Web3 ever became a thing. Bittorrent worked fine without a blockchain. IPFS works fine without a blockchain. Soulseek and Limewire didn't need blockchains, same as Napster.
The idea of digital currency is definitely geek pornography, but it's a much more complicated issue in the real world. All signs seem to indicate that the further a protocol distances itself from money, the better chance it has at succeeding in the long-term.
Fine, but for IPFS you need a normal domain name. Oops, now you're centralized/cancellable again.
Every single person who thinks blockchain = database just doesn't understand centralization vs decentralization, and trust vs trustless. A database is run by a central authority.
Huh? Who told you that? Sure, if you are lazy enough to rely on a translator (which exists for Tor and IPFS), domain names would be in the picture, but you could use clients... that do that directly.
1. The most immediate problem is going to be scaling. Since we can't rely on centralized peers (or even federated trackers like on Bittorrent), our ledger has to be both distributed and operate with relatively low block times. This introduces a problem: anyone who wants a "complete" ledger needs to trace their domain back through the history of the blockchain. This would require a local copy of the ledger on your client (extremely large), or server-side domain resolution (unbelievably slow, even for a single user). The internet as we know it simply wouldn't fit on a Blockchain.
2. Let's pretend like that isn't an issue though, and you only need to serve a few dozen sites to a few dozen users (the fate of many such crypto projects). Now we get to the exciting stuff; decentralized domain markets! I'm assuming this is where people step in to suggest smart contracts and NFTs get used, but there's a bigger problem on the horizon; lack of regulation. Since DNS is a centralized server, it can determine when abusive transactions are conducted and rectify them. If Microsoft decided to buy every domain NFT overnight, nobody could stop them. Now Microsoft owns your "decentralized" internet! Yippee!
3. Even though the mental gymnastics are getting exhausting, let's assume one more time that this project has perfectly worked out every social engineering kink and logical exploit in their market system.
...then what? Domain owners can now be openly hunted by observing the wallet their domain name lives in. Domains can be stolen like those poor Bored Apes. Companies can no longer take solace in a B2B transaction with their DNS provider, since that doesn't determine the ownership of their domain anymore. The logic of domains breaks down past this point, you may as well just use unique identifiers, IP addresses or hashes by now. The idea of a web as we know it wouldn't exist in this reality. It would be a lawless no-man's land, a reflection of the catatonic crypto landscape as it exists currently.
In a democracy people maintain a commons. Web3 is the opposite, withdrawal from the commons, usually to ignore democratic authority or the law to begin with.
Btw, speaking about Brave
Matt Damon told me "fortune favors the Brave" and I lost all my f#cking money
( for context - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twpEgYnc-jA )
I even say this as having a belief in some of the values of cryptocurrenceis and a desire to have what web3 claims to be. I see high value in a private (ZKP), secure, quick, digital currency, but it must also be better than what we already have, meaning that if it doesn't allow for things like clawbacks (being able to play within the judiciary), then it is dead in the water. I really do want to see a decentralized internet like web3 seeks, but I haven't seen any extraordinary evidence. Maybe there is a signal in all the noise that I can't see, but if there is, then maybe the true believers need to rid the space of the grifters (there is zero doubt that there are a large number of grifts making hand over fist) and build trust. If you can't convince a bunch of techies of your cool tech product you're not going to convince the average public. It just builds distrust, which will be almost impossible to recover from. But I'm still waiting to see if there is a signal in all that noise.
> allow for things like clawbacks (being able to play within the judiciary)
Pick one.
It's actually very hard to develop a real app in smart contracts. We're missing the ability to store private data. Tooling is highly lacking for anything beyond deploying a simple 100 line NFT contract. As soon as these problems are solved, we'll start to see some traditional applications rebuilt in a way that gives users ownership of their own data.
That's the goal of web3 to me, not specifically the exact implementation of whether we're on a blockchain or doing peer to peer file storage. Web3 means I have all the rights to my data, and ideally, applications can live on beyond their creators.
I don't think that's true. I think people call it a grift because "identity" and "ownership" are not topics that require whatever "Web3" constitutes to be implemented, and the idea that we require web3 to allow a user to "have all the rights to [their] data" is equally facetious.
This is solved off-blockchain.
> Tooling is highly lacking for anything beyond deploying a simple 100 line NFT contract.
This is solved off-blockchain.
> we'll start to see some traditional applications rebuilt in a way that gives users ownership of their own data.
This is solved off-cloud, or if you pay for storage. I can download my photos and documents locally from Google Drive just fine.
> Web3 means I have all the rights to my data
You already do, if you store it off-cloud or pay for storage
> applications can live on beyond their creators.
This is solved off-cloud. I can still run executables from the 90s.
I don't think anyone here said 'store private data on blockchain'.
> This is solved off-cloud, or if you pay for storage. I can download my photos and documents locally from Google Drive just fine.
Better not have your child's photos on Google or iCloud, and possibly reported on your device due to excessive CSAM checks [0] [1].
Their solutions have created more problems in the background which are no better, and will get worse with the big tech companies over time.
Skiff looks like it is going in the right direction so far in how they are using IPFS, ENS, Mail, etc. [2] Watching them closely.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
[1] https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14230711866160005...
You're right. Don't complain if Google Drive, iCloud, etc bans you via an AI or bot automatically over an alleged ToS violation. Same with Twitter and the rest of them or even payment companies like PayPal. When your account is banned, that is that. Period.
As these services are free to do business with whoever they want, you are free to choose alternatives to these services, since at the end of the day, they will never change.
If a single "it went badly enough to wind up in the NYT" case means Google is a no-go, I've got really bad news for you about blockchains.
I think we are beyond 'one' case going wrong with Google services like YouTube, Drive, etc which the result of automated bans have made people realize that Google owns whatever you put on their services and can remove whatever they 'think' violates their ToS.
> I've got really bad news for you about blockchains.
Yet, I made no mention about or storing data on the 'blockchain', since IPFS is not a blockchain.
Yes, but I think the goal is to have these things AND be on-cloud
While I’m not anti-web3 I’m sceptical the promised results will appear not for technical reasons but due to misaligned incentives. At the end of the day someone has to pay for the storage or compute and we’re back to systems of exploitative extraction by proxy. Your personal data pays for service X via advertising and you pay directly for service Y by volunteering cryptocurrency based information exchange tokens so that blah blah blah it’s normally just tokens automatically created to track what you do which makes it just the same as advertised, arguably more creepy.
It’s a very lofty technical goal, I fear will fail for very normal human psychological reasons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I think my main point is it doesn’t matter if other things do it alright already. There’s a lot of energy behind putting together the whole package in the crypto area.
I’m not saying it will end up working, but I am saying that any critique that tries to say it won’t work because disparate things X, Y and Z exist already is inherently unconvincing because it never comes down to whether some features exist in some form already. It’s always the final packaging, branding, and all sorts of vague appeals and ideals that give energy to something. And crypto, for all the leeches, certainly also has a lot of energy, funding, and smart people, and more than enough of appeals and ideals.
The components that get called Web3 may be younger than some other parts of the internet, but they have been available for nearly a decade now (depending on when you start counting), and in that time I haven’t seen any useful applications emerge. Well, maybe a few that are useful to criminal gangs.
How long do we have to wait?
Until Godot finally arrives.
Honestly, I think 98% of Web3 is garbage. It's a worse system than our current financial system. I founded a web3 company in early 2022 based on a new way to put data onchain in a permissionless & trustless way to make smart contracts more useful. People don't actually care about decentralization so we pivoted a couple months after our raise.
Our team explored the space in depth by speaking with established founders and execs of many protocols and companies in the space. It's almost all driven by speculation for imaginary use cases. We went back to basics and asked, "Really, what is the point of this tech existing?" IMHO, the only reason for this tech to exist is privacy.
Right now, there's no private digital cash. I believe the ability to purchase things anonymously is a fundamental right. To me it's the same as private communication. Right now there's no private way to digitally send money. BTC & ETH seek to make this worse by making every transaction public instead of concealed by a trusted third party. I personally believe it's socially important that we figure out stable private digital cash.
Monero/Zcash don't solve the problem because they fluctuate wildly and are largely driven by speculation. Our long term goal is to create a private p2p venmo using a stablecoin. There are definitely up and downsides of privacy as there are with any freedom. Scientology wouldn't exist without freedom of religion, neo-nazi marches wouldn't exist without freedom of speech. All of the illegal activity on the internet wouldn't exist without encrypted communication. Nonetheless, I think the social benefits of empowering individuals outweigh the costs and I don't see any other technology capable of delivering private digital payments.
Thanks for this, I agree. For those of us working on the application stack, web3 is about human rights, and building global scale utilities that are run by networks not companies.
If this view of web3 is alien to you, I suggest starting some place like this blog post: https://jaygraber.medium.com/web3-is-self-certifying-9dad77f...
I don't understand how this isn't already solved by existing FLOSS
[EDIT - strike the incorrect "yearly" from the "fees paid" statement]
> Unstoppable domains are yours for life with no renewal fees, eliminating the risk of losing a domain because you forget to renew or because the registrar takes it away.
Is this not correct?
From a marketing point of view, this means that effort you spend on publicizing that domain and getting people to remember or recognize it wouldn't be wasted by having someone else take the domain away.
From a security point of view, this means that people who are expecting to use your domain to reach you and your service can't be fooled into reaching someone else by having the domain reassigned to someone else.
There are also security downsides around squatting and typosquatting; if some people explicitly or implicitly assume that domain ownership follows trademark ownership, it will be easier for someone to impersonate a famous brand or site, with greatly reduced recourse for the famous entity.
Hmm, for something to claim to be Unstoppable Domains, why not include .onion as well, seems like that is more an unstoppable domain than what Brave is offering. Any comments on that Brave?
It doesn't explicitly mention onion addresses, but I don't see any indication it's not supported.
(Tor is also not supported on the Android or iOS versions of Brave)
Decentralization in the web basically turns many "digital products" into something closer to their physical analog, in terms of ownership. What I mean there is that if you buy a Widget from the Widget Mart, Widget Mart no longer has any ability to impact that Widget in any way whatsoever. It's the same with these domains.
You buy it, it's yours. Somebody can only take it away from you in the same ways that they might take away your Widget.
The goal of Unstoppable Domains is to tie human-readable aliases to these public keys.
But honestly, what is the strategy here?
He asked “how is it better”.
Plus Mozilla really isn't the same as they used to be, they're too corrupt and political now
And everything has an excellent UI for configuring things which can be done on a per site or global basis. So for instance just blocking 'x' script, or only blocking cross-site cookies, or whatever else. I believe Firefox was adding in some of these features back when I swapped, but they've been playing catch up for some time now.
There's also lots of other neat features like the topic of this thread, single click support for TOR, and I'm sure plenty of stuff I'm leaving out. I also find it to be vastly more performant/memory friendly if you're anything like me and happen to leave a gazillion tabs open because I'm totally going to eventually go read that really interesting sounding article that I opened 3 months ago.
Has a Chromium base which means a bunch of nice things: It just works better nowadays because devs make everything for Chrome and barely care for anything else. Chromium's native tab groups rock. Chromium means separate browser profiles and PWAs, which I like to have. I think Chromium's mobile UI is better.
Those are mostly just benefits of stock Chromium, but:
Sane defaults (eg. not defaulting to Google + search suggestions on). The browser has a built in uBO grade adblocker that also works on mobile and doesn't care about Manifest v3, like Mozilla, they run an independent end to end encrypted sync service for bookmarks/settings/history/etc. You get the good of Chromium without the bullshit.
Brave specifically: YouTube video background playback on mobile, they're working on vertical tabs, tons and tons of nice privacy features. I think being able to adjust video Autoplay is Brave-specific, but not sure.
Organization:
Mozilla as an organization is funded by Google, and is completely okay with others deciding what I should see on the Internet. It also just generally seems more interested in activism than browser building.
Brave from the get go tries to have independent sources of revenue (ie. their ad business, and now paid services like Brave Talk and adfree Search).
They are an organization that itself doesn't have politics except for user control and privacy, which is an increasingly rare attitude and I like a lot.
Brave maintains an independent search engine that has its own index rather than being a simple Bing frontend the way most other small engines are, and it supports DDGs !bang syntax. Plus Goggles are cool.
---
In short, they don't do anything exactly revolutionary - they just focus on making a browser, and make a browser with very little bullshit.
> …but then what product would be for you?
All else being equal, my preference is browsers that focus on internet standards rather than propping up bottom-feeders who want to privatize DNS. My daily driver is Chrome on desktop, and Safari on mobile. I really like Vivaldi, too.
I had the exact same idea as this company and I'm sure thousands of others did as well. The goal wasn't to make money (though that's obviously a pleasant aside), but to fix something that, from my perspective, is very broken. Our current DNS system entails you paying an ever-increasing and perpetual rent to a company for them to do literally nothing. You are paying them to not remove your name from a database, which is less work on their part than deleting it would be. That's seems just so dysfunctional and exploitative.
And just to also make sure we're on the same page here - when this company distributes your domain, they no longer own it in any way, shape, or form. Even if they wanted to go scummy and swap back to our current model (perhaps after gaining large marketshare), they'd be literally unable to - because they do not control, in any way, these domains once they are distributed.
Private Window with Tor connectivity
Brave never remembers what you do in a Private Window. With Tor connectivity, you get two additional benefits: your IP address is hidden from the sites you visit and the sites you visit are hidden from passive network observers. Note that Tor may slow down browsing or break some websites.
A private window with Tor makes it more difficult, but not impossible, for your ISP or employer (if you're using a work machine or network) to see what sites you visit. However, even a private window with Tor won't fully defend against tracking. If your personal safety depends on remaining anonymous, use the Tor Browser instead.
(a) technologists break free of control and invent libertarian paradise (b) criminals and other bad actors flock there (c) governments create laws and regulations that make it either illegal or practically so inconvenient to operate such services that nobody can do it any more
In practical terms, what exact plan do they have when Web3 becomes a giant cess pool of child porn and underground illegal gambling and drug trading? Do they really think governments are going to say "Oh well we can't do anything about these 'unstoppable' domains so I guess child porn is ok now?".
Do they understand that the inevitable actions taken by government to regain control will end up over-reaching - almost by definition. The more resistent the libertarian paradise is to control, the more blunt and severe the response is going to be in regaining it.
The worst thing is, when the over-reach happens, it doesn't just affect thelibertarians; it wrecks every other valid use of the technology. Witness the sun setting on legal encryption as governments steadily outlaw it around the world.
Such things people may not even consider technology today... that most likely were used in the vices of those days long past just as much as what newer tech is used and abused for by certain people.
At some point the cost to regulate, police and ban far exceeds the cost of each instance of usage of such tech. Sure, it hurts those who face the wrath of the incumbent powers head on, but it really doesn't matter long term.
There is also not much a centralized company like UD could ever really resist as you elegantly described. It will not take much pressure from governments or other entities to make the company UD crumble like a house of cards. An old fashioned centralized company roleplaying "decentralized" theater, VCs will be VCs..
(?) the rest of the world flocks to the "libertarian paradise", thus rendering it no longer a paradise at all, but somewhere with most the same issues as the physical world.
Do you want this again? [0] [1]. The so-called 'open web' is complete nonsense which technologists at large tech companies have taken control to push on their next grifting and surveillance products.
For example, Google Chrome being used as the dominant browser and Google already leading control over web standards, privacy violations and sabotaging other browsers like Firefox for their own gain.
There is no such thing as the 'open web'.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677
[1] https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...
>a secure and privacy-centric browser that allows you to explore the Internet without being tracked
But you can find info on Brave's in-browser analytics: https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/
And you can find out how the Brave browser itself tracks the ads it shows you, while providing aggregated info to Brave's advertising engine: https://brave.com/intro-to-brave-ads/
Brave appears to have simply replaced other tracking with itself, even if they claim to use aggregation to provide anonymity. To be clear, the Brave browser tracks you in multiple ways, claiming to do this in a privacy preserving way.
If you are not into crypto, and buying into Web3, then I have no idea why you'd use Brave.
The browser itself is also fully open source and you're free to verify that they're sending exactly and only what they say they're sending. You can also disable what limited analytics that they do use if you'd prefer them not see hyper-sensitive information like a bucketed grouping (1, 2-5, 6-10, 11-50, 51+) of how many tabs you have open.
How did that work out for Log4j? Is trust but verify really trust at all?
My irony meter exploded