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Comment by DRosario | Hacker News Reader

Have you checked out Farcaster? https://docs.farcaster.xyz/

FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.

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Any service built on cryptocurrency is a terrible idea for the future; there exists no such thing as scarcity in cyberspace.

Scarcity is just a natural consequence of trust

What do you mean?

Crypto is a solution to establishing trust in a decentralized ledger system: proof of stake and proof of work prevent people from adding fake transactions to the blockchain.

It’s just a natural consequence that this creates scarcity.

It doesn’t establish trust. It’s the opposite of trust. It establishes paranoia, and even then, how can you be sure your screen is the truth?

It establishes both trust by separating it from mistrust (paranoia if you will) by making the division explicit and assigning trust to some people and operations and not others.

If you think it's concerned about screens, you're wrong. It's concerned about "did this person really do this"?

Do you understand that you are trusting your screen?

Do you also blame the post office when someone breaks into your post box?

Can you build a post box? Can you build a computer and the software?

A screen isn't software. And indeed, I can't. There are specific parties concerned with building postboxes and screens, and those have no reason to be the same as those delivering mail or writing blockchain software.

I mean you might as well just throw out all computers then.

What practical advantages are there to a decentralized ledger? Does it offer the trust that centralized ledgers and legal avenues do?

The same advantages of all decentralization. You could say the same things about crypto that youd say about open source

There is some relationship but some scarcity is natural- where is trust in that?

Huh? All I’m saying is that crypto doesn’t create scarcity for no reason. It creates scarcity provided you need a ledger system where only certain transactions are valid. Any ledger system inherently creates scarcity

thanks for the gut reaction but FC has nothing to do with scarcity. It has to do with ownership, control over your digital footprint, and censorship resistance.

All those are forms of coercion and finite resources, which are artificial limitations that are naturally non-existent in cyberspace. What you are describing are vestiges of the physical world being forced upon the unphysical - it makes no sense.

> What you are describing are vestiges of the physical world being forced upon the unphysical - it makes no sense.

Cyberspace does not exist without the physical substrate of compute resources.

That's like saying your mind is limited by the body.

can you show me a mind that exists without a body?

That's a weird take. After all, 'cyberspace' is not some abstract realm divorced from the universe at large. It's still subject to scarcity of time, energy, and information.

Tell that to John Perry Barlow:

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Indeed! Trust is a precious good in society and economy.

In Dec 1960 we "decentralised communication", now called The Internet. Bittorrent decentralised broadcasting, leading to streaming revolution. Bitcoin pioneered decentralised money.

At Delft University I've worked for 25 years to decentralised trust, democracy, and economic cooperation in general. As an academic this focus on running code and societal change obviously kills you career protects. See my writing from prior century on "Open Information Pools" (pre-wikipedia era) [0]. Essentially what others called the Global Brain.

We deployed a decentralised trust algorithm based on the interaction graph to 94k people, see [1]. Theoretical foundations are based on proving that the Harvard impossibility result against Sybil attacks made too strict assumptions, [2]. Leading to trust scores with resilience against fake identities: MeritRank [3]. This is being released in first version in this Tribler version. So hopefully this trust framework will help stop spammers a bit. We now pioneered "Decentralised AI", that critically relies on such a trust framework to function in a trustworthy manner [4].

[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/2000-usenix-annual-technic... [1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862... [2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/files/96914542/p1263.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09950 [4] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi

That's like saying your imagination is constrained by the speed of light.

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