cowtools

>You can’t possibly hand approve everything so I’m sure the vast majority of node runners auto approve stuff and perhaps share some (non decentralized) black lists.

This obviously hasn't been the case for bittorrent, so I don't know why you would assume that would be the case for IPFS. Even ignoring the legal risk of blindly re-hosting whatever illegal bootleg-ISIS-child-porn-malware.exe on the net, the use of a blacklist isn't sybil proof so you just get bogged down with spam by the first attacker and run out of disk space.

>So you would say I have 16TB, feel free to use it as you see fit swarm. I can "mine" crypto by helping the swarm.

The problem is that cryptocurrency mining is about producing verifiable proofs. I don't know how you would go about producing a proof that you've helped the swarm in a decentralized, sybil-proof way.

The majority of seeding/downloading will be done with the (minority) most popular files, while only a minority of seeding/downloading is done for the majority of files.

For example, go to TPB and look at the distribution of seeders/leechers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

Well then maybe it might be worthwhile to start bittorent-like private trackers for IPFS?

I like the IPNS idea. That would be useful even if it was just back-ported to bittorrent

Well, valve released portal on the new nintendo, so they have some buisness connections

It would certainly make it easier to disguise the space platform

well, each thread basically has a time limit before it gets archived and removed, so the users know to keep making threads if they want to keep their topic alive.

So if someone comes and makes a DMCA claim on a thread, the moderators can just ignore it and wait for the thread to time out or they delete it and the users just make another thread.

As long as the moderators wait a couple hours or so to respond to legal threats, and maintain a semblance of "low moderation" they pretty much have plausible deniability to void copyright. It's sort of genius.

>My understanding is that many of the people who own crypto do so through a third party, so there is a layer of indirection. It's the difference between me having cash in hand (money in my pocket I can directly use) and me having cash in the bank (I tell my bank to send money to someone else and they execute the transaction on my behalf).

This is quite true, and it is likely the largest problem facing cryptocurrency today is this custodial use of it (besides all of the get-rich-quick schemes). But at its worst like this, cryptocurrency is a non-proprietary inter-bank payment method that prevents double-spending between banks. It is still superior to something like zelle, paypal, or SWIFT so long as the fees are lower. If cryptocurrency was the primary means of inter-bank transfer, then it would be trivial for anyone to start a new bank that could inter-network with the rest of the banking system, so I expect banks would be a lot more competitive (including on matters of privacy and security).

>My mom has downloaded ransomeware before, so from that perspective, I think crypto has worse security properties. If transactions are executed indirectly, the security properties are theoretically the same as executing transactions through a bank and you are back in a system of trust. Furthermore if a "cryptobank" gets hacked, that money is not retrievable, while theoretically in a system of pure fiat, the money might not be retrievable, but

Hmm. yes this is sort of a complicated subject. But I'll just re-iterate a point here which I may not have made as clear earlier: that cryptocurrency allows you to establish different levels of trust/risk through the means by which you manage your keys. A lot of older cryptocurrency users who don't practice good opsec will use a hardware token to sign transactions. Another example of what you could do is use a multi-signature system that would make it so that multiple keys are needed to move your funds (for example, they would have to hack at least X of Y devices in order to move funds), or simply have multiple wallets and limit the amount that you have in each one.

And secondly, there are non-cryptocurrency ways of implementing different levels of trust/risk that you could integrate into the existing banking system, like chaumian cash or even just using cryptographic keypairs to authenticate transactions.

In other words, losses of cryptocurrency due to theft or fraud are not always all-or-nothing. The difference between cryptocurrency and the conventional banking system is that you can decide your level of trust/risk you want to take before you do a transaction, which includes the use of a "cryptobank" (which could be secure but have historically been very scammy compared to conventional banks, see Mt Gox, Celcius, etc.).

>the value could be refunded at the cost of devaluing the currency as a whole.

I am not sure that it's a desirable property that the rest of society can bail out banks like you're describing. I think in an ideal situation you would have some sort of free-market-ish sort of way to balance the risk vs reward of different security practices, whether that's users voting with their dollar or with a middleman like rating agencies or insurance. And those incentives basically require the bank and its customers to lose money when they get robbed (maybe through some middleman like insurance).

If you look at serious cryptocurrency exchanges like Kraken or Binance, there is a massive gap between "cryptobank gets hacked and loses some of their funds" and "cryptobank gets hacked and loses everything". They keep a lot of their funds on separate, air-gapped, offline systems, with the keys distributed between multiple people. Those aren't funds that you can steal with a normal cyber-attack: it would take pretty persistent social engineering akin to widespread corruption.

It's just another proprietary network with its own gatekeepers. I don't see what the fundamental change is here over something like SWIFT.

It may only be temporarily competitive as it tries to penetrate the market. Once it reaches a sufficient enough market share, they will be able to hike up fees and disregard users like the systems that came before it.

You can just have a voluntary system wherein people decide beforehand how funds are distributed in the case of fraud.

That doesn't necessarily require a third party like a bank to surveil and supervise every transaction.

>But it isn't. It might be more secure because the average crypto holder is more savvy, but in terms of security properties, I wouldn't let my mom have a crypto wallet, and without a direct wallet, I don't see how crypto has different properties than a bank (an entity making transactions on your behalf), the interface is the same, but the implementation details are different. No?

It's true to some extent that crypto users are more savvy than most, but I think cryptocurrency also has obviously superior security properties to the conventional banking system, technically speaking. In the conventional banking system, there are no "savvy" users because everyone is equally insecure no matter what. In the conventional banking systems it's all based on trust. Trust that the bank obeys the law, trust that law enforcement is not corrupt, etc. The security mechanisms of cryptocurrency are at most a superset of what you can do with the conventional banking systems. If you want to have a third party supervising transactions, you use 2-of-3 multisig for example (https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Multisignature). If don't trust your family member to authorize payments without you, you use 2-of-2 multisig. If you don't trust yourself to not lose your keys, you back them up. If you want to limit your risk, you keep a small amount of cryptocurrency in a "hot" wallet.

Secondly, I don't think that the idea of a keypair is beyond the understanding of an average person. They effectively already know how to manage secrets in the current system: passwords, bank routing numbers, etc. It's just that the keypair is superior to these systems of authentication which often require you to reveal the secret itself to authenticate (credit card number), do not have enough entropy (4-digit-pin), are open source (E.g. security questions like "what's your mother's maiden name?"), or rely on other centralized systems (SMS-based 2FA). Even if you implemented some sort of "custodial keypair" that allowed you to transparently sign transactions without revealing your secret, that would be a major improvement over the current system which is based on (typically bad) secrets.

In many ways, the conventional banking system is more complicated than cryptocurrency, because the failures of cryptocurrencies are "solid" and well-defined (e.g. 51% attacks, MITM attacks, etc.) while the failures of the conventional banking system are "soft and fuzzy". For example, I was reading about a scam the other day wherein the attacker sends the victim a fake check, and asks them to cash out the money- this scam works because banks generally accept checks before validating them, allowing you to spend money that hasn't been validated yet and then charging you later. You might think this is obvious as a boomer, but as a zoomer who has never cashed a check before, this is not obvious at all.

And I'm not necessarily saying that cryptocurrency is the end-all-be-all of payment systems. There are superior systems like chaumian cash (https://taler.net/en/) but they require the permission of the existing banking system (which generally profits off providing services that surveil users and """fix""" the existing insecurity), so they haven't taken off.

I get the impression that regulation will never fix this because the nuances at hand will go over the head of any lawmaker who has merely accepted the insecurity of the status quo. I think that even if you get some libertarian or pro-cryptocurrency person in office which doesn't accept the current system, I highly doubt that they would make the right decision needed- it's more likely that any pro-cryptocurrency candidate is just going act in a way that benefits cryptocurrency owners.

Compare this to a topic like net neutrality. Even though I am a libertarian, I am more aligned with the democrats' views on net neutrality because of the obama administration's actions. Why? Not because the democrats are especially aligned to solve this problem, but merely they happened to have a good cabinet member or something that happened to understand the issue that election cycle and advise obama on that issue. It seems just as likely to me that the opposite might happen, albeit the democrats tend to be more pro-consumer in general. My point being that elected officials will not campaign on this because it is too nuanced, so solving this through politics is futile. It is better to just to improve cryptocurrency (or some other non-permissive technical solution) until it is competitive and forces the government/banking system to adapt (e.g. Project Hamilton).

P.S. I don't understand what you mean by a "direct wallet" here. A hardware wallet?

>I'd rather live in a world where banks are solely responsible for fraudulent withdrawals than one where banks can shirk responsibility to their patrons. That is only possible through regulation.

I'd rather live in a world in which effective security measures prevent fraud than a world in which there are weak security measures and endless debates as to who should be blamed when they fail. Regardless of your political stance, I think we can agree that the system is more technicially-broken than it is socially-broken.

I think understanding the problem in solely in terms of more/less regulation is a bone-headed thing to do.

I think what we have isn't a free market but a duopoly of mastercard/visa each with control over their respective domain. You can't upgrade the security, privacy, or efficiency of the network because the big players benefit from the insecurity, surveilance, and inefficiency.

Decreased regulation will probably increase their stranglehold on the industry, as you've noted. Increased regulation will cement current ineffective practices and make different buisness models impossible.

People turn to cryptocurrency, not because it's more private/secure/etc but because it is the most private/secure/etc system that works without the permission of the big rent-seekers.

Beyond 2FA, some type of chaumian cash like https://taler.net/en/ might help too.

But the problem is really downgrade attacks. There are multiple payment systems (bank wire, check, credit card ) and if there is one insecure way to make payments, then the whole system is broken.

That used to be the case a decade ago, but I find that most wifi hardware supports linux these days.

Is this worst-case scenario for linux users any worse than the average-case of windows users downloading an .exe from a vendor's website and running it?

If you do not already have a pubkey for which the code can be signed, then there is no chain of trust to verify in the first place. What signature would you check the code against in such a scenario? One you download from the vendor's same website?

Web3 is basicially about federated social networks. Maybe cryptocurrency plays a role, but the idea that it takes center-stage is one peddled by people who clearly have money to make.

I use cryptocurrency, however I don't remember ever working on, particiapting in, or endorsing Celcius.

Celcius is not decentralized, it is not a community led-project, it is not free/open source software.

So who is "they"? It's obvious to me that the type of person who endorses something like celcius just sees cryptocurrency as a free money machine, and does not actually have real princples regarding decentralization and whatnot.

Cryptocurrency can be strong against censorship etc. But it is clearly not sufficient in itself for censorship resistance etc (e.g. what value is being secured? from who? how?) It is analagous to saying that encryption is good for security but the presence of encryption is not sufficient for security (e.g. what data is being secured? from who? how?).

The fact that celcius can steal your deposit despite the fact that cryptocurrency is involved is analagous to the fact that GMail can read your emails despite the fact that HTTPS is involved.

custodially held cryptocurrency is not on the ledger. When you own cryptocurrency custodially with someone, what that usually means that they hold all the cryptocurrency and they have their own database of IOUs.

This is why it is unsafe to keep too many funds custodially with untrustworthy parties and why it is a good idea to minimize the amount you have custudially (e.g. on exchanges see mt gox fiasco)

> Kids and the Internet. About half the 10 year olds I know (which is more than a few) have phones with no filters on them. Kids running wild

And whose responsibility is that? People start treating the internet like TV and radio, so we have to start sanitizing it like TV and radio?

great solutions is maybe an overstatement. If you build a bridge that puts everyone else out of business, and later discriminate on what traffic is allowed on the bridge, and after that you put an expensive toll booth on that bridge, that's a problem for everyone else if no one else can compete. At some point, you are doing society a disservice. At some point, great solutions become meager solutions by merit of a monopoly's ownership.

The solution is to make the internet itself resilient to this mode of attack. Not to create a single company big enough to gatekeep and spy on the whole network and to just trust them to act virtuously forever.

What if you just had a balloon or something that was tethered to some ground station. Might be cheaper than a radio tower.

As someone who has admittedly worked on approximately 0 user-facing programs, it seems like there are not many revolutionary ideas when it comes UI.

I have some dream of a sort of user-interface system that exposes controls and data more directly to the user, independent of the author's stylistic choices. Sort of like semantic HTML with style-sheets that are configured on a per-user basis. It would be analogous to the unix shell in the sense that it would allow small programs to easily inter-operate, like plan9's pumbing or something. Instead of having a big monolithic program like kdenlive or blender, you would have a number of modifiable general-use programs that can be re-arranged to fit many use-cases in an extensible way.

But instead of that it just seems like every toolkit or library wants to be highly specialized and complex, and provide for a very specific use-case rather than making the most general-possible user interface that is universal. Programmers should not be concerned with the appearance of their UIs like window decorations or the layout of buttons or text fields, for the same reason they should not be concerned with the minutia of optimizing assembly-code. It leads to a non-portable design. That should be left up to the system.

I think there is an important difference between having stress and having a traumatic stress disorder.

The alternative to centralized moderation is voluntary peer-to-peer communication, not a firehose.

Something like secushare would take the place of forums I assume: https://secushare.org/society

I didn't read this whole thing but I agree it would be pretty funny if social media was legally forced to host spam

If you don't like it, just build your own state. smh.

The problem is that there are only a handful companies to do business with in the first place.

I think what you would expect in a sane market is that they are forced to negotiate a more expensive deal with the remaining service providers due to the supply/demand imbalance.

As there are so few service providers here, there's only a few levels of risk-tolerance/good-moral-fiber that you can negotiate on. Activists only need to push a site above the highest risk-tolerance level (which is unnaturally low due to this quantization)

>Something requiring decent scale is totally different than being a natural monopoly. There were plenty of DDoS protection options on the market.

Is it? There were a few DDoS protection services on the market, but they seemingly all dropped KF, so what then? Is that not analogous to kicked out by every ISP?

>I can't grow my own wheat, build my own car [...] - these all require economies of scale. But they aren't natural monopolies, there's plenty of competition in each space. On the other hand, internet is a natural monopoly because the capital costs are so high and are relatively inelastic with the number of users served.

You probably can grow your own wheat or build your own car. But I like your definition of monopoly.

I would say that more generally, that a monopoly is any business that has insufficient competition to motivate them from abusing their stakeholders (including customers, workers, etc.).

I couldn't disagree more. Without the silk road, bitcoin would have never taken off. monero has seemingly displaced bitcoin here.

The transparency of the ledger is key to the censorship, control, and abuse of the network.

>open source

Are you implying that the cryptonote/zerocoin projects like monero aren't open source?