Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

orchidprotocol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 196 posts

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#101

Post by CryptoPunk »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #83
tbodt wrote: post #40

As soon as I see "Ethereum" I stop reading.

Call me zealous, but I'm the same way. I'm wary of the potential for monetary incentives to skew actual demand. I've seen how digital advertising has more or less destroyed much of the internet. Hopefully decentralization will prevent monopolies or oligopolies from forming, but I'm not so sure about that. At this point, it's hard to say what actual distributions of wealth might look like if people start using cryptoc…

The main design goal of cryptocurrency protocols and the like is immutability, so that the protocol operates according to formal specs and not according to the whims of economic stakeholders.

This is why the Finnish central bank's paper on Bitcoin called it a 'monopoly without a monopolist'.

I think the immutability of these kinds of protocols is certainly an improvement over the total control that economic stakeholders have in a centralized server-client architecture, with respect to power distribution.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#102

Post by QAPereo »

saurik wrote: post #22
kirillseva wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICO

Not exactly, though I can appreciate why it might seem like that at first glance; we are selling a "utility token". This distinction is interesting and important as we are not selling a token to raise money to do development, instead having taken on seed investors to help us get the right team of developers and advisors to do this initial build out. The sale of tokens will be made after we have this network fully wor…

“This distinction is interesting and important...”

...and will be at the eventual inquest I’m sure.

https://blog.colony.io/the-colony-token-sale-7ac14c845bc0

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#104

Post by ddevault »

ve55 wrote: post #94

There's a lot of projects that sound exactly like this. What they all have in common is that they all use an Ethereum (ERC20/22) token and all have very large amounts of money flowing into them, from private investors, companies, ICOs, etc. It would be nice to see more projects take routes that projects like tor take, where the founders do not accept millions of dollars of money before they even have a working and co…

Check out cjdns for a less stupid, less blockchain BS take on fixing the internet.

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#106

Post by paulsutter »

ve55 wrote: post #94

There's a lot of projects that sound exactly like this. What they all have in common is that they all use an Ethereum (ERC20/22) token and all have very large amounts of money flowing into them, from private investors, companies, ICOs, etc. It would be nice to see more projects take routes that projects like tor take, where the founders do not accept millions of dollars of money before they even have a working and co…

The best thing about the project is that the tokens will be valued by use from the beginning and not with an ICO.

Could you name the other projects that you think are better? Given the interest in this article I’m sure others would be interested as well.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#108

Post by colordrops »

confounded wrote: post #76

Why were venture capitalists interested in funding this? What do they get out of it? How and when do you intend to ‘exit’? (Apologies for the skeptical tone, I think this seems like a cool idea.)

Very good question that I'm curious about as well. The cynic inside me could think of some nefarious reasons, but I can also imagine some legitimate ones, such as taking a cut of the eth made in bandwidth transactions, and opening up markets for other services that were previously impenetrable, such as China.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#109

Post by g_simonsson »

ve55 wrote: post #94

There's a lot of projects that sound exactly like this. What they all have in common is that they all use an Ethereum (ERC20/22) token and all have very large amounts of money flowing into them, from private investors, companies, ICOs, etc. It would be nice to see more projects take routes that projects like tor take, where the founders do not accept millions of dollars of money before they even have a working and co…

What's wrong with raising money? Is it more ethical to build systems while living of one's savings?

One of the reasons why there's is a lot of Ethereum-based projects currently raising a lot of money is because token-based systems avoid relying on the traditional financial system for payments and value transfers. If your app is using traditional payments it can be shut down by your payment provider.

Blockchain-based tokens allow users to be in control of their own funds and not have their payments tracked or tied to their identity. I'd say that's a pretty big win.

Moreover ERC20-based tokens allows for engineering of incentives in a way that is far more efficient than company shares. It can accelerate network effects in a way that was simply not possible before blockchain technology.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#110

Post by g_simonsson »

toxic_ wrote: post #91
saurik wrote: post #5

Hello! My name is Jay Freeman (saurik), and I was both deeply involved in the design of Orchid's protocol as well as in charge of the initial implementation of the networking and routing logic, and am happy to try to answer any questions people might have about what we are working on! (edit:) g_simonsson, who now has an account on Hacker News and has joined this thread, is Gustav Simonsson, another developer working…

Using PoW `Medallions' on top of a PoW blockchain to prevent Sybil attacks seems redundant. Why not just require Ether commitments from bandwidth providers? Users can then set a configurable threshold for commitment lengths/amounts according to individual needs. This is the first I'm hearing of probabilistic payments. Are you aware of any other systems, proposed or operational, using this to pay for bandwidth? It see…

While not very well described in the whitepaper, the system actually uses token commitments to verify source nodes. Relay and exit nodes verify that the connecting source node has enough token committed (locked up in an Ethereum smart contract) before and after accepting connections / payments.

The only two operational systems I'm aware of using probabilistic payments is blockchain Proof-of-Work, where mining rewards can be viewed as probabilistic (though with annoyingly high variance) and blockchain-based lotteries.

IMO probabilistic payments can replace payment channels in quite a few blockchain-based systems such as https://gridplus.io/ (basically in systems/apps where a service is provided that is (very) granular and continuous (video streaming would be another example))

Post reply on HN