171–180 of 196 posts
As soon as I see "Ethereum" I stop reading.
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments here?
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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…
Raising money to fund work is not the issue in my view. But raising money from venture capital firms has implications that I find hard to reconcile with the stated goals of this particular project. Venture capital funds many projects in the hope that a tiny share of them will pay for all the others and a profit on top of it. So for this project to meet the expectations of its owners it would have to be extremely lucr…
Basically, the deal is that our investors bought the right to future Orchid Tokens, which is a new token used for payments within the Orchid Network. Since it's a utility token it's value should be driven by the utility of the network - the size, health and of course user count of the network.
Since there is a huge market for VPNs which overlaps with the utility of Orchid in terms of enabling access where there is censorship, if Orchid can grab a small part of this market then the utility of the network would drive the price of the token.
Whether this is the right model remains to be seen, and like any project there could be a conflict of interest if investors push for features that are not aligned with the project vision.
The difference is that, unlike traditional startups that are in control of their IP and the deployment of their software, once the Orchid Network is deployed, no one controls it but the users who run nodes. They choose what software to run for their source, relay and exit nodes, and no one can force them to upgrade to some new version. This is similar to other decentralized networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In practice the developers and teams behind decentralized networks do hold some power of software upgrades from their reputation and control of github repos, etc. But if push comes to show and for example we try to add payment fees or adds or other types of monetization, then users are very likely to simply reject such upgrades or even outright fork client software (thus effectively forking the network once such clients are deployed).
It is my hope that this is a structure that allows for both raising money from VCs and still end up with a truly decentralized network. We'd love to get feedback on this and understand what we can do to ensure that the network remains controlled by it's users and not (too much) influenced by any specific group.
https://www.coindesk.com/saft-arrives-simple-investor-agreem...
This sounds like a good idea. One problem with things like tor and i2p is you want to have tons of traffic so as to hide things from the various spies, but it is hard to get enough people to support nodes. Add a token and perhaps that problem will be solved.
A token seems to solve the supply side (relay and exit nodes) but what about the demand side? Why would anyone who doesn't care about subverting censorship or surveillance pay for this?
And as Orchid is a P2P market place with no middlemen or fees, it should find a market equilibrium that is more efficient than VPNs, with a lower price per data relayed.
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> I will consider myself to have won that round, not lost ;P. If fame and victory are what your company is going after, instead of taking care of your potential users, then I am sorry that you won't have my support. Btw, thank you for creating cydia if you were the author.
To "win" here means "win a battle on the road to an Internet free of surveillance". I (personally) firmly believe that if China were to do that, that the people would not stand for it; any form of "half solution" or "compromise position" where the Chinese govnerment can block just enough to remove access to material that bothers them while only minority inconveniencing users, is a world in which this form of freedom…
I'm glad that it is ridiculously unlikely you "win".
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So, I don't know your mother, and can't say what kind of extreme technical needs she might have as part of her lifestyle or job; but, I guess I will presume you asked this question from the depressingly stereotypical perspective of "assuming peoples' mothers are not very technically skilled as they are older women, how would a mother use it" and answer your question anyway :(. So, she might not use the first version,…
So the reasons she might use it are: * you install it on her computer * it has a simple user interface * it has a non-technical sounding name Is that correct? What if you reinterpret "my mother" to be "average internet user, in a country with average internet freedoms, who doesn't read HN etc"?
Internet users who may be less technical and may not care about surveillance or Internet freedom would still be interested when they hear "hey if you install this app you get a few $ (worth of tokens) per month just for sharing your bandwidth"
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Check out cjdns for a less stupid, less blockchain BS take on fixing the internet. https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
One question I still haven't found answer to: what's with the name? What does it mean / why is it the way it is? Should it be read as CJ DNS, i.e. something to do with DNS? Or CJD (author's initials) NS (??? again, name server?)? C (?) J (JavaScript/Node) DNS? Related, what the hell it is, actually? You say in other comment that it's a mesh network, they say it's a network, but I see a program to install. How a progr…
"Where did the name cjdns come from?
Cjdns was based on a codebase which was originally intended to handle name resolution (DNS) and so it was a combination of 'cjd' and 'dns'. The project changed direction early on and currently is still lacking DNS resolution but the name stuck. Make up your own acronym for it if you like."
Source: https://github.com/SlashRoot/cjdns
What is it? The author has said it is meant to be a single binary: a router. The router accepts "customized" IPv6 addresses, e.g., each address contains a public key fingerprint. The packets are also custom, each containing a full route to the destination, which might be reminiscent of the bang path in UUCP. The nodejs stuff is just a prototype method of getting data from the router.
I remember watching a video of him explaining this at a cafe a number of years ago. Not sure if that was the first "public announcement". In that video he mentions a concern over censorship via DNS. And then he states that at a certain point he realized routing was easier to do than DNS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zINQYkl01N8
He uses NaCl. As for the name "cjdns" and why he started out experimenting with DNS, my guess was always that the original experimentation he did with NaCl was probably related to encrypting and forwarding DNS packets (or perhaps custom "name system" packets), since encrypting DNS packets was the "PoC" for NaCl.
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A token seems to solve the supply side (relay and exit nodes) but what about the demand side? Why would anyone who doesn't care about subverting censorship or surveillance pay for this?
Because people currently pay for VPNs, and Orchid effectively provides some of the features of VPNs, with the added benefit that there is no central VPN provider who logs your (meta) data and sells it for profit. And as Orchid is a P2P market place with no middlemen or fees, it should find a market equilibrium that is more efficient than VPNs, with a lower price per data relayed.
I'd consider that to be worse than the risk of a semi-trustworthy VPN provider keeping logs, depending on your threat model.
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If only there was a document describing the details of the design that you could read
I mean, I already said I know about the whitepaper. I'm very sorry that I ask for a bit more of a tl;dr of it when there's another new hot blockchain startup. Eh, you know, one of those you see every other day. Why not leave it to them to decide if they want to acknowledge my feedback or not? I'm not forcing anyone to do anything here.
They call it a protocol but this is very much a startup/ICO, having raised nearly $5m in seed. Not that there is anything wrong with this, it seems like a very cool project. But it does seem to be very intentionally presenting itself as something that is closer to a not-for-profit a la Tor.
It is maybe worth noting that we had actually looked into whether we could be registered as a non-profit and still raise money by these means to build out our implementation and market it to the world, and that was simply not possible :/. We are, however, all deeply committed to open source, and are working on how to best ensure that this is enforced in the company's charter (such that even if there are any future ch…
With the general public, you might start with some things they are unhappy about with the present internet, and for each of them explain how things would be better for them if they used Orchid.
For the more techy minded, you could do a list of similar things like tor or IPFS, and for each of them explain how Orchid is similar or different, and what are your reasons for deciding to make it that way.