could they do something about the snake-oil peddlers everywhere online these days? ...and blockchain/crypto won't be transformative until they ditch the deflationary obsession: it's all a Ponzi scheme! if you want people to use the "Distributed Economy", don't build tools for hoarders. ...and don't keep changing the protocol all the time(it kills adoption -- because there's no way spend it, at least not legally: no services).
The Future Is Decentralized
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the merchant ship your single item of clothing w/out you giving them your address?
You create another Dapp, which connects the merchant with a PO-box like warehouse which has numbered drop locations. You pay for a drop location, and the merchant gets the id of that drop location only. They send it there, the warehouse Dapp has to pay somebody to do a physical verification that a drop happened. Then you get notified of the drop, and go pick it up.
You're right, for the average user this is a much better workflow than just given a shop your address and the shop sending you a package.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#53Isn't this fundamentally a political issue? Even unbreakable encryption and stuff like shortwave broadcasts can be outlawed by a government which will lead to a very few number of holdouts on the run from law and the rest of society is going to comply. True change can only happen if people passionate about this manage to convince the REST of the 95% to back them and adopt the ideals.
There needs to be a bigger benefit to the end users before decentralized services catch on. Widespread hard censorship of company run services might be just the kind of thing that decentralization needs to stop being a niche thing for people willing to put up with a diminished experience for the nebulous benefit of controlling your data and experience. Vanishingly few people want to deal with running their own services so the annoyances of not having control over what exactly happens on $socialMediumPlatform is smaller than the hassle of trying to move to mastodon then having no one to follow.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if that strictly goes to what the article was talking about, but nevertheless: Blockchains can prove that two parties once agreed on something, cheaply. That is remarkably valuable information (of such bricks economies are built). And it is truly remarkable that there is nothing in the blockchain that a government can do about it. Ditto anyone else. I believe it is financial information and preference da…
1. Click != agreement. Cf: phishing. 2. https://xkcd.com/538/ - applies for any sufficiently large entities and certainly governments.
Sorry can’t edit, but a perfect exhibit for (2) is on HN right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24545236
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we start colonizing planets. Anyway, even then it seems quite likely that each individual planet will still be very centralized. Imagine being a colonist on Mars. It's not like it'll be feasible to homestead in the first few decades, if ever. You depend on centralized government for the very air you breathe. It's the very opposite of living in a decentralized society.
We will live free in the asteroid belts and Oort cloud.
Those will probably become the most militarized zones in the solar system when planetary governments realize the WMD potential of an asteroid plunging into the sun's gravity well.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#56"You can follow him on Twitter" ...oh, the irony. Some good views, buy come on, at least do what you preach and use mastadon.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#57I hope that the web becomes more decentralized. I wonder, what catalyst would cause decentralization? My grandma doesn't care about decentralization and I am not sure she would be convinced even if I did my very best to explain it to her. I don't think it would change her habit of connecting with family via Facebook and using Google for search, mail etc.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#58Isn't this fundamentally a political issue? Even unbreakable encryption and stuff like shortwave broadcasts can be outlawed by a government which will lead to a very few number of holdouts on the run from law and the rest of society is going to comply. True change can only happen if people passionate about this manage to convince the REST of the 95% to back them and adopt the ideals.
There needs to be a bigger benefit to the end users before decentralized services catch on. Widespread hard censorship of company run services might be just the kind of thing that decentralization needs to stop being a niche thing for people willing to put up with a diminished experience for the nebulous benefit of controlling your data and experience. Vanishingly few people want to deal with running their own servic…
We need Justin Bieber to use mastadon.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#59Can't anyone still share information using the normal internet? You don't need the blockchain in order to set up a website and start sharing information. Few choose to do this because it is more work than using a centralized system. Using Facebook or twitter is much easier to use. What does the blockchain really change? So far, it doesn't seem to be any easier than sharing information the traditional way.
I agree, but I think "more profitable" is the underlying reason, not "easy." Facebook/twitter/Whatsapp/etc. could be a lot more distributed, open, etc. It wouldn't be harder. As you said, this is what the internet and www were designed to do. You don't need blockchain, but this is just another example of good decentralization tech that exists. It wouldn't have been hard to make whatsapp open, and/or distributed. It w…
It isn’t so obvious to me that you can make say, WhatsApp be distributed as easily as making it centralized.
It seems like all kinds of things like identity, message routing, nat-traversal etc, are harder in the distributed case a compared with a centralized server farm.
It’s also not clear to me that email is a good example of ‘distributed’. For a start most users actually do use centralized email services like gmail because it’s easier, and secondly even in the days before that, email has always relied on DNS, which is at best only partially distributed - i.e. although the participants are in a federation distributed across the network, there are still centralized authorities governing the root servers, the issuing of IP addresses, and of domain names.
Re: The Future Is Decentralized
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
There needs to be a bigger benefit to the end users before decentralized services catch on. Widespread hard censorship of company run services might be just the kind of thing that decentralization needs to stop being a niche thing for people willing to put up with a diminished experience for the nebulous benefit of controlling your data and experience. Vanishingly few people want to deal with running their own servic…
We need Justin Bieber to use mastadon.
Is he even that hot of a celebrity any more? I was not in that demographic at all but he seems to have fallen into the weird void of the 'formerly super famous' to me.
Either way it's an old strategy for businesses, pay or convince a celebrity to use your platform to bring their fans along. You want a wider span of 'influencers' though for sure because you don't want Mastodon to become the place with all the Beiber fans.