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EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

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Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#91

Post by 908B64B197 »

shrimpx wrote: post #79

With apologies to my European friends (I’m also European), this article illustrates how the EU is a second rate sucker in technology. While they boast and believe that they’re cutting edge because they’re investing in Blockchain, the likely reality is that they’re jumping on a false trend and Blockchain and its thousands of buzzwords will fizzle out, as it’s sustained only by fomo and speculation.

I'm curious who oversees these expenditures, and what their qualifications are.

Governments typically have sub-par IT and software engineering (when done in house). When it's venture capital, investors are playing with their own money*, so there's a good incentive to be right and pick the right people/tech. But here, it seems like it's bureaucrats that are going to be deciding what to invest in, isn't it?

DARPA got it right a couple of times in the past, so I could be wrong.

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#92

Post by MaxBarraclough »

superkuh wrote: post #11

It's disappointing to see this project, like many other decentralized web projects, has tunnel vision with respect to "cool technologies". The real distributed web is not non-web protocols, blockchains, or the like. The real distributed web is THE WEB HTTP servers and every single individual running their own web server to host their content (and then syndicate on whatever walled gardens are most profitable after). C…

> No, the decentralized web is the decentalized web. And it's easy to be a part of it.

The IndieWeb community deserve a mention here, they're all about exactly this kind of thing: https://indieweb.org/

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#93

Post by natural219 »

Geee wrote: post #78
natural219 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely don't need some crypto-based financial scheme to run decentralized web applications. Just some kind of open standard & a set of motivations and incentives to keep the system running and improving. American ideas of decentralization tend to make the root assumption that financial incentives are the only thing that drive human motivation, so almost every decentralization project gets "blockchained" event…

Someone has to pay for the resources. If you're going to compete with Facebook, then someone has to pay for billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Voluntarist P2P can work to an extent when everyone donates their computer to the task, but a better way is to allow people to pay and let experts run the nodes. People get better quality service, and experts can make a living by providing the service. Voluntarist ne…

I 100% get that, and fwiw I'm fully supportive of any scheme that eventually works out to fund traditional app development.

I admit I was more skeptical in ~2017 when these grand claims were made, and it seemed like you needed to be deeply up-to-date with latest crypto happenings to be able to navigate the 'blockchain dApp' world.

I'm very supportive and admiring of things like Protocol Labs, which have put their money where their mouth is to translate the windfall from the Filecoin IPO into projects that make more sense to my traditional webapp brain, like the latest Matrix. So genuine kudos to everyone involved, I'm happy that this model exists and the ecosystem does eventually deliver in some cases.

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#94

Post by mariusor »

mhitza wrote: post #2

Got a bit of envy for the people that get funds/grants for their idea. I'm always "lucky" enough to find the call for proposals that match my skills and interest past their closing date. Must be a sign :)

I always look at the problem as the people that actually build cool tech don't really have the time to find grants and submit proposals. I personally haven't really seen something concrete and useful coming out from someone that has won one.

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#95

Post by fleddr »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #85

I think a definition of "Decentralized web" should mean is in order. The Internet/Arpa net was created to be decentralized from the beginning. If a node, or more nodes went down, the rest of the network may be able to keep working. If you, and me and all of our friends and all of their friends all ran out own web servers from our homes it would be decentralized to the extent that if a server disconnected all the othe…

"The prevalence of enormously centralized monopolies on the internet is not a result of its technical architecture, but rather narrow business interests and a terminal lack of regulation."

Neither business interests or regulation have anything to do with something being centralized or not.

If you would launch "Thinkbeat's blog", in the traditional sense of web publishing, it is 100% centralized. Regardless of its size or your good or bad intentions.

You would be in full control of it. You could intentionally retire the site, and all information and access is lost, forever. You could accidentally do that by forgetting to pay a bill.

Another scenario, you publish something fishy on your blog, and get banned from the blogging platform, or whichever dependency you rely on.

Further, all content on the blog is 100% owned by you, and none of it by the users. So you would also own and control comments to the blog, and arbitrarily edit or delete them.

You have 100% control on everything, and users none at all.

A decentralized version of your blog would be radically different. You can't just retire it. You can't permanent delete or overwrite prior entries. Commenters may actually own their own comments.

I know, a blog is not a good example and a poor use case, just saying that the decentralized web very much is a difference in technical architecture.

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#96

Post by xondono »

throwaway739 wrote: post #27
xondono wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Belligerently? He is just rising a point. Government “innovation” subsidies move a lot of money into shinny “new” ideas, but in EU there’s no thought about how to create innovation itself. Just as an example, a friend of mine roasts coffee for a living. He is considering closing shop, because he is succeeding too much. At the point he is, he’ll be required to register as a business, which in Spain means he will have…

Do you realize you are saying that companies shouldn't pay any taxes?

No I’m not, I’m saying that some tax systems make no sense. The only way to create a company in Spain is to flunk regulations. Some are meaningless and people ignore them all the time, some aren’t.

Another example. When escape rooms we’re trending, me and some friends considered building one. One of the partners didn’t want to get into trouble on it, so he wanted everything by the book.

Spanish regulation requires a business to specify their “economic activity” with a codified value. The list is in the thousands, with a lot of non defined ambiguous terms.

Evidently “escape room” was new, so it wasn’t on the list (and it still isn’t). The closest was “gambling business”, which of course a escape room isn’t. It also has a lot more paperwork and additional taxes.

Faced with this conundrum, we went around to the 3 or 4 escape rooms that were near enough to visit and asked them. Some of them just wrote a random number and called it a day. One of them was registered as a butchers…

The legal exposure it represented was simply too big and we abandoned the idea. there was no good reason for that legal exposure.

The statistics then are hardly surprising. Unemployment here is >14%, just to name one.

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#98

Post by CryptoPunk »

vkk8 wrote: post #57
wb14123 wrote: post #41

I never really understand the hype behind blockchain related technologies. The low transaction throughput, high compute resource demands makes it pretty unusable in most cases. Lots of workaround either has security problem or violated the idea of decentralization of blockchain, which makes it meaningless to use blockchain. Oh, there is also PoS which doesn't need CPU for mining, but doesn't anyone think it's irony t…

I'm also puzzled by the fact that EU is funding this. Usually states and state-like entities are exactly the ones who don't want people to use decentralized technologies, because they often make laws difficult or impossible to enforce. In fact, wanting to circumvent laws is the only reason why people en mass would ever want to use decentralized technologies. I'm not necessarily always against this (there are some rea…

>>I'm also puzzled by the fact that EU is funding this. Usually states and state-like entities are exactly the ones who don't want people to use decentralized technologies, because they often make laws difficult or impossible to enforce.

Ideally, the state represents the interests of the people, and it's in the interest of the people for decentralized technologies to be better funded, so that abusive government and corporate power can be checked.

Therefore, one of the activities of a truly democratic government will be to contribute to the creation and enhancement of technologies and institutions that act as non-political checks on government and concentrated corporate power, like privacy and decentralized communication protocols, physical and electronic cash, etc.

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#99

Post by Geee »

natural219 wrote: post #93
Geee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has to pay for the resources. If you're going to compete with Facebook, then someone has to pay for billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. Voluntarist P2P can work to an extent when everyone donates their computer to the task, but a better way is to allow people to pay and let experts run the nodes. People get better quality service, and experts can make a living by providing the service. Voluntarist ne…

I 100% get that, and fwiw I'm fully supportive of any scheme that eventually works out to fund traditional app development. I admit I was more skeptical in ~2017 when these grand claims were made, and it seemed like you needed to be deeply up-to-date with latest crypto happenings to be able to navigate the 'blockchain dApp' world. I'm very supportive and admiring of things like Protocol Labs, which have put their mon…

I have to say that I don't know any blockchain P2P-networks that have succesfully done this (Sia/Skynet maybe). I don't advocate for 'token for every app' or ICOs, which end up being ponzi schemes. Currently I'm more interested in what's being built on Bitcoin and Lightning Network, such as https://www.impervious.ai and the ecosystem on https://getumbrel.com

Re: EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web

#100

Post by wb14123 »

abetusk wrote: post #83
wb14123 wrote: post #41

I never really understand the hype behind blockchain related technologies. The low transaction throughput, high compute resource demands makes it pretty unusable in most cases. Lots of workaround either has security problem or violated the idea of decentralization of blockchain, which makes it meaningless to use blockchain. Oh, there is also PoS which doesn't need CPU for mining, but doesn't anyone think it's irony t…

Cryptocurrency uses the blockchain as a fundamental building block. For good faith proponents of cryptocurrencies, the appeal is that they provide the potential to do low friction digital payments (e.g. "micropayments"), reduce the barrier to entry to participate in financial transactions and allow for a single, global unifying currency. You may disagree that Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, has the potential to…

Yes, the intention of Bitcoin is good, and as a research paper, the idea of Blockchain is very genius and interesting. But back to the use case, it must has the basic function first then add more features to it. With low throughput and high fee, it can barely be used widely in normal life, especially for "micropayments". Then what's the point to make it decentralized?

I had some experience with L2 solution, Polygon specifically. As you mentioned, it compromises security or/and decentralization. And I don't think it's a "happy" compromise, since the weak point of a system depends on it's weakest point. If L2 chain has a security or centralization problem, then it can be exploited so that the whole system has such problem.

Even if the blockchain technology can replace current banking system, it's not the solution for problems like monopoly. It just replaced the companies/organizations that are in the monopoly position. Look at the crypto concurrency exchange market and mining farms, you can get a sense.

To make it clear, by "Why not let big company play the monopoly?", I mean monopoly is a bad thing, which would happen if there is no regulation. So in the system of Blockchains, we still need the regulations we need in the current system. I know there are some problems in our political and economical system, but I don't believe Blockchain is the answer.

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