Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting the centralized in decentralized.
Probably so. Centralized isn't always a bad word as you can see from the tire fire that is crypto.
Most crypto is fairly centralised, ironically.
Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
191–199 of 199 posts
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Except cryptocurrencies aren't any good for that, because the transaction costs are too high, and the value of cryptocurrencies too volatile. Cryptocurrencies are not a medium of exchange. 2. Now, what's a valid use-case for a smart contract, and please explain how it functions if there's a bug in the contract? 3. Maybe. You'll need to provide a more concrete use-case. Also, you have the outside-world problem (you…
1. If you're sending a portion of your monthly wages as a remittance to your family, spending a dollar[1] isn't too much. 2. A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency. (That's not appropriate or necessary for every organisation, but it can be an improvement on one person hosting a server and saying "Trust me"). If there's a bug in the contract, you have t…
The only concrete use case you've offered “is unlikely to deliver substantial gains to the industry when compared to alternatives” such as shared databases, which don't require any costly consensus algorithm.
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have literally no idea what a good or bad answer even looks like, it's not time to standardize it at this sort of formal level yet. Beyond that, some of this is just odd. " It's harmful because whatever future methods might emerge will relegated to a second class for having failed to 'get in' on the initial standard." Good. We can deal with that in v2.0. Trying to design this kind of thing to anticipate every…
> Trying to design this kind of thing to anticipate every possible future good thing that might come along is a folly. If you can't standardize them yet because you don't even know Whatever you design for the web stays on the web for decades. So yes, you have to look into the future and anticipate things. It's not "move fast and break things"
I'm not at all suggesting move fast and break things.
Yes, things stay for decades. So don't standardize something when you have literally no idea what good looks like.
There is a limit to anticipation. Trying to guess what the world will look like 10 years from now is dumb. Nobody does it well.
So just because v1 will have inertia doesn't mean you will actually predict the future more successfully. Instead, you have to figure out how you deal with that inertia.
In practice, the reason things have tremendous intertia is because they are often not built to be migrated from or to in a relatively seamless way.
Those standards that allow for easy migration tend to see much faster adoption of new versions.
Those that don't, the old standards linger even longer.
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have literally no idea what a good or bad answer even looks like, it's not time to standardize it at this sort of formal level yet. Beyond that, some of this is just odd. " It's harmful because whatever future methods might emerge will relegated to a second class for having failed to 'get in' on the initial standard." Good. We can deal with that in v2.0. Trying to design this kind of thing to anticipate every…
> Good. We can deal with that in v2.0. There are many, many examples of v2.0 standards that, although better in every respect, never actually supplant v1. v1 has immense inertia. It's not all as willy nilly as it might seem. W3C standardized the parts they could without painting themselves into a corner and wisely factored out the part they couldn't. There is an official W3C hosted registry of methods, each with a sp…
Yes, v1 often has immense inertia. This is true, but it will actually not make you any better at predicting the future, and as i said elsewhere, we are extremely bad at that already.
Step into the shoes of a developer 10 years ago, and look the world now. Look ohw much is changed in a way that would affect this stuff.
Trying to have successfully anticipated it simply won't work. Instead, you build standards to be easy to transition from/to.
That is what enables you to upgrade standards and get reasonable adoption of new versions.
While painful, that is the only path that ever works.
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency. A smart contract is neither smart, nor a contract. It's a program, written in an esoteric language, and running in the world's most inefficient VM. It's so bad and overcomplicated that "smart contract" authors themselves routinely make mistakes in code equivalent to the most basic of actual contracts. And since…
Sorry, but you sound like tech skeptics in every generation ever, saying “the Dewey Decimal system works perfectly well, why do we need computers just to find a book”? (Yes, I have heard this exact objection raised by radio hosts to early computer pioneers who tried to explain why computers will become useful for regular people.) Email became useful and replaced the post office Web 1.0 became useful and replaced TV,…
Here's the problem: people don't care about even one of the eight things you listed there. None of these things matter to the common person, and they certainly don't matter to the preeminent payment infrastructure.
Nobody here is shilling for centralized services, most of us are veterans of decentralized tech giving you warnings. Many projects have encountered these same issues, and have died because they have no purpose. Blockchains are little more than nerd porn, the average banker isn't going to look a trustless infrastructure and all of the sudden "get it". That's one of many insurmountable problems that cryptocurrency faces, and it has been successfully blocking adoption of it in the real world for more than 10 years. You can't simply shrug off decades of decentralized failure without applying the lessons you learned from watching them fall. Unfortunately, every cryptocurrency I've found is tone-deaf to these concerns, and prefers to replace genuine conversation with marketing crap.
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Crypto-enthusiasts ignore how regulations existed for good reasons before regulatory capture made a mess of things. What way do you propose out of regulatory capture?
Transparency laws, stricter regulation on moving between regulatory agencies and regulated industries, in general, better democratic accountability. All of these are imperfect, but it's also the case that cryptocurrency doesn't make any of it better.
>stricter regulation on moving between regulatory agencies and regulated industries
You seem to assume the existence of a competent and non-corrupt metaregulator (some form of supervisory body that would "regulate the regulators" and somehow prevent "revolving door" scenarios).
- If it exists, why was long-term regulatory capture possible in the first place?
- If it doesn't, how would we go about instituting one?
We're on Hacker News. Exit wishful thinking, enter systems thinking.
- Feedback between regulatory agency and regulated industry: continuous.
- Feedback between regulatory agency and supervisory body: continuous.
- Feedback between supervisory body and sovereign (=the general public getting shafted by the regulatory capture): discrete, and of appalingly low resolution.
I'm told that in the world's dominant democracy, where most of the ideas that we're discussing originate, the sovereign is throttled to expressing its interest in the form of a binary decision once every ~35000 hours.
So, the boffins at the revolving door email each other and call each other on the phone all the time, but the public can only talk to the legislature at the grand rate of 1 bit per 4 years? In that case, I'm prone to applying the concept of "regulatory capture" to any and all regulation that nominally serve the public interest. They simply don't have the bandwidth to establish what the public interest is.
Even at Bitcoin's "low" speed of 7 transactions per second, on-chain voting would still support a much faster democratic process. That's why people are opposed to it. For now, people use cryptos to vote mostly on inconsequential things. That's while the quirks are being ironed out. Some crypto bros who got in for teh gainz got shafted. So what. Maybe in a fairer economic system a fool and his money would be parted even more easily.
Currently, crypto does not work... except as a public "exit"/"no confidence" vote towards the methods through which industry is organized and regulation is instituted. For one to devote time and effort to this emergent form of economic organization, no matter how uncertain its realities might be, is simply to refuse to take part in maintaining a status quo that one has had no part in establishing - and to look for alternatives, no matter how tenuous.
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#197Something that should be a bit of a warning flag is that I have two decades of identity-related experience but I still have no idea what DID even is . For reference, I've worked with three vendors' implementations of LDAP, several versions of SAML, OAuth, JWT, Okta, Azure Active Directory, etc, etc... I've even deployed Smart Card authentication in the field several times. I literally have no idea, not a clue what DI…
It's a standardized version of Keybase IDs (which can also support non key based identity if you choose)
Poor Keybase...
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
What advantages does DID have to something like OpenID? Which is actually decentralised without a central registry.
This is OpenID's privacy policy: https://openid.net/foundation/members/privacy_policy They will turn your information to the authority when requested. How is that decentralised?
OpenID is a standard. Openid.net is one provider not the only provider. You are free to use another provider.
Re: Mozilla and Google Objections Overruled on “Decentralized Identifiers” by W3C
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
What advantages does DID have to something like OpenID? Which is actually decentralised without a central registry.
This is OpenID's privacy policy: https://openid.net/foundation/members/privacy_policy They will turn your information to the authority when requested. How is that decentralised?
It's decentralised because you can pick up any other provider or even host your own (which I did, until OpenID declined from popularity and wasn't accepted anywhere any more).