The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

Is it really? I think that was true for a period of time, but that period had come and gone for the most part.

Google searches are pretty bad, and it's only a matter of time before it even loses its remaining relevance with normies.

Amazon, I can't really find much wrong with to be honest.

Reddit hung itself by its own rope with its redesign that turned it into yet another infinite scroll content site, taking the focus away from conversations and to memes and gifs. The site is a garbage can, and it's mostly crazies who are left. Reddit will remain relevant until people no longer use it as an alternative for finding real opinions that they can't find using Google. Its days are definitely numbered in terms of relevancy. You know it's bad when you're on your home feed and they shove in a live cam of a girl jiggling her rear end that you never subscribed to.

Facebook? I know almost no one under 60 who actually uses it or makes posts. Everyone's moved on to Instagram. I have 20 cousins and we communicate through Messenger (not my idea, I'd prefer Signal at least), but even a handful of them aren't even on Messenger anymore. Most of the groups are crap, though the Marketplace is halfway decent, which isn't hard to do when your only competition is Craigslist.

Twitter has remained relevant because of celebrities and journalists, and fewer and fewer people care about either of those groups anymore. More alternatives for different niches are going to pop up and while Twitter will never go away, it's well on its way to being nothing more than a sad joke.

> Discovery needs to be reimagined.

Right-o. As someone pointed out the other day, I think big search engines in their current form are on the way out. Hopefully we can move on to something that can rely on independent niche search engines instead of allowing megacorporations to be the gateway to the web. At this point I'm either using `site:` syntax with DDG or using the search features directly on certain sites. The only search terms I seem to get much useful for with DDG or Google is coding documentation. Anything else seems rigged and controlled.

E.g., Sam runs a Web site and wants to charge each user some small amount, say, $0.001 up to $0.10, including users in foreign countries, for each visit. Sam is eager to let his users pay with some major NFT.

Joe wants to use Sam's site and other sites with such a charging technique so buys in whatever fiat currency his country uses, say, $10.00 worth of some NFT. Then Joe uses Sam's site and pays with some NFT money. That NFT tokens can be divided into many parts is crucial here.

Once a day Sam converts all his NFT revenue to dollars (or whatever fiat currency is used in his country).

So, net, the money flow is from Joe's fiat money to $10.00 WORTH of some NFT to Sam's revenue in NFT to Sam's revenue in his fiat money.

Point 1: The NFT is held by Joe and Sam for only a short time and is used only as a convenient way to move many small amounts of money.

Point 2: Neither Joe nor Sam cares what each whole token of the NFT is worth.

Point 3: Investors who want to speculate on the long term value of a NFT tokens have risks from "unknown unknowns".

Point 4: If each of 1 billion people do what Joe does, hold nearly all that NFT, and on average hold only $10.00 worth, then we have an estimate of the maximum the investors can make.

2) "zero knowledge" : Suppose I want to prove to you (or at least, give you very strong evidence) that I know a 3-coloring for the graph, but I don't want to give you any information about how to color the graph with 3 colors.

This can be done in a way where I first randomly permute the 3 colors, and then commit to a particular coloring without showing you anything about it (e.g. I give each node on the graph a random salt, and show you the hash of (the color and the salt appended) for each node ), and ask you to pick any two nodes of the graph. I reveal the color and salt for those two nodes, and you can check that they make the hash I said they did. If the two nodes are connected by an edge, then the colors I give have to be different (if they are the same then my proof is invalid and you shouldn't believe my claim that I have a coloring of the graph with 3 colors.)

By repeating this process many times (each time I randomly permute the colors/names-of-the-colors, and make a new commitment about each node), and each time you choose a random pair of (adjacent) vertices, then, if I didn't actually have a coloring of it with 3 colors, there's a high chance you would eventually find that the pairs you asked me to reveal, have the same color. So, if we keep doing this, and I'm telling the truth, eventually you should have strong evidence that I have a coloring for it, but without you getting any information about that coloring (other than that it is one) (because by permuting the colors each time, the only info you get about the nodes you asked about, is that the colors are different, which is already implied by it being a coloring.)

So, that would be a zero knowledge proof that I know how to color that graph using only 3 colors, with no 2 nodes having the same color.

(of course, the thing with coloring graphs is just an example, one which is relatively easy to give a protocol for.)

3) "non-interactive" : accomplishing the same sort of thing, except instead of us sending many messages back and forth like in what I described above, instead, I just do one computation (using the knowledge I have), and then I give you the output of that computation, and you can check that with some algorithm, and the algorithm says "yep" if I gave you a good output, and "nope" if I gave you a bad output, and, if I had the info I claim to have and used it for the input to my computation, then you will always get the result "yep", while if I don't have the info I claim to have, then the probability that I succeed in giving you a good output, one which would make your program say "yep", is negligible.

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Hopefully that helps make the idea more clear?

You might be wondering why this idea is applicable to cryptocurrency stuff?

A number of reasons. Being able to prove that you have some information that satisfies a given property, without revealing the information, is fairly powerful.

Exactly like crypto often is.