I know there was the whole conversation relating to Elon's acquisition attempt, around Twitter blue-checking every one of their users, to establish identity. If you could actually find a way to use your crypto identity to get paid back a fraction of the value back from the personal information you're producing as you navigate the web, t…
I know there was the whole conversation relating to Elon's acquisition attempt, around Twitter blue-checking every one of their users, to establish identity. If you could actually find a way to use your crypto identity to get paid back a fraction of the value back from the personal information you're producing as you navigate the web, that would certainly be interesting. Like, opt back into the world of detailed tracking (which Apple and Google have been up-ending by way of FLoCs and the like). Have your data attach to your BirdCoin wallet, and the system that discloses your detailed tracking also tosses you a few pennies each time somebody wants to use that information.
I still am skeptical you need to do this on a distributed blockchain for it to work, though; it seems to me like pretty much anything you can design on a distributed blockchain could be done at lower cost (in time, and cumulative processor cycles and storage bits) using a more traditional replicated/multi-sited database, administered by a trusted authority. That could be a for-profit company like Twitter or Google, or, maybe better, it could be some kind of co-op like entity, or a non-profit like the Mozilla Foundation. But fundamentally because proof-of-work costs orders of magnitude more energy, and proof-of-stake has such built-in rich-get-richer issues, the value proposition to the mass of users is going to look better with the model that uses a trusted central clearinghouse. The overall income less expenses of the business that does the central clearinghouse model is better, and they can distribute some of that back to the users, and pocket some of it, or reinvest it in improving their tech.
On your first point, I think Andrew Yang had a petition going around for this exact purpose: get paid for your own data. On the second point, I think you’re stuck in the present: the current web3 conventional wisdom is we are all conceding to a future of low cost blockchains where everything is already on chain. AGM is correctly saying that of existing web2 infrastructure, attribution fits most seamlessly in web3. Agreed with your thesis, but I think it plays out differently in the defi land of anon/pseudonymous
"the current web3 conventional wisdom is we are all conceding to a future of low cost blockchains where everything is already on chain"
A blockchain like database can exist as a decentralized thing that's administered entirely algorithmically on every machine participating in the network, or it can exist with authoritative nodes.
Compare NFTs against people who are trading Pokemons in Pokemon Go, with Niantic's server network (which you can be sure has replicated nodes all over the world) serving as the central authority.
The transaction cost in the model with authoritative nodes is drastically lower. Like, at least three orders of magnitude. Transactions process much faster, and consume less energy. This isn't something that can ever be changed, it's essential to the proof-of-work concept.
Proof-of-stake improves on this, it probably only costs maybe _one_ order of magnitude more than a model that has authoritative nodes. You might be able to overcome that if distributed blockchains offered other benefits that anyone wanted. But the truth is it doesn't. The only thing the distributed blockchain allows for is that _if_ you actually own your keys -- you have them managed on your own hardware, participating in the network -- then it does away with the need for any kind of trusted authority. But the truth is that blockchain almost _instantly_ devolved back into having people trust some kind of central authority. What do you think all of the exchanges are? The vast majority of participants in cryptocurrency markets are _not_ running the algorithms on their own hardware. They may not even actually have a local copy of their keys. They're managing everything by way of an account on some exchange.
And in any case proof-of-stake basically algorithmically embeds the idea that people can let their money work for them, instead of working for their money. And you really can't hack around this problem, because making the system reward little guys more will allow attackers to just gin up a bunch of automated little guys.
You can throw as much jargon as you like at the problem, but there's just no there there. I say this as somebody who was around for the origins of this stuff. I can remember sitting around on the couches in the back corner of the Manhattan Lounge on a Death Guild Monday with Bram Cohen, talking through the transaction structure of MojoNation, which was a precursor to the BitTorrent protocol. I hosted the graduation party of Ian Goldberg, one of the foremost cypherpunks, when he finished his PhD at Cal. And I'm pretty sure I know who Satoshi was; I was at the party that's in the photo in this article: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10
It's been _fourteen years_. That's the timeline between when the internet first debuted to the mass public in the mid '90s, and 2010, when Amazon had already started driving brick-and-mortar booksellers out of business, and people were seeing social media overtake the advertising and news world. And blockchain's still puttering along as a solution in search of a problem.
I know there was the whole conversation relating to Elon's acquisition attempt, around Twitter blue-checking every one of their users, to establish identity. If you could actually find a way to use your crypto identity to get paid back a fraction of the value back from the personal information you're producing as you navigate the web, that would certainly be interesting. Like, opt back into the world of detailed tracking (which Apple and Google have been up-ending by way of FLoCs and the like). Have your data attach to your BirdCoin wallet, and the system that discloses your detailed tracking also tosses you a few pennies each time somebody wants to use that information.
I still am skeptical you need to do this on a distributed blockchain for it to work, though; it seems to me like pretty much anything you can design on a distributed blockchain could be done at lower cost (in time, and cumulative processor cycles and storage bits) using a more traditional replicated/multi-sited database, administered by a trusted authority. That could be a for-profit company like Twitter or Google, or, maybe better, it could be some kind of co-op like entity, or a non-profit like the Mozilla Foundation. But fundamentally because proof-of-work costs orders of magnitude more energy, and proof-of-stake has such built-in rich-get-richer issues, the value proposition to the mass of users is going to look better with the model that uses a trusted central clearinghouse. The overall income less expenses of the business that does the central clearinghouse model is better, and they can distribute some of that back to the users, and pocket some of it, or reinvest it in improving their tech.
On your first point, I think Andrew Yang had a petition going around for this exact purpose: get paid for your own data. On the second point, I think you’re stuck in the present: the current web3 conventional wisdom is we are all conceding to a future of low cost blockchains where everything is already on chain. AGM is correctly saying that of existing web2 infrastructure, attribution fits most seamlessly in web3. Agreed with your thesis, but I think it plays out differently in the defi land of anon/pseudonymous
"the current web3 conventional wisdom is we are all conceding to a future of low cost blockchains where everything is already on chain"
A blockchain like database can exist as a decentralized thing that's administered entirely algorithmically on every machine participating in the network, or it can exist with authoritative nodes.
Compare NFTs against people who are trading Pokemons in Pokemon Go, with Niantic's server network (which you can be sure has replicated nodes all over the world) serving as the central authority.
The transaction cost in the model with authoritative nodes is drastically lower. Like, at least three orders of magnitude. Transactions process much faster, and consume less energy. This isn't something that can ever be changed, it's essential to the proof-of-work concept.
Proof-of-stake improves on this, it probably only costs maybe _one_ order of magnitude more than a model that has authoritative nodes. You might be able to overcome that if distributed blockchains offered other benefits that anyone wanted. But the truth is it doesn't. The only thing the distributed blockchain allows for is that _if_ you actually own your keys -- you have them managed on your own hardware, participating in the network -- then it does away with the need for any kind of trusted authority. But the truth is that blockchain almost _instantly_ devolved back into having people trust some kind of central authority. What do you think all of the exchanges are? The vast majority of participants in cryptocurrency markets are _not_ running the algorithms on their own hardware. They may not even actually have a local copy of their keys. They're managing everything by way of an account on some exchange.
And in any case proof-of-stake basically algorithmically embeds the idea that people can let their money work for them, instead of working for their money. And you really can't hack around this problem, because making the system reward little guys more will allow attackers to just gin up a bunch of automated little guys.
You can throw as much jargon as you like at the problem, but there's just no there there. I say this as somebody who was around for the origins of this stuff. I can remember sitting around on the couches in the back corner of the Manhattan Lounge on a Death Guild Monday with Bram Cohen, talking through the transaction structure of MojoNation, which was a precursor to the BitTorrent protocol. I hosted the graduation party of Ian Goldberg, one of the foremost cypherpunks, when he finished his PhD at Cal. And I'm pretty sure I know who Satoshi was; I was at the party that's in the photo in this article: https://evanhatch.medium.com/len-sassaman-and-satoshi-e483c85c2b10
It's been _fourteen years_. That's the timeline between when the internet first debuted to the mass public in the mid '90s, and 2010, when Amazon had already started driving brick-and-mortar booksellers out of business, and people were seeing social media overtake the advertising and news world. And blockchain's still puttering along as a solution in search of a problem.