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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @drdoom 5 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: Removing the last few middleman tech
Neat idea! It was interesting to read up on UUCP just now. New reinvents old.
Oh that's a really fascinating (and mildly disturbing yet not surprising) tidbit, see what they are up to there.
Again here we have an example of providers making decisions in the middle of what should otherwise be neutral communication.
However, if the user is the one who is doing the negotiation, ie- setting the price they demand for new inbound messages from untrusted parties - does this mitigate your concern? There could be also a zero or low fee kind of 'spam' box the interface builds in that ultimately allows for anyone to send a message to anybody (or endpoint) provided there is some way to reliably transmit those messages (which depending on our design could result in the same fate as an exceedingly low fee on a BTC tx).
Exactly these are local blockchains (with free addressing/hashing out of the box) that each node can install/include as part of its (Docker and/or perhaps Nix) stack to provide verifiable file integrity. This hypothetical protocol could then be used to reflect that verification in the user's UI to show them that they are indeed looking at the correct file & that everything is working as intended.
Since each node can run Git or ZFS in isolation there is not one 'the blockchain' to download; operators are hosting mini-blockchains and can choose to host/sync/replicate as many or as few of them as they so desire (ie- maybe you just want to host your own website and thats it - others might choose to host your site or a number of their favorite sites - a documentary filmmaker might choose to host his films).
Either way, some kind of distributed index/ledger mechanism can be deployed in whereby each node broadcasts the last time it performed a proof of confirmation/integrity check for having the correct checksum of a given file that has been published to said index, or for broadcasting new files. This is where I have been actively researching where Bitcoin integrates - as you know it's the world's best timestamping system. And possibly we can even creatively store the index directly on the blockchain too. Tangent: initial design doesn't necessarily need it since ZFS/Git + http + torrents and checksumming should make replication/downloading/delivery reliable and hopefully fast enough but I have even seriously evaulated Bitcoin SV since you got unlimted block size to work with there and so content could actually be hosted directly on the chain (... Craig's chain, that is... yeah have pretty much scrapped that idea)
Extra points btw both Git and ZFS have snapshot/revision capabilities that make it trivial to empower the user to roll back to previous versions and verify the hash/checksums for historical files too. Imagine having that capabiltiy built into Wikipedia. Right now we just have to trust that their "History" page is not hiding/skipping certain changes from purview.
No problem as you can see I have no quams ranting on here. I'm coding everyday on this so it is always fresh on my mind; also working towards a public beta but one-man product development can be rather slow pace. The main driver is that I want to share and publish content knowing it's not going into a black hole. And I think a lot of talented devs & content creators alike out their realize they are increasingly playing a rigged game by publishing content on the www - sure you can avoid the controlled platforms/social media and publish on to your own domain (and pay increasingly gouging annual renewal prices). But even SEO spam aside there's a deeper dark pattern affecting the discovery of blogs and independent sites - primarily the issue is search engines are queitly pruning/adjusting their algos to intentionally block these very independent sites by design (YouTube glaringly bad but you are seeing the same thing slowly happen to Google results too).
Had a somewhat popular Geocities website back in the day and maybe you also recal a special charm about that era. Good old Yahoo category index would let you browse the web and discover at your own pace. Non JavaScript by default internet is also something I long for again (despite being a full stack JS coder today).
You are obviously on the ball - seeing similar patterns as much as I love to optimize for nostalgia and improved UX it is important to plan ahead for the worst; huge props to you on that regard indeed we should take cue from the signs and have something before the next 'thing' happens.
Same dillemma with money. On one hand, we need to use Bitcoin wherever possible if we will ever have a chance to sway the masses. On the other, the masses use fiat so we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I love the notion of hedging a bet on a better internet future much like Bitcoin is promising for money while straddling that balance of doing business with the devil for as long as necessary for the rest of the world to transition.
Sounds like you are working with some clientelle who need mission critical end to end file & messaging integrity.
Will do some reading up on short wave I'm completely new to that stuff. Other Bitcoiners are experimenting with HAM too so you will at least have a small market of guys willing to launch blimps with you :)
Yes, as per the theory the internet is 'dying' by parastical bot infestation. ChatGPT/AI has made the matter worse because now even during interactions when there is actually a human on the other end you can no longer assume they are not generating responses or new content with the help of said bot.
That said, I think we are still early. Grassroots projects like SN and other alt media make it more difficult for bot farms (whether militarized or corporate or just spammers) to fly under the radar. In fact, we've got a great v4v feature built in that is mitigating that to some extent with the zaps.
So it's like anything; nothing can stay still without dying - it's up to us to keep adapting the tech and improving our communication procedures to retain open discourse. Even if gasp that involves resolving to have more IRL discussions.
HTTP and the domain name system (and by extension, email) today are the fiat of internet information exchange. The endpoints are not immutable, nor is the content at those endpoints verifiable (in most typical situations where the provider does not explicitly provide a checksum; SSL is some aspect of general end to end security but there's no checksum provided for the site's JavaScript bundle file for example). When endpoints go down, unless you have your own copy its gone (possibly recoverable on wayback machine, internet archive, or if you are lucky as a torrent/from a seeder if it was a large file for example)
We have verifiable/checksum based systems already like in Git or ZFS (and torrents)
So it's not about replacing the internet 'workflow' but rather integrating these verifiable file systems under the hood to make a better internet. Just like Bitcoin made a better money. It made the exchanging of information immutable; the endpoints are permanent.
At the risk of being too pie in the sky another 'workflow' example is email. There are of course a dozen contenders for making the next 'email' including Nostr but it's got its imperfections and I don't necessarily think they are optimizing for what I describe here. When you send an email, you don't want it eaten by man in the middle. This is a critical flaw right now today with email - some messages are actually blocked at the provider level like Gmail. And for those not blocked/rejected their solution to spam is to read your emails and filter on your behalf; today you send an email to someone for the first time and you must assume 10% chance you will go in the spam box and there's about a 1% chance every 60 days the recipient might look there and might actually see you in a sea of other msges.
Hash based endpoint system (instead of routing through IPs and domains) solves this and you can verifiably open your inbox - spam or no spam - and rest assured your mail provider or ISP hasn't filtered out messages; its like a Bitcoin address if someone sent you BTC you are not missing that transaction. To prevent/mitigate spam we can use sats to let users set an inbound fee not far unliike how Stackernews does; set your price for receiving a message from an untrusted provider and now even if you do get spam at least they paid you for the priveledge.
At the end of the day, you're going to need that 'killer app' to give these features first class treatment (not to mention native integration w/ Lightning for example) so yeah a browser / inbox viewer is something I have been tinkering on.
I understand you are looking at more logistical/infrastructure level vs yet more software engineering but having common goals helps bridge systems so perhaps we can find ways to overlap our endeavours & keep focused on doing what we respectively do best.
Can you list out :
Well I can keep spitballing; if we get too structured here I'll have to bill you by the hour haha
Though am indeed building on my own right now just fleshing things out & prototyping; it's why this is great to have converstation with likeminds.
Definitely agree with you let's not reinvent the wheel. On that regard, I've given the backend some thought too and this ties in to what it would look like a little bit in terms of UX and how it works. IPFS is an example of something that is rather exotic and so I think we should be looking seriously at other existing file systems/networked systems already in production that guarantee file integrity specificaly the workhorses known as Git and ZFS which both happen also to be software engineering pinnacles IMHO. Primarily the reasons these 2 are so rock solid & widespread is that they are extremely focused on limited features but absolutely nailing those.
And like you said DNS/CDN pretty much fine and as such my thinking is you bootstrap on them; nothing is going to go anywhere if its not resolvable over http so what we could have is 'nodes' that expose a port and are as such reachable on http complete with the addressing system so that any given node can host all or some of the endpoints (content) over existing DNS + http ex: mydomain.com/somehash123435dfs/mynote.md
Hard pass on NFTs but methods of authentication/permission is important and this can effectively make it useful for communications too. Some method to accommodate licenseable content may also be worthy of implementation to help individual creators publish/monetize their endpoints if they so desire.
Like you pointed out we don't need a new tech stack, I would only suggest a clever content routing/addressing system combined with intuitive UI/UX & some aspect of branding - that aside we can tackle the more pressing and challenging political, monopolozation and man-in-the-middle vulnerabilities you highlight.
Your collaborative/crowdsourced/bot driven purchasing strategy seems very promising. I think also perhaps something early on to decide is if we would want to work towards IRL hardware ie- to get rackspace and/or have a data-center strategy.
Digging the direction you two are going with this. I've been giving it a lot of thought at the end-user level; ie- the content consumption layer. IMO there should defintely be a hash based routing system to checksumed content that results in an immutable/introspectable endpoint as with BTC addresses (and that perhaps are BTC addresses). Users as such can consume them as a QR making it 'fun' to collect and organize your content (websites, feeds, podcasts, movies, etc) & you could potentially add another incentive/reward system to convenience users by selling shorthand naming/namespaces to such a system ie- build our own alternate DNS complete with a domain registry. The benefit of such a system is that even if a user forgets to pay a bill and their namespace 'expires' their endpoint would continue functioning at its original hash address.
That it can be purchased with fiat. By accepting dollars for Bitcoin those who control dollars by extension control Bitcoin. At least to some extent; thankfully the system has inherit structures to mitigate monopolization.
Over a long enough period though it is hard to turn a blind-eye to the recipients of infinite fiat money and what they are/might/can do to consolidate/control all aspects of the ecosystem (or to literally torch the world around the ecosystem rendering it a moot point when all is said and done).
Just recently but it appears most of the action is same type as it was last time I checked a few years back; everyone posting has big banner ads to whatever service they're promoting so it is hard to gauge the genuineness of replies - not saying posting for satoshis is necessarily the best solution but it at least neutralizes shilling to some degree and so we can see there is certainly a much chiller vibe going on SN here.
Perhaps my mind is in the wrong place but it's got kind of 69 layout going on
And for that reason, I'm out
Idea: make a page with a feed of live commits (git log) from stacker.news repo with a lightning bolt icon beside each commit so users can zap you for your code not just your comments
Imagine if nobody 'believed' the media. So it's not just money where this would be useful.
In fact, human civilization as we know it seems to be crumbling around us - while being consolidated by a few.
Those few are managing the collapse. How do they do that? Because they have the masses believing things detrimental to their own potential. If the masses did not believe in things the few would not be able to manage the many.
I too would like to 'take a leap of faith' to my partner - you're right on that it's the one person you should believe in when it counts - and hopefully he/she will always be there to lend that hand. Not sure however I would believe a 6 year old or an alchoholic cousin so even amongst family belief is always a potential for detriment.
A society where all trust / belief / values / whatever are automated is a society of robots.
Agreed, belief in automation or delegated systems of trust is just as detrimental - removing belief entirely doesn't turn us into robots it makes us resilient to self destruction via third party.
This could be mitigated with a trust / whitelist type system. If I meet you at a conference or just generally trust your posts are not bot/AI content then I can whitelist you. Make it a setting to toggle on/off the whitelist such that once you have enough whitelistees you can keep it on and enjoy the smaller-scale discussions with people you trust.
100 sats \ 0 replies \ @drdoom 30 Aug 2023 \ parent \ on: Sweden proves that lockdowns were unecessary meta
How do you know that his sole purpose is being against what other people say?
He seems like a successful Bitcoiner and given a previous comment from him earlier today is building a literal self-sustaining citadele in the woods by himself. You calling him pathetic and accusing him of trolling seems more pathetic IMO
Yeah the body is a great analogy there. I guess to nitpick the issue is collection/storage of things that are not necessarily needed for the body to function as intended. Too much of something will kill the body. Adding things to the body it does not need (ie- that you want ) hastens our inevitable path to death.
So as you might agree then belief is like a festering cancer to the mind. Rejection of all belief might then result in being better adapted to the reality of one's situation such as an approaching predator or a sky being contaminated with metallic particulate.
If indeed rejection of all beliefs is the most prudent path then we could apply that to trade as well and thus remove all currency units from the equation since they represent a belief that the units will exchangeable at some point in the future. This takes us 'back' to a traditional real goods/services based barter system. And before someone says this is stoneage behavior what's to stop us from building sophisitcated technical improvements to an otherwise ancient tool like we did with money.
Anyway props to your last point as well - it's true no-one can understand-all and if the car drives faster, safer, smoother it's probably a better car regardless of what's under the hood.
Oh for sure, this thread is about negative tradeoffs so it is simply the first thing that jumps out to me on that regard. Totally Bitcoin is far better solution to currency than fiat. I think the gig is still out on whether or not it will become extremely monopolized (by those who will corner the market via buying up the available quantities while fiat still has purchasing power and likewise investing/gaining majority receivership of newly minted coins by doing the same to mining) in the meantime today it represents an exciting propsect of shift in financial dominance. Evil men will at least have less levers to pull even if they do gain a monopoly control.
It further encourages idolotry of money.
Money is not used in nature by any other living organism yet humans use it everyday and many worship it. Lot's of people lead a life of following one belief system to another without doing the work to understand the underlying premise or proofs and many of those kind land on Bitcoin. The maxis become their new priests telling them what to think and what to do.
In 30 years if Bitcoin overtakes fiat as the common currency we are still at square 1; same dillemma with fiat: a mass of idolotards using a system they don't understand but use based on belief.
Grinding through the last part of a client gig so that I may earn a normie/fiat payment and then shift focus exclusively to a small fleet of software+games have been chipping away at.
Why did you put question marks on your paper backup?
Were you originally intending to just remember those or are you saying those characters are unreadable due to age/messy writing?
what general area if you don't mind answering ? Seems there are definitely areas that foreigners need avoid for safety.
Gotta admit, after using Lightning + Bitcoin in the real world; for both trade over the internet (coding/consulting) as well as at a POS (lattes, cookies) - it does feel like two separate systems. You need a separate type of wallet, separate type of address and fixed addresses is not a solved problem yet so unlike Bitcoin you can't just stick a QR on the counter and have people pay you like that. And then explaining to normies there are these 2 different types of Bitcoin is annoying.
These are merely UX and surmountable technical challenges that I assume will get ironed out to the point where they both feel as 'one again' someday but on the other hand if the anti-Segwit crowd got there way I can't help but imagine if we would not already have super (maybe not lightning, but 'good enough') transaction speeds and low fees on the native chain; complete with the benefit of fixed addresses and all the features of existing wallets.
Or maybe now is a good time to take a gander at Bitcoin Cash to see the state of thing there....
Are you just copy/pasting AI generated content or is there a script driving @ter9702 ?
Mining sats either way...