[HN Gopher] Zooko: Decentralized, immutable and uncensorable mic...
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Zooko: Decentralized, immutable and uncensorable microblogging
Author : abriosi
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-01-12 20:42 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| navbaker wrote:
| I understand the very basics of blockchain technology, but I
| guess I'm missing some context or background that would allow me
| to make the mental connection between "blockchain" and
| "unblockable microblog". Does anyone have a good pointer to
| something that would explain this more in-depth/like I'm 5?
| wepple wrote:
| My guess is that because blockchain is decentralized, in theory
| nobody could censor or block it, because nobody "controls" the
| blockchain.
|
| Compared with any modern social media site which is mutable and
| controlled by an organization who gets to police content
|
| Edit: a good example of this is that folks have put malicious
| content into the various blockchains (ascii images of child
| harm material, or strings of data that trigger antivirus). You
| can't stop it being added, and once it's there you cannot
| remove it.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > You can't stop it being added
|
| It really depends what you mean by "you", of course I can't,
| but miners can since they are the one actively adding stuff
| to the chain. In fact, they may even be legally responsible
| for what they add to a blockchain (IANAL though), and since
| miners are physical entities most of whom have a publicly
| known IP address, it may even be realistically enforceable.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Eventually a company providing a UI layer will be the central
| access point for all the content coming from the block chain.
| The central point will then be able to censor posts. This is no
| different from OpenSea, or Coinbase.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I think it's embedding posts directly into the chain, so if you
| can sync the chain then you can access everyone's posts. Since
| these posts are cryptographically embedded in the chain you
| can't block any of them without blocking access to the entire
| chain, or attacking the chain and rewriting history.
| romaniitedomum wrote:
| Oh dear. Another allegedly censorship resistant platform, and
| where do they put their code? On the most censored and censorable
| place possible, github. It's just one DMCA complaint away from
| being taken down, or Microsoft may decide to just lock out some
| or all of the developers.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| rvz wrote:
| There you go.
|
| It is no wonder that these projects that claim to be
| 'decentralised' still relying on using centralised services
| like Discord, GitHub, Etherscan, Coinmarketcap, Coinbase,
| Binance and Twitter, and they scream about 'web3'. Whatever
| that means.
|
| On your point towards Github there is a solution and that is to
| self-host the source code via using something like GitLab,
| cgit, gerrit, etc in which many free and open source projects
| already do this.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Nothing stops a developer from putting their code elsewhere,
| should it be taken off github.
|
| Choosing a different host than GitHub to begin with is
| basically self-censorship (as fewer will see it).
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| I stopped reading after
|
| "Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other
| chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them."
|
| The claim that Handshake isn't easy to abuse lacks proof.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't understand the popularity of immutability and uncensor-
| ability.
|
| What if someone posts naked photos of their girlfriend on this?
|
| Furthermore it says you can block access to the chain completely
| do it doesn't even do what it claims.
| klyrs wrote:
| I was thinking about the children(tm), personally. I wouldn't
| touch this technology with a 10 foot pole.
| dannyw wrote:
| some people believe information should be free, period.
|
| There's am argument to be made that the drawbacks of revenge
| porn are outweighed by the benefits of free access to
| information.
| endisneigh wrote:
| you don't need this to have free access to info tho.
| pjerem wrote:
| > some people believe information should be free, period.
|
| There is nothing wrong believing some ideology.
|
| However, enforcing your beliefs without caring about
| consequences is called extremism.
|
| You can believe information must be free but acknowledge that
| it don't include revenge porn. Or you can act like it doesn't
| matter but then, you are a danger for the society.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Every technology has pros and cons. The pro here is that some
| blog about corruption can't be knocked offline by some
| government authority lest they block the entire network, which
| would be a problem if any businesses use such a decentralized
| network for their own means. The con is that everything is
| immutable and unchangeable, and that has consequences - for
| reference, despite that the story about CP being on Bitcoin is
| false[0], it's definitely possible if anyone ever wanted to
| spend a few hundred thousands in gas fees to store an arbitrary
| jpeg on ethereum.
|
| 0: https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-
| blockcha...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The pro here is that some blog about corruption can't be
| knocked offline by some government authority lest they block
| the entire network...
|
| Let's not kid ourselves with the idea that's even likely to
| happen. The main use case of stuff like this is for people to
| say stuff that would get them banned on Twitter, and most of
| that consists of being an asshole or spreading lies.
|
| The blog about corruption will be put up on real Twitter,
| where the eyeballs are, and preserved by getting scraped by
| some organization like the Archive Team and uploaded to the
| Internet Archive.
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| "Uncensorable" if all nodes go down it's down. It's like that
| torrent/magnet you really want to have but it's at 0/0.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Recent and presumably related:
|
| _Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm
| Websites_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 - Dec
| 2021 (186 comments)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Zooko was named after Zooko Wilcox O'Hearn, one of the few
| remaining, original, Cypherpunks.
|
| It's super weird to name a project after someone who's not dead,
| and in this case not even that old (Wikipedia says he's 47).
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| It's extra weird when you know Zooko. One of his kids shared a
| kindergarten class with my oldest and I used to hang out with
| him.
|
| Clicked on this to see if it was something he'd done.
| fsiefken wrote:
| i wonder how the handshake protocol compares with the hypercore
| protocol or scuttlebut and if there are other similar suitable
| protocols for social media. for example iris.to uses hypercore
| https://hypercore-protocol.org/
| an-allen wrote:
| Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no one
| has asked for!
| paulpauper wrote:
| ummm. government censorship is real
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| So are laws like the Right to be Forgotten. [0]
|
| Which, as soon as one of them is violated, the entire system
| will be torn down to stop it.
|
| [0] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1562/right-to-
| be-fo...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no
| one has asked for!
|
| Must be the solution to some important problem, then! Let's try
| to apply it everywhere and strongly insist that it's the
| future.
| hobs wrote:
| It's almost like twitter users have been asking for an edit
| button for N years, so let's make everything EVEN MORE
| immutable!
| mcculley wrote:
| An edit button should also come with an immutable history of
| edits.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Maybe not directly, but I actually see plenty of complaints
| about link rot and news publications silently editing or
| removing old articles.
| rhizome wrote:
| While at the same time, people are still receiving
| consequences after the discovery of things they said and did
| a long time ago. What a world!
| Kadin wrote:
| Nothing about "put it on a blockchain" helps that.
|
| If you are actually putting the page contents onto the
| blockchain, you have basically constructed an append-only,
| replicated database. Which will almost certainly become
| unmanageably large over time. (Why would a user want to
| maintain a local archive of this content? There's no
| incentive for them to keep it on their machine, aside from
| wanting a copy of the content for themselves, which they
| could achieve in any number of other ways. Like just...
| saving it to disk.)
|
| If you _aren 't_ actually putting the content into the
| blockchain itself, but are really just storing a URL that
| points to the content, you haven't solved the linkrot problem
| at all. You've just created a very roundabout way to send
| people URLs. You could put something like a PURL in there, or
| a DOI, but that just moves the problem around. Again, _the
| blockchain isn 't solving anything_.
|
| Here's an easier solution, if you want to try and ensure the
| availability of a piece of content into the future: strip it
| down to its most minimal, plaintext version, and post that to
| a well-known (and subject-appropriate) Usenet group. It will
| immediately be archived in several places across the world,
| which have a pretty good track record of keeping ahead of the
| flow of incoming content and keeping it available. No, you
| don't get a guaranteed URL, but the Message-ID is a very
| unique search string that can be used later on to find it.
| thebean11 wrote:
| You are arguing against a point I didn't make, but I do
| want to clarify the problem a little bit more since it is
| pretty interesting. I agree that storing images or even
| articles on a blockchain does not scale; that level of data
| redundancy is a humongous waste for something like a tweet.
|
| There's two issues at play here, immutability and
| availability. Immutability is not too hard to solve with a
| blockchain. You can hash pretty much any piece of digital
| content, store the hash on-chain, and prove that the
| content (hosted elsewhere) is identical to the original
| content (assuming the chain is not susceptible to massive
| block re orgs).
|
| Availability is trickier. There are blockchain-related
| projects that claim to solve it in a decentralized manner
| by incentivizing a group of nodes to store it, and then
| periodically submit proofs that they have it stored, but
| I'm pretty fuzzy on the details there.
|
| edit: Want to make it clear that I don't think blockchains
| are the only potential solution to these immutability and
| availability problems. That being said I'm pretty
| optimistic that crypto _can_ solve these problems in a
| decentralized way, sounds like you feel the opposite, but
| let 's try to not let it devolve into the stereotypical HN
| crypto flame war..
| topspin wrote:
| > Why would a user want to maintain a local archive of this
| content?
|
| When I think of all the things that once existed and have
| now vanished forever for all sorts of reasons it is very
| appealing to imagine having a local archive.
| verdverm wrote:
| Handshake has been co-opted by the same person who took over
| Freenode. That handshake has become toxic should come at no
| surprise.
|
| I feel for this dev, I had a similarly unpleasant experience with
| the Aragon team and decided the community was not for me.
| publiush wrote:
| If we're talking about the same person, he was the only one who
| actually encouraged what I was doing and even gave me the idea
| for Zooko.
|
| However, the admins on their discord, were less than
| encouraging.
| roughly wrote:
| People keep using immutable like it's a good thing. Any of y'all
| who still want to fully stand by the things you said, did, and
| thought 20 years ago might need to reflect a bit.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I think this is the most interesting part:
|
| https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake
| publiush wrote:
| I've decided to begin my own community. Those toxic admins
| can't control the blockchain.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Huh?! No one controls the blockchain.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| So you pay to post, otherwise who will pay miners to post blocks?
| That will surely disincentivize too much posting and solve
| inherent scalability issues. This service is a no go.
| benpiper wrote:
| This already exists. It's called Usenet.
| codespin wrote:
| I'm excited to try this out, I was toying with the idea of
| creating something similar.
|
| I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users
| have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko
| goes farther in the right direction.
| roywiggins wrote:
| This seems like a different definition of "control"- sure, your
| posts can't be deleted by anyone else, but they can't be
| deleted or edited by _you_. They are preserved and public
| _forever_.
|
| I'm not sure that's what people think of when they think of
| having control of their data?
| dannyw wrote:
| Yes, like it or not that's practically how the internet
| works.
|
| You don't believe Facebook actually deletes your messages, do
| you?
| roywiggins wrote:
| Right. But that's what I mean by this thing not giving you
| "control over your data."
|
| If I post something on Facebook and regret it, I have
| _some_ control over it- sure, I can 't delete it off
| Facebook's internal tape archives, but that's really going
| to be one of a handful of places it will stick around after
| I delete it.
|
| If I embed something in plaintext on a blockchain it will
| be public, to everyone, forever. This seems like having
| _less control_ , or at least no _more_ control.
| macintux wrote:
| Seems analogous to the discussion of which licensing type
| gives the developer more freedom: GPL or BSD. The answer
| depends on how you define freedom.
| dqpb wrote:
| > These children remind of me of Lord of the Flies.
|
| I think most people in blockchain Discord "servers" are actually
| children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the
| same palpable feeling that I'm talking to teenagers. It's odd.
| fnord77 wrote:
| possibly adults who have not matured intellectually beyond teen
| levels.
| pessimizer wrote:
| A lot of dopey young people who have medium-sized
| inheritances/trust funds that they're gambling with in the hope
| that they'll never have to work, mixed with overpaid tech
| workers fresh out of college hoping to buy Bay Area homes.
| vannevar wrote:
| Anyone interested in this field should also check out Freenet, a
| distributed, encrypted and censor-resistant platform that's been
| around for 20 years.
|
| https://freenetproject.org/
| acdha wrote:
| This is "uncensorable" in the same way that "sovereign citizens"
| are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something
| which is actually illegal, they'll learn how useful blockchains
| are for prosecutors.
|
| The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where
| you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually
| happens is one of two paths:
|
| 1. You're outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work
| because your local police don't care. Maybe you have to avoid
| traveling to certain places or doing business with certain
| companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with
| minimal impact unless you're doing something like leaking the
| secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.
|
| 2. You're subject to their authority, which gives them a rich
| suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS
| or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on
| your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they'll expend depends
| on exactly what you're doing and how authoritarian the government
| is, not the technology.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game
| where you can make up rules for the government to follow.
|
| Thanks for describing that error so clearly and succinctly.
| It's one of those fundamental misconceptions that's
| depressingly common.
|
| Don't assume you've defeated the them because they haven't
| cared enough to come after you.
| alangibson wrote:
| > where you can make up rules for the government to follow
|
| Exactly. It always reminds me of that scene in the Simpsons
| where Burns goes through tons of security in the nuclear plant,
| then a dog walks in through a screen door.
| friendlydog wrote:
| Let's say you use something like a striped raid on different
| nodes.
|
| Node A contains the odd bytes for something copyrighted like
| "the love guru" those bytes by themselves aren't the
| copyrighted content and no one claims rights to them.
|
| Node B has has the even ones.
|
| Downloading either doesn't yield the copyrighted file, but on a
| person's own machine if they combine them it does.
|
| Still illegal?
| hash872 wrote:
| Let's say instead of 'copyrighted file' it's CSAM material
| instead. Is it 'illegal'? Maybe you can convince a judge
| otherwise.... after your home has been raided, you've already
| done at least some time in jail where all the inmates know
| you've been arrested for CSAM, your friends & family know
| you've been arrested for that, that's what comes up under a
| Google search for your name for all time, thus making you
| unemployable.....
|
| Yes, after spending $500k-1 million on a defense attorney,
| it's possible that you could convince a judge that that
| content isn't 'illegal', sure. (How many judges- average age
| over 60- can learn what a 'striped raid' is?) But none of
| those other consequences can be reversed, even if you 'win'
| at trial
| acdha wrote:
| Yes. What happens is that the FBI uses the system to download
| the illicit content and every IP they connect to gets a
| letter to their ISP demanding that they identify the
| customer.
|
| When they show up at your door, you get to hope they believe
| you saying that you had no idea your system was hosting that
| content and/or that you never had the decryption key. If you
| say anything which a judge/jury believes untrue, that's a
| federal crime in its own right.
|
| Better hope that you don't need any of the hardware they
| seized as evidence (possibly for years - see Steve Jackson
| Games), and that your employer doesn't hear the news and sack
| you.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Yes. The law isn't naive and seeing content A appear when
| using innocent content B as a key is beyond a reasonable
| doubt.
| edoceo wrote:
| Having copyrighted works isn't the inherently illegal part.
| It's the act of obtaining them outside the licensed methods
| and then holding them. At that point, according to some, is
| when it becomes theft.
|
| Hosts with unknown blobs of bytes can, and have, been taken
| to task by various authorities.
|
| Maybe it's grey-area but looks more towards the illegal side
| to me.
|
| Not a lawyer.
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| is that true though? CP on Etherium blockchain is a well known
| problem, and no prosecution jurisdiction is doing anything
| about it. Who would even have jurisdiction on something so
| decentralised? Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all
| of them. And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more
| quickly than you can kill them. So prosecutors really are
| powerless. I think. Am I wrong?
| alkonaut wrote:
| Could the reasoning behind that not simply be that there is
| only finite resources to use so you want to target where you
| get the most effect for the least resource and "CP on
| blockchains" ends up way down in that priority list?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > So prosecutors really are powerless. I think. Am I wrong?
|
| Yes, you're wrong.
|
| > Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all of them.
| And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more quickly than
| you can kill them.
|
| Your error is here. If prosecutors actually decide to start
| shutting down nodes because of CP and make successful
| prosecutions, it will deter people from running new nodes in
| that jurisdiction. If hosting a copy of the Etherium
| blockchain had a high chance of landing you in jail for CP
| possession, would _you_ start up a new node to replace one
| that was shut down? Instead of "new nodes ... pop[ping] up
| vastly more quickly than you can kill them," most operators
| would get scared and quickly shut down their nodes and wipe
| their HDs, and the rest would get prosecuted. Maybe you'd
| have a few stragglers hiding out on Tor, but at that point
| the network is unusable for any legitimate use.
|
| Don't believe me? There's even been a recent example of
| something like that. China banned Bitcoin mining, and the
| miners there shut down or GTFO of China:
|
| https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-
| cryp...
|
| > Available data shows that crypto mining no longer exists in
| China and that China's crypto mining ban completely upended
| the global Bitcoin mining industry. China went from
| controlling up to two-thirds of all Bitcoin mining in the
| world in April to not contributing to the industry at all as
| of July 2021, according to data compiled by the University of
| Cambridge's Centre for Alternative Finance. And anecdotal
| evidence suggests that the vast majority of Chinese Bitcoin
| miners relocated their operations to places like Kazakhstan,
| the U.S., and Canada or simply sold off their equipment at
| discounted prices and left the industry.
| notch656a wrote:
| Bitcoin survival isn't predicated on mass mining farms of
| the sort that are easily shutdown in china and elsewhere.
| Running nodes yields more revenue the higher proportion of
| the hash rate you have. Making it illegal just makes it
| that much more profitable to run nodes in difficult to shut
| down ways, such as a cell phone powered by a solar array
| running tor and a miner.
|
| The market will provide.
| soco wrote:
| And I really hope that there wouldn't be that many with
| such a vested interest in CP to fight against those
| shutdowns.
| acdha wrote:
| That's why I put it in terms of how much they care. I'd be
| surprised if there is something on the Ethereum chain itself
| because it'd cost a small fortune but if there was, the
| authorities could easily require all companies to block
| access to those records, filter network traffic for all but
| the most determined users, etc. because it's a complex
| always-on network system with a fair amount of volume.
|
| The underlying problem here is discoverability. If I can find
| your content, so can the police. If sharing it is personally
| risky, most people won't and they feel who do won't for long.
| Censorship has never relied on absolutely preventing anyone
| from saying something prohibited -- it's always the potential
| for retroactive consequences. This is why successful
| movements have generally needed outside support, anonymous
| communications (e.g. printed samizdat which is most risky if
| they catch you when you're actually in possession of it), or
| some kind of social network which is hard to infiltrate
| (family, religion, etc.).
| roywiggins wrote:
| The readme does explain that you could censor it by blocking
| access the chain entirely, it's not pretending otherwise.
|
| But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are
| just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You
| just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the
| chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know
| whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to
| resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since
| you can do all that offline.
| acdha wrote:
| Okay, so now you've downloaded the entire chain. Does that
| seem safe to have in your possession in this scenario? Even
| if I have the storage, I would not want to find out that
| someone else had uploaded something illegal when the police
| search my computer/phone and I have to prove to their
| satisfaction that I didn't know.
|
| If you don't download the entire chain, your traffic
| connecting to certain nodes and downloading certain sizes can
| be enough to track you - there are academic papers about
| using this to figure out what movies you're watching over
| HTTPS - and that's assuming that you don't learn the hard way
| that the fast server with all of the underground content is
| the secret police's honeypot.
|
| This is all probably moot in any case because it's tricky to
| build something like this which never does DNS resolution,
| connects to a suspicious server, etc. The average user is
| going to have a very hard time avoiding mistakes like that,
| and that's assuming you don't have police informants
| encouraging unsafe opsec or use of treacherous apps -- real
| things which happen to dissidents and activists all over the
| world. Remember Citizen Lab's report on the use of NSO's
| malware to go after supporters of a _soda tax_?
|
| What bothers me most about cryptocurrency proponents are that
| most of the claims are being made by people who will not
| personally suffer the consequences of being wrong if someone
| follows their advice. If you care about people in dangerous
| legal environments, that really needs to focus on changing
| the system rather than advocating use of electronic systems
| which even experts cannot use safely in those environments.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| As long as there is illegal content on the blockchain, they
| can simply state that you are hosting a node connected to a
| network that downloads and shares illegal content, which will
| be true, and therefore that you possess it, which will also
| be true. And that can be enough to get you prosecuted
| regardless of how many crypto bros are going to try to
| convince you, or them, otherwise.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Well, sure. They could make owning a computer illegal, or
| whatever. Anything outside your skull is censorable. The
| readme doesn't pretend that this works if you can't access
| the Handshake chain.
| dannyw wrote:
| They being who, under what law?
|
| It's widely known there's child porn on the bitcoin
| blockchain, not familiar with any prosecutions that have
| happened.
|
| Pretending that the law trumps all technology is as naive
| as pretending technology trumps all law. No extreme is
| true: you can build technological problems to solve many
| social or political problems (example: VeraCrypt with
| plausible denialability)
| jasode wrote:
| _> It's widely known there's child porn on the bitcoin
| blockchain, _
|
| Are there _actual bytes_ of child porn embedded in
| Bitcoin blockchain or only encrypted-or-obfuscated urls
| of possible websites that lead to child porn?
|
| Example story from 2018 saying child porn bytes are not
| in the blockchain and non-tech journalists are
| misreporting it: https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-
| porn-bitcoin-blockcha...
|
| Any credible embedding of child porn bytes in the
| blockchain since that story?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| So, if some bad actor embedded child sexual abuse material
| in the blockchain it would become illegal to run a Bitcoin
| node?
|
| Seems like somebody could short Bitcoin or eth, do that,
| make it pubic, cause a furor, and profit despite the cost.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Since it isn't really clear, Handshake protocol is an attempt to
| create an alternative DNS without authoritative root name
| servers, where instead users auction names priced in Handshake
| coins, the initial bulk of which were gifted to various FOSS
| developers and organizations to try and keep rich people from
| hoarding everything. Instead of querying root servers for TLDs,
| you query a blockchain to get the records.
|
| This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records,
| and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since
| this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name
| record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed,
| the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you
| can now never delete or edit a Tweet.
| webmaven wrote:
| Naming this after Zooko is a nice hat tip. I remember back when
| he was interleaving his last names to form O'Whielacronx.
| flubflub wrote:
| How much does this cost to use yourself as it is on a blockchain?
| rvz wrote:
| Maybe all these projects that have typical Discord chats talking
| about blockchains, DAOs, NFTs, etc are full of kids given that
| some users can get easily upset and hate your pet project and
| they don't give any reasons other than character attacks. I
| always see this when someone attaches their own identity to a
| technology or project that once someone criticises the project
| (but not you directly) they feel _' personally attacked'_.
|
| Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the
| end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter
| argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this
| project. I don't see any character attacks on the user from the
| project devs.
|
| In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to
| have 'won'.
| nottorp wrote:
| I guess this is addressed to whoever lives in the crypto bubble.
| I don't understand what a handshake is, why it passes dns records
| and if it can be used to publish twitter like messages who is
| going to read them and how.
|
| Also from the little i know about this current fad:
|
| If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million
| users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain
| becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older
| tweets are lost?
| verdverm wrote:
| Handshake is a blockchain based alternative for ICANN. DNS
| resolvers still work the same, and HNS could play nice with
| ICANN, but largely seem to want to replace it rather than be
| peers with it.
|
| The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting
| things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and
| verification.
| nottorp wrote:
| I could attach TXT records to my own domain and publish
| "tweets" like that couldn't I?
| verdverm wrote:
| Yes, but as the author points out, these can be blocked.
|
| Typically one sets up their handshake node with a DNS
| resolver to serve records, so in theory, if everyone used
| handshake node ups for DNS, this could be uncensorable
| sowbug wrote:
| That's roughly how people used to use Unix .plan files,
| with finger being a convenient way to check out what
| someone else was up to.
|
| Which reminds me of a story. At Google in the mid-2000s, we
| used a corporate version of Google Chat, embedded in Gmail,
| much as it is today. One key difference in the UI was that
| your status appeared as text right below your name in other
| people's contact lists. Your status could be active, idle,
| away, or any freeform text that you set it to. The status
| lines in the contacts list updated in real time (ordinary
| today but remarkable back then). So people figured out that
| they could have an odd kind of one-to-many chat
| conversation by frequently updating their statuses. Not
| everyone was in everyone else's contacts list, so it was
| actually one-to-who-knows-how-many. And people used it
| accordingly, as if they were shouting stuff in a large room
| -- "does anyone know what's for lunch today?" "I heard it's
| lasagna" "beef or vegetarian?" etc.
|
| Anyway, Evan Williams worked at Google back then, and I
| assume he saw these ephemeral messages flickering across
| his screen, same as I did. I wonder whether that planted
| the seed for Twitter.
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