Blockstack at the Decentralized Web Summit

blog.blockstack.org

54 points·guylepage3··4 comments

I was unable to attend, but did watch many of the speakers live via youtube.

One thing I noticed was that many of these "wonderful decentralized technologies" were pay-to-play. Pay more, use some and pay more.

Yet the whole idea of a decentralized and/or distributed web should abstract the idea of money away to a point that it shouldn't cost anything to use. IPFS seems to fit that bill tremendously well. Yet other technologies are "Different way to pay.... With a BLOCKCHAIN!!!111"

Blockchains are not there for payment, but for secure bootstrapping of trust without depending on any trusted third parties.

Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency as a payment method for X is a completely different high-level (optional) feature.

There needs to be incentives to maintain things otherwise decentralized projects join that graveyard.

Financial incentives are what lead to centralized web. If incentivised to maintain 'nodes' that might be prevented.

Good recap summary of the conference. "in the time between launching your browser and going to facebook, how many parties are you blindly trusting?" ... " there are at least 10 hidden entities involved when you open a browser and sign into @facebook". This is one reason I am trying to wean myself off of corporation provided social media and instead using GNU Social.

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