Mercury Protocol: Communication Platform Built on the Ethereum Blockchain | Hacker News Reader

Mercury Protocol: Communication Platform Built on the Ethereum Blockchain

mercuryprotocol.com

87 pointsclaudiulodro54 comments

I read the paper. Still not sure how this solves anything besides transferring wealth from the gullible to the authors:

* Noted are the transactions-per-second limits, but solution is missing behind some handwaving

* Lots of talk of fees for doing things like sending messages and lots of mentions of "premium" offerings. This is not a free messaging app (which means likely nobody will use it and the network effect will not happen. Will you pay anything over $0.00 to send messages?)

* Talk of incentivization of "reading posts" meaning "there will be ads"

* Literally mentions farming user data "users generating behavioural data for large scale analysis"

* A completely ridiculous claim that pseudonymity == privacy

* No talk at all about actual message encryption (you would not want your 1-to-1 messages publicly readable in the blockchain, would you?)

And then finally, by the last page it is suddenly clear...they are selling their tokens...

The world makes sense again..

> I read the paper. Still not sure how this solves anything besides transferring wealth from the gullible to the authors.

That's MC's modus operandi.

I don't know about messaging, but paying per comment would be a really interesting idea. There are a lot of people out there who are very aggressive about posting in tabloid and newspaper comment sections. The comments are usually so argumentative, angry, and spiteful that I have to think that just having the comment itself appear on the page is worth quite a lot to those people.

But YOU wouldn’t pay to participate in a place where they can do that :)

My scenario is just me thinking out loud. Most people don't participate in online discussions. It's a very small part of the population that logs onto the internet to critique news articles and spread their agenda.

I don't participate in that sort of thing at all.

If HN wasn't financially viable would people pay $0.10 to post?

Would $0.10 per post decrease participation?

Would $0.10 per post significantly offset the cost of running HN?

Would $0.10 be enough to improve the forums, maybe have it notify you when your comment was replied to?

No, because a webforum is not exactly difficult to replicate. The users would all move to whatever free alternative popped up.

HN as a following and prestige at this point. People would pay.

There have been a number of websites with a fee to create an account, to prevent spam. Metafilter, Something Awful, Bitcoin Wiki previously.

There are also sites meant to be exclusive with fees $1000 and up https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15407144/exclusive-social...

I've also heard proposals of email readers charging fees that senders have to pay, to stop spammers from being able to send them anything. Sometimes it's a computation fee instead of a monetary fee, a proof of work to rate limit spammers.

People will pay to not have their data sold and then the companies will sell the data to double down

Well a newspaper is different, few contributors and many readers. Normal chat is either 1 to 1 or a small group of people in a channel/room.

Just like email, I'd happily pay a small amount, say $0.10 to email a person the first time. Especially since even a small fee, negligible to most would be catastrophically expensive to spammers.

Might also create an income stream so that it would be easier to compete with gmail, microsoft, and yahoo.

As spam bots become more common on social and messaging networks I don't see why it couldn't be a similarly effective measure.

I came to understand it as users of the app willing to put a price on their visual attention, giving advertisers the ability to bid on users' attention based on the users' own tolerances, and then it all becoming an ad bidding network.

Except the marketers would pay you money (I guess, the coin) to show you the adds, and not say, a TV network.

I'd probably put a high price to my attention — $5 per second. If I get an ad maybe someone messed up, but I get paid dearly. A lot of people I imagine would be down to get paid some fraction of a cent per view, probably seeing more ads, but also probably making enough revenue for a handful of coffees every month.

Here the blockchain is the distribution network.

I'm quite positive this EXACT idea (pay people to watch ads) was implemented by more than one dot com fucked company around 2000. I hypothesize this scheme will be as successful.

It's kind of amazing to me how the current blockchain/ICO bubble is almost an exact repeat of the original .com bubble. Back then, it was anything and everything "on the internet", and now it's anything and everything "on the blockchain". Of course, some of today's biggest companies were birthed from that .com bubble, but the vast, vast majority of them crashed and burned. I suspect the same will be true of the blockchain bubble.

It's probably difficult to prove that the human actually saw the ad. I would just have a script 'view' as many ads as possible and earn the $

Haven't read the paper to see if they solved that concern though.

This seems like it will do a mediocre job trying to solve many problems rather than solving one problem well.

Don't understand why I need it. Lots of complexity to replicate features in centralized services that I don't have a strong need to be decentralized.

Am I missing something?

... but with Blockchain!!

'cos everyone wants a gameable social network where someone could earn pennies from making your experience worse.

I still don't understand. Everyone already has a social network where someone earns pennies by making the experience worse.

You're missing that MC is trying to cash in on garbage while the cash is up for grabs.

I doubt that's going to scale if messages have to pass through the Ethereum blockchain.

Most cryptocurrencies today are limited by their transaction volume capacity because every transaction needs to be distributed to every other node in the network - In other words, the Blockchain workload is serial (limited by processing speed not concurrency) and cannot be parallelized (distributed is not the same as parallelized). It's not possible to have a single blockchain handling more than a limited number of transactions/messages per second - This is a hard mathematical law, not a hardware resource limitation.

Sure, they can batch messages together to reduce transaction count (assuming they'd be willing to do that) but that only buys a bit of extra time. Looking at this I get the feeling that the Ethereum blockchain is doomed - It will be death by spam.

How is this different than Bitmessage?

https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mark Cuban integration?

Bitmessage does not use a blockchain, since messages are not stored, except optionally by the recipient, after transmission.

Last I checked bitmessage basically formed a ring of all clients, who forward the traffic. That way it's very difficult to do traffic analysis since you can't tell who received the message.

No block chain, just message forwarding and public key crypto.

Implementation issues around Mecury aside, a "fee-based" Reddit is a worthy experiment. Justin Kan had a similar idea with his Whale App. Get experts to answer serious questions regarding entrepreneurship and be compensated for their time. The market for this exists.

I also like the idea of reputation managed via distributed ledger. Hard coding trust is a raison d'etre for smart contracts to exist and although a personal "integrity score" acting akin to your "credit score" may sound dystopian it also is an interesting experiment.

Anyone recall "Whuffie" from Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

Check out Steemit: https://steemit.com/

It's pretty much a "fee-based" Reddit, where people who post content are rewarded for doing so.

Argh. The top post is so full of BS it completely kills any excitement about the platform: https://steemit.com/joy/@teamsteem/on-the-path-to-a-fairer-f...

Dunno, people getting paid by who valued the content sounds pretty good to me. Sure there's hype/BS in promotional type messages... but don't pay for that one.

I'd certainly put more into my posts if I thought that some modest popularity resulted in a few $100.

Seems like micro-transactions were mostly a non-starter because the credit card companies want high transaction fees. Fortunately these days there are alternatives.

I think this is the antithesis of the blockchain. I think a much better idea is: "Uncensorable Twitter". With how much twitter and Google censor users they find offensive I think a product like that would take off and not be too difficult to build.

The main problem with uncensorable platforms is the proliferation of illegal content especially illegal images.

Totally, solving that issue is the most challenging thing. A middle ground could be democratized voting where users can vote to keep or remove messages.

That invalidates the need for a blockchain. Censorship resistance isn't for popular content.

Yeah good point.

Once all the people posting porn and racist memes show up, everyone normal will leave and the worst shit will get upvoted.

Twitter is already full of racist memes that people see.

That's kinda the whole point, watch it all burn and interact with people at the rawest level.

Decentralized system where 'retweeting' is rehosting. You traverse trust network n-levels deep and only access the content which has distributed trust to you. Every view is unique that user and their network.

How can one possibly moderate to prevent rehosting illegal content automatically? You need active filtering of some sort. If rehosting is not automatic, the platform will die very quickly.

You don't upvote/rehost the content you believe is illegal and respond to DMCA notices for your personal repository.

Do blockchain people have any other arguments other than decentralization, security, probable future monetary incentive. These arguments although sound have become cliched, every whitepaper has the same arguments, same methodology, same roadmaps, substitute noun and you have got a whole new whitepaper. It's the lack of ideas of use of blockchain.

Ohh that business is centralized, ohh that guy is making so much money off it, ohh they sell user data, ohh they got hacked !! lets decentralize that business, lets make some crypto money while we can ( and unload it on suckers when crypto hits high ). we got hacked (oops) ...it wasn't us it's the underlying layer under the layer on which our "smart" contracts are based.

I don't care if zuck or anyone is making millions for a centralized product ..he should be he made that product. It was needed that's why people use it. Data isn't safe with centralized network, they misuse it ..heck i have got a choice to share what i want, i can control it. Maybe educating yourself on what and what not to share is better. Networks get hacked ..use 2FA, go MI6. Not everything comes with lifetime guarantee.

what if I don't want to make money off your blockchain protocol or ICO or early adopter incentive or what not.

I am curious to know reason other than mentioned above on why should anyone care about blockchain based protocols/networks etc.

Do we really need another Twitter like platform that’s based around the idea of “rewards”? Wasn’t app.net enough?

Oh, but blockchain...

Is there an ICO? If it is an ethereum app, there has to be an ICO. It's the only way

Edit: color me surprised, there is not an ICO. They even want to have working app first. Well that's new. Mostly those apps just write a whitepaper, accept money and then do nothing.

>According to Ryan Ozonian, the CEO of Dust and a leader of the Mercury Protocol, the only way for people to earn tokens at the outset will be through participation. In the future, though, he says there will be an opportunity to purchase them.

Edit2: oh there will be an ICO of course though

>Roadmap

>Phase 1: Dust (Q3 2017)

>We will build version 1.0.0 of the Mercury Protocol, conduct the token sale, and integrate GMT into Dust. The Mercury Protocol will remain closed-source at this stage.

Ummm ok. Good for them I guess. Let's throw more money at broken blockchain protocols!

This post made me remember that I had muted "blockchain" on twitter, and my life was much better because of it. Classic example of adding "blockchain" or "token" to something for pure hype.

So, the headline doesn't present the value prop very clearly. It should say something like: "Never, meet another troll again" or "Message, with absolute privacy.."

From what i understand based on the article, the value proposition is: 1. Privacy 2. No Trolls

I know the above two have been mentioned quite a bit as detractors for twitter. But, personally, I've never had a problem with either one of those.

The question is, How many people would be willing to switch to a new platform, if it meant never meeting another troll again?

Blockchains provide false security, and there're big players in the game that either don't understand that or are driving the fad train to the bank.

A platform where you pay to send a message become a platfork where only few speak but many just listen

What is the difference between an 'oracle' and a server?

Has Ethereum been fixed since all those DAO hacks?

the problem isn't actually Ethereum, but the tools they provide for writing smart contracts. the exploits are in contracts, not EVM.

that doesn't actually make it better, but it does highlight the problem of using code as an absolute arbiter b/c it can be hard to tell if it describes your intent accurately or not.

Blogspam, please replace URL with https://www.mercuryprotocol.com/

Didn't realize reporting on things is blogspam . . .

There's a clear link to both the site and the whitepaper in the article.

Obviously your effort is appreciated, but in this case it really does seem that the story is the site itself and not your article (which is just 3 paragraphs and contains no new information).

That makes sense. Thanks for the feedback.

By someone who misspells the core technology, no less.

Ok, we changed to that from http://multithreaded.link/2017/08/mark-cubans-new-blockchain....

I know that HN loves to crap on anything blockchain related, but we live in a time where the POTUS is a Nazi sympathizer living in an alternate universe, so this couldn't come at a better time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com