Show HN: 4chan on the Ethereum blockchain
davidwong.fr
davidwong.fr
Blog link at the bottom of the page is interesting:
https://cryptologie.net/article/424/writing-a-dapp-for-the-e...
The contract itself is simple:
pragma solidity ^0.4.15;
contract Transponder {
address public owner;
event Squawk(address indexed _author, string _text);
function Transponder() {
owner = msg.sender;
}
function squawk(string _text) {
Squawk(msg.sender, _text);
}
}
My attention has re-oriented towards Whisper instead, which ultimately is the right place for this in the web3 stack.
However, the government can simply use DNS to block your website. Do you have any plans to overcome this? Any promising research that would make a website unblockable by China Great Firewall?
If you're okay with high latency (i.e. you are primarily reading from blocks, not writing new transactions, which is probably an accurate profile for the /consumption/ of censored data), then a full copy of the Ethereum Foundation blockchain could be carried on a $40 microSD card and carried (or flown, or dropped), well, anywhere.
>Fee to reply: 0.0005 ethers (0.15 USD)
DOA
Blockchain apps are too expensive to operate vs paying for traditional bandwidth and hdd space.
Prob had his gas price set at default 21 when 0.1 gwei will do just fine most times.
Maybe it's bugged though because those numbers are quite a bit different.
Edit: oops looks like I was on the rinkeby testnet
Current state of software is only appropriate for some use cases. Email/text messaging (like 4chan) are not practical uses. Financial business logic handling is a great use case.
Entrepreneur: 'Hey, look if we boil water it moves this piston'
Investors: 'We speculate that this may be important in the future, here's money'
Entrepreneurs: 'I made a steam engine'
Investors: 'We speculate that this may be important in the future, here's money'
Entrepreneurs: 'I made a railway system'
Investors: 'We speculate that this may be important in the future, here's money'For instance, how Keybase uses the bitcoin blockchain: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
Ethereum is also not in a finished state. Scaling options haven't been fully explored yet. The move to PoS alone should decrease block times.
Historically, discussions were done in Usenet on much longer timespans, so this shouldn't prevent using it for real discussions.
Somethings make sense on the blockchain but I don't know about a clone of the epicenter of shitposting.
>Blockchain apps are too expensive to operate vs paying for traditional bandwidth and hdd space.
As for whether or not I would pay to post? The answer is maybe. It is certainly not "100% no." I'm willing to keep an open mind.
I can't think of plaintext that would be both illegal and small enough to store in the blockchain.
If you think about it, what does it mean that content is illegal? How can you forbid a set of ones and zeroes?
It's a fake idea we've invented, and new technology has a way of forcing us to realize that.
That said, practically, the world will adapt however it adapts. If we can survive the advent of unbreakable encryption, a little trolling won't matter much.
This is like asking, "How can you forbid a set of iron atoms?" in reference to guns.
Guns can cause harm. Does information?
If someone photographs your private life and makes it public, that could be called information. But it's not quite the same: That's an action that goes against your will, and it seems quite ethical to let you enforce it.
Yet even still, how do you propose to do that? What happens when a service literally cannot delete the information? And when that service becomes crucial infrastructure, what then?
These are questions that technology is going to force us to address. Pretending that it's naive won't change that. Decentralization is coming.
To your edit, you're just punting the question. What do you do when the information cannot be removed, and the service is critical infrastructure? What happens when the content is in a decentralized internet that everyone uses, and that everyone receives automatically?
You can punish the uploader, sure. But do you ban the service? You'll take part of your population with it. Most countries seem to agree that banning Bitcoin is a bad idea, for example.
So what do you propose?
I'd do what we do with every advancement that challenges are existing paradigms: study it, debate it, and seek out creative and equitable ways to deter the negative externalities. That may involve banning, restricting or regulating services.
> What do you do when the information cannot be removed, and the service is critical infrastructure? What happens when the content is in a decentralized internet that everyone uses, and that everyone receives automatically?
Even in this scenario, there is still going to be a common denominator that can be regulated to control illegal content (ISPs for example).
Imagine that Bitcoin's genesis block contained an encrypted image. Satoshi today releases the key, and it turns out to be the worst image imaginable. BTC doesn't drop; the price keeps going up over time. What do you do?
If you have an answer, it would be an important one.
I mean this quite seriously: Should feelings alone be enshrined and protected? It's a strange question with no clear answers.
What happens when everyone automatically receives all content, and the content cannot be deleted? Now assume the service is something everyone uses. Imagine it's a decentralized internet, and banning it will cause your country to fall behind. What do you do then?
This isn't quite a baseless hypothetical. It's one logical outcome of decentralization. And sooner or later, we're going to need to answer these hard questions.
But that's also an answer to your question. It's easy to imagine if Bitcoin were. So let's say it was. What do you do now that Bitcoin is $6k?
(It's easy to argue that Bitcoin may not have attained $6k if it embedded an image renderer. But I think a future service will attain the same importance.)
This doesn't stop just because the technology is unable to delete anything.
You can try to make Ethereum illegal if you want, but it'd be a tactical mistake. Ditto for unbreakable encryption.
In fact, explain why it makes no sense to make unbreakable encryption illegal. Show your work. I suspect the same argument you'd use for that will apply to this.
Required reading: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
The courts seem to think they can make some numbers illegal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
its similar to hearing how banal things are now uncertain because a computer was involved at some point.
you always could store plain text in block chains. why would it change anything if it's now wrapped into a image board shell?
likewise, there was p2p and cache layers since forever. why now this should be treated as something else?
I think this is the contract: https://etherchain.org/account/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d140...
If you look at a transaction hash that transferred nozero ETH to the account, you can see the ASCII encoded post.
The source code is on etherscan.io[2] so you can check it for yourself, there are no functions that allow me to remove a post by someone. Whatever ends up there will stay there. Images and videos are not hosted on the blockchain though (thank humanity it's already large enough), so there are always ways to get rid of CP. Right now most of the images there are from imgur.
[1]: https://cryptologie.net/article/425/publishing-my-smart-cont...
[2]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x470fb19D08c3d2eB8923A31d1408c...
What if the images are hosted in another blockchain-like, censorship-resistant service like IPFS instead of imgur?
I wonder what the goatse guy is doing right now?
I'm not kidding.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne78vd/goatse-cry...
(Unless you're asking about the guy in the photo, no idea about him. I hope he remains happily married, and ... limber.)
I was wondering about the guy in the photo though.
I imagine he’s probably “relaxing” on a yacht from all that internet fame money.
Edit: had to quote “relaxing” because, yeah it’s the guy in the pic so who knows.
Block chain could be great, but you also need somehow to guarantee me a level of visibility, like an ad provider does. For example, even the job posts on HN decay slowly in the homepage, guaranteeing a pretty good visibility.
Otherwise the risk is that I post an image, paying, and suddenly other people post and mine disappears immediately.
Again, I'm not 1. complaining about 4chan, and 2. complaining about this as a proof of concept. But this as a real product has no incentive for me to really pay for posting.
this can't be done in a contract, you'll need some kind of payment processor to do that