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Comment by Sargos | Hacker News Reader

This problem is only going to grow in the future. You can't control or reliably censor information on a free and open internet. The only way to ensure that nothing "bad" happens on the internet is to completely lock it down and whitelist everything that is posted. This isn't going to happen.

In a few years blockchain based messaging apps will be launching and they will not be controlled by Facebook or anyone else. You won't be able to ban anyone. This is something we are going to have to accept and deal with. There will be things you don't like on the internet.

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blockchain based messaging apps

Out of genuine curiosity, where do blockchains enter into the messaging space? Auditable chat histories and identities? As opposed to other cryptography/security techniques, blockchain doesn't seem like an especially good match for the problem space.

knock knock "government telling you you're in trouble and need to take down your content.. wait whose building is this?"

Messengers need someone to host and maintain the servers. That requires a monetization model and requires someone to act as a central figure. That figure (like Facebook) then has to either moderate the content or try to make a case of not being able to but still facilitating it.

A messenger using the blockchain as its medium requires no staff to operate it and has nobody responsible for it. There is nobody to blame for whatever it's used for and nobody to dictate what it can and can't be used for. The group chats will simply exist and require no maintenance which is very desirable from an app point of view. Also a big positive is that you don't have to worry about the company running your messenger going out of business and then you lose the ability to use your app.

There's already p2p messaging apps that do that without any blockchain nonsense. The blockchain would leave a permanent trace to which pseudonym posted what forever.

P2P messaging apps have a hard time with group messages because you have to have someone online to relay messages at all times. Group chats really have to have a shared storage medium to work.

There are plenty of non-blockchain approaches to persistence as well which also fall under either the "distributed" or "p2p" labels.

The part I'm having a hard time with is that blockchain's specific strength relative to other distributed approaches is the ledger. That's not really the crux of the decentralized messaging problem.

Unless you need the immutable ledger, other approaches solve identity, privacy, and persistence aspects of messaging just as well or better without the overhead that blockchain approaches introduce.

What would the storage requirements be for a blockchain like that? It seems to me extravagant... and also would there be all the concensus algorithms? So I'd send a message and wait X amount of time for the network to achieve concensus that I had posted the message?

I can see the value in the distributed part certainly but if the storage requirements are very large due to a large volume of messages (I'd imagine any solution which caught on could quickly outpace the number of transactions on something like the ethereum or btc network), wouldn't it necessarily just end up centralized?

It's an interesting idea though.

> P2P messaging apps have a hard time with group messages

Well https://tox.chat and https://ring.cx (now Jami) can do just that as well as https://briarproject.org.

So these do exist. Such a thing was also being proposed for Ricochet https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/issues/54

That's neat. Thanks.

You can, actually, by not having a free and open internet. Which is what we will eventually have. And it won't be because of some super shady and evil council of old men in suits, but because the public will beg for it.

That doesn't make sense any more than thinking they can somehow ban encryption when their economy is dependent upon it. Even China with its efforts so overkill that it does the opposite of its job by making it incredibly obvious something is going on when words start getting randomly censored like censoring 'Shanghai stock market' after it ended on a number that was a very coded reference to June 4th, 1989 aka Tienanmen square.

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