Hacker News Reader

Comment by sthnblllII | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of a decentralized web is to remove data hosting costs and eliminate central points of failure which are vulnerable to DDoS and censorship. PGP already lets you verify data is from a particular sender, and I don't want every website I visit to go on a public ledger.

View on HN

> The whole point of a decentralized web is to remove data hosting costs and eliminate central points of failure which are vulnerable to DDoS and censorship

Vapor has nothing to do with data hosting costs and DDoS. It solves the problem of data ownership, incentive, monetization, etc.

This difference in the interpretation of what benefit decentralization provides is why many past "decentralized internet" projects have focused on the networking aspect (censorship resistance, DDoS avoidance, etc.) whereas Vapor is taking a different approach where it tries to solve a different problem. Its main focus is to decentralize the power structure, and to do that it needs to solve the data ownership (both philosophically and technologically), as well as frictionless monetization.

The goal is to change the power structure that drives the web, and I believe it has more to do with how the data itself is structured (so that it can be distributed trustlessly regardless of the network) than the network stack.

I still don't see how this has anything to do with decentralization, and frankly the way you're justifying it sounds like you wanted to use a clickbaity word that doesn't really apply here.

How does this help data ownership? How does this decentralize the 'power structure'? The ownership and power is still in the hands of the server. The benefits you highlight here are addressed by SSL. Is this trying to address the downsides of SSL? I can't see how it is/would.

It seems like 'frictionless monetization' is the only thing this really addresses, and even that I'm skeptical of.

I don't mean to be such a detractor, but you really need to reconsider what the purpose of this technology is and sell that purpose better. Because your current explanation makes no sense.

Can you stop with the marketing speak? Goals aren't features.

Amen. At the end of the day, a tool is used for what it can accomplish—whether it was a goal, or not.

Sorry about the marketing speak, I read it again and it does sound cheesy and I updated to tone it down. It still sounds a bit cheesy but I had to explain it that way to make my point.

Because the goal is not to lower hosting costs and avoid DDoS, but to create a data structure that can be routed around in a trustless manner (by double signing the HTTP requests and encapsulating in an offchain Bitcoin transaction format with unique SHA256 hash ids for secure synchronization), it's solving a completely different problem. The features were derived from this goal.

You only know that the connection has not been MITM if you have actually identified that the public keys that you want to use or trust that they are correct due to a WoT (e.g. they are signed by a CA your OS trusts or GPG WoT).

2 identities knowing data came from each other due to the properties of public key encryption. Is this a good summary? For which use cases should this property come in handy?

Yeah it took me a while to figure out this is what’s going on, I don’t understand why it was tossed in a word salad.

Steve Jobs disagrees.

If Steve Jobs ever used "benefit decentralization" as a noun, he would have cut his own tongue out rather than risk uttering it a second time.

Just to clarify, I didn't use it as a noun. Here's what I meant:

> This difference in the interpretation of (what benefit) decentralization provides

> It solves the problem of data ownership, incentive, monetization, etc.

It's not obvious what problem you mean. In particular, what is the problem of data ownership?

> Its main focus is to decentralize the power structure

Can you explain that in concrete terms?

If it's not about the network, why is your domain vapor.network?

> No Bitcoin needed: Vapor only uses Bitcoin transactions as data packets. You do not even need to own Bitcoins.

Don’t confuse the Bitcoin protocol with the public Bitcoin ledger!

> Don’t confuse the Bitcoin protocol with the public Bitcoin ledger!

They didn't, but the story sure did.

How so?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com