EU Funding for Developer Tools for the Decentralized Web
httptoolkit.tech
httptoolkit.tech
Decentralization doesn't mean there shouldn't be one or some centralized nodes. That means open protocol, and server cannot control everything (for example, with end to end encryption). So that anyone can run the server, and user can use the service without trust the server.
Most importantly, non regulation doesn't always mean good. Otherwise why we need law and government? Why not live in the wild west and let strong people kill weak people? Why not let big company play the monopoly?
In fact, wanting to circumvent laws is the only reason why people en mass would ever want to use decentralized technologies. I'm not necessarily always against this (there are some really stupid laws that should be broken), but I'm pretty annoyed by how people try to pretend that there is demand for these technologies for any other reason.
Europe could even take a page from China and use regulation to strongly encourage European customers and businesses to not use US products and services (GDPR, for example).
Exactly this is already happening with Gaia-X[0]. Its mostly pushed by German companies, along with French ones. But because of huge involvement of Deutsche Telekom, BMW and such I dont have high expectations.
This one was pitched as, "a European initiative for a Human Internet that respects the fundamental values of privacy, participation and diversity". So the EU would have just seen the buzzwords "privacy" and "diversity" and said great, have some money.
Ideally, the state represents the interests of the people, and it's in the interest of the people for decentralized technologies to be better funded, so that abusive government and corporate power can be checked.
Therefore, one of the activities of a truly democratic government will be to contribute to the creation and enhancement of technologies and institutions that act as non-political checks on government and concentrated corporate power, like privacy and decentralized communication protocols, physical and electronic cash, etc.
There are plenty other reasons, like not wanting private corporations to be gatekeepers of society.
Even the crypto that's newer than Bitcoin (all of it?) and therefore more efficient (not proof-of-work/stake?) is still not efficient in cost/time/other-resources/etc.
That is the best part of today's blockchains - huge space for improvements! I don't see the same opportunity in centralized services/protocols which are kind of "done" and control by few big tech companies with so many resources, which they use to keep that control.
You may disagree that Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, has the potential to do this or whether it can actually do this, but that's the appeal.
Proof of Work (PoW) is probably necessary for a decentralized currency [0]. Proof of Stake (PoS) can be a valid cryptocurrency but fails in it's centralization criteria [1].
The Lightning network provides a layer-2 solution to payments, increasing transaction throughput and, thus, reducing PoW energy usage [2]. This might get into centralization territory but maybe this is a happy compromise between energy usage, throughput and centralization. In some sense, we have many "layer-2" like structures on the internet, with DNS caching, replication and load balancing etc.
> Most importantly, non regulation doesn't always mean good. Otherwise why we need law and government? Why not live in the wild west and let strong people kill weak people? Why not let big company play the monopoly?
As a counterpoint, regulation isn't always a good thing when it's been captured by hedge funds, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies or other special interests.
I'm having a hard time understanding if the line "Why not let big company play the monopoly?" was meant to be rhetorical in the affirmative or the negative. Are you suggesting that company monopolies are a good thing? Or are you suggesting that a decentralized currency unseating what is essentially the current banking monopoly is a bad thing?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDGliHwstM8&t=490s
[1] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...
I had some experience with L2 solution, Polygon specifically. As you mentioned, it compromises security or/and decentralization. And I don't think it's a "happy" compromise, since the weak point of a system depends on it's weakest point. If L2 chain has a security or centralization problem, then it can be exploited so that the whole system has such problem.
Even if the blockchain technology can replace current banking system, it's not the solution for problems like monopoly. It just replaced the companies/organizations that are in the monopoly position. Look at the crypto concurrency exchange market and mining farms, you can get a sense.
To make it clear, by "Why not let big company play the monopoly?", I mean monopoly is a bad thing, which would happen if there is no regulation. So in the system of Blockchains, we still need the regulations we need in the current system. I know there are some problems in our political and economical system, but I don't believe Blockchain is the answer.
Meanwhile, the altcoin "crypto industry" is becoming more and more like a casino and not even trying to solve anything. These people just chase profits, without even thinking of use cases any more. Decentralization isn't important any more; decentralization is old and the next buzzword is more valuable. There are the glorious leaders, the influencers, and the fans. Everyone is doing their part to perpetrate the scam for their own profit.
No, it doesn't solve that.
I know IPFS doesn't use Ethereum, and neither do things like SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt, based on the gossip protocol) but the biggest ecosystem of DApps is based on Ethereum and requires gas...
Regarding the expensiveness there are a lot of new technologies rolling out today such as optimistic rollups(arbitrum/optimism) and zkrollups(dydx,zksync) that allow for cheaper dapps to run. Then there is also things like Avalanche or Solana that are completely separate chains with different decentralization trade offs that allow for cheaper transactions. The space is still going through rapid advancement and experimentation.
I went to a Hyperledger workshop just to get a more objective opinion on it.
All the demo functions were showing us how it was possible to threads and put the state on an internal blockchain, but that all nodes had to run the threaded functions we wrote.
hmmmm, why is this taking so long, oh because everyone in the class was spamming the nodes with arbitrary executions! with no anti-spam resource it was as actually dumb as the theory suggested.
that said, I've come to accept that the market can bear many things in the distributed ledger space, so even if other theoretical solutions can make participants cooperate, an out of the box solution is here that the world is selling so hard that it is easy to sell itself.
Previous generation dapps were mostly on Ethereum because it was the only real solution available. But the ecosystem is maturing, there are chains that consume so little gas it's effectively a negligible cost, and more and more dapps are making use of them. Not to mention that Eth 2.0 is coming soon™.
Can you give some examples? How far along is the development?
Rollups inherit the security of the blockchain they are based on, and a user can always leave the rollup network if they become censored.
The downside of current Optimistic Rollup networks is that many still have centralized points of control in place (such as arbitrary contract upgrades), but those are expected to be removed in the next few months for at least one of them.
Zero-Knowledge rollups are also coming out and have key advantages over Optimistic Rollups, including much lower costs.
The tradeoff, based on my understanding, is that there's not as much resilience to node outages (on both of these, 33% of validators by stake concentration going down could lead to block production halting)
They can have speed and low cost, which inheriting the security of Ethereum. At the same time, if block production ever stopped (like we just saw with Solana), all users can still retrieve their funds by forcing a withdraw back to the Ethereum mainnet.
Networks with low attack thresholds shouldn’t be operating as L1s.
American ideas of decentralization tend to make the root assumption that financial incentives are the only thing that drive human motivation, so almost every decentralization project gets "blockchained" eventually, at which point progress on the core standards or applications gets halted because the attention, focus, and energy shifts to figuring out the myriad, predictable problems with adding "operate a global financial system" to your JIRA tickets.
I don't really know any way out of this bottleneck for Americans; they're simply too obsessed with complicated financial schemes to make clear progress on usable dApps.
I have slightly more hope for Europeans; if you notice the Matrix project has been chugging along for years, with millions of users, and is poised to actually compete with big tech products via traditional funding and company operation, like normal people.
And, if you try to recreate reputation mechanisms, consider how exposed people would be with persistent perfectly precise digital identification of their cooperation efforts whenever such efforts cross interests of some other group. In non-internet life a lot of things are understood and agreed upon without making those decisions public. Even in private contracts, parties prefer that the details of the contract to remain known only to themselves unless (in rare and unfortunate circumstances) their dispute warrants participation of an arbiter.
What about BitTorrent or its various file-sharing predecessors? It has no cash, they had no cash. Or Tor? Exit nodes don't demand money as compensation from attracting the attention of people in authority.
Voluntarist networks can't guarantee quality of service. You just get what you get. If you want to have 1 Gbps downloads and 100% content availability, you have to pay someone to provide that.
I admit I was more skeptical in ~2017 when these grand claims were made, and it seemed like you needed to be deeply up-to-date with latest crypto happenings to be able to navigate the 'blockchain dApp' world.
I'm very supportive and admiring of things like Protocol Labs, which have put their money where their mouth is to translate the windfall from the Filecoin IPO into projects that make more sense to my traditional webapp brain, like the latest Matrix. So genuine kudos to everyone involved, I'm happy that this model exists and the ecosystem does eventually deliver in some cases.
For example, in a decentralized Youtube-like application, you can browse and watch videos without using any gas. You would only need gas if you wanted to add content to the system, like uploading a video or posting a comment.
If such an application required no cost to write data, what would protect the system against spam? Who would bear the costs of operating the application?
Others worth looking at would be Avalanche (also PoS and DAG-based) or Polygon/Matic (which is L2)
Further away from Ethereum, the launch of smart contracts on Cardano from a few days ago is the beginning of dapps there as well. The fees on Cardano are getting to be prohibitive for casual usage unfortunately (minimum $0.50 per transaction), but what's nice is that the fees are deterministic, and you can't have a failed transaction that consumes or runs out of 'gas' without finishing (though they don't actually use gas)
(further disclaimer, I actually hold some of all of the above + Ethereum... but I guess it's fair to say I hold these because of the potential of what they're doing)
Implementing smart contacts that do non trivial stuff is just basically impossible, but it's a very interesting concept to run code if it were.
Non-programmers just don't really realize how error riddled the average software is, so they get caught on the promise itself.
Edit: they're both from summer 2014, so I was mistaken.
Governments typically have sub-par IT and software engineering (when done in house). When it's venture capital, investors are playing with their own money*, so there's a good incentive to be right and pick the right people/tech. But here, it seems like it's bureaucrats that are going to be deciding what to invest in, isn't it?
DARPA got it right a couple of times in the past, so I could be wrong.
The market will produce a bunch of privacy focused “Facebook in a box” kind of products on top of such infrastructure.
The biggest problem is how do you prove your right to participation? Proof of work and proof of stake are both laughably inadequate. Machine learning things are being applied incorrectly imo but it'll converge eventually.
Plus, most consumers here don't care about their IP status (most don't know what an IP is), they mostly care if they can stream YouTube and play Fortnite good enough on their connection.
I wish we could force (and fund) telecoms to extend their fiber network as at least in Germany and Austria it's awful, like going back in Eastern Europe but 15 years in the past.
The Internet/Arpa net was created to be decentralized from the beginning.
If a node, or more nodes went down, the rest of the network may be able to keep working.
If you, and me and all of our friends and all of their friends all ran out own web servers from our homes it would be decentralized to the extent that if a server disconnected all the others would keep working.
The information on that server may be gone for all time.
The prevalence of enormously centralized monopolies on the internet is not a result of its technical architecture, but rather narrow business interests and a terminal lack of regulation.
Now we are all using AOL v3. (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc).
It can get semantically confusing. Facebook is massively distributed in some ways. Datacenters in several locations, CDNs all over the place. It would take a hell of a lot (I think) to blow Facebook off the web. Or maybe some servers centrally will shut everything off it they are blown up.
IPFS is weird when taking about decentralized. Storage is not on one big server located somewhere. It is distributed among many. In theory if one goes down, the data is still available. but only if the server/nodes that make up the IFPS network are reliable and dependable.
If a lot of nodes are run from laptops that that are shutdown at the end of the day that would become a significant problem.
Since more and more and more data would need to be stored in IPFS the need for dependable storage servers will increase rapidly.
I would like a simpler approach more in line with the original architecture, lots and lots of independent small servers. The people who run them can mirror each other in some fashion to persist data. Like FTP used to be (and maybe still is), like NNTP used to be (and maybe still is)
...GitHub (the Facebook of software development)...
Neither business interests or regulation have anything to do with something being centralized or not.
If you would launch "Thinkbeat's blog", in the traditional sense of web publishing, it is 100% centralized. Regardless of its size or your good or bad intentions.
You would be in full control of it. You could intentionally retire the site, and all information and access is lost, forever. You could accidentally do that by forgetting to pay a bill.
Another scenario, you publish something fishy on your blog, and get banned from the blogging platform, or whichever dependency you rely on.
Further, all content on the blog is 100% owned by you, and none of it by the users. So you would also own and control comments to the blog, and arbitrarily edit or delete them.
You have 100% control on everything, and users none at all.
A decentralized version of your blog would be radically different. You can't just retire it. You can't permanent delete or overwrite prior entries. Commenters may actually own their own comments.
I know, a blog is not a good example and a poor use case, just saying that the decentralized web very much is a difference in technical architecture.
See https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/ and consider following them on Mastodon: https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero
One real difficulty here is the ability of open systems people to communicate, lobby, advocate with governments. The reps, staffers and ministerial professionals aren't that numerous, specialized or inventive... usually. They basically work off ideas, prototype plans and such that are provided by (usually corporate) industry bodies and such.
Even sympathetic politicians or public servants don't have much to go on. An Australian Shadow Secretary for rural development can pull a bold, $1bn infrastructure plan straight off the shelf in his parliamentary library and start talking it up the next day. It'll typically come with a booklet explaining the main ideas, easy to find allies/advocates. Etc. The "Decentralized Web" section is a sparse mess.
you mean promote speculators with tax payer money? so they can sell their ETH and make ton of profit?
remove ethereum from your post, and i 100% agree with you
the fact that you included ethereum alongside IPFS and WebRTC is very suspicious
i don't believe in "decentralized web" if people wants it solely to make profit from 'trading' aka speculating "decentralized coins" with fiat currency
before any decentralization, there should be a global transparency act
so before doing anything, one should be able to know what your portfolio consist of, to prevent any form of conflict of interest
and even that i'm not sure that'll be enough to move forward
if it's to repeat what we lived, there is no reason to lie to ourself into pretending things will change for the better
why do you want a "decentralized web"? to maximize your profits? yeah no thanks
And other new types of payment?
Source: wanted to apply with my Web Browser that is peer to peer but doesn't go with the blockchain hypetrain.
All the other ones specifically mention blockchain based technologies.
Or did your project get funded by NLNet directly via another fund?
Err... I'm deep into decentralisation and I don't use any of those protocols. Anyone saying that there is a backbone for decentralisation or a dominant protocol is just pushing an agenda.
I prefer using SSB and Hyper, I don't go around saying they're the backbone of decentralisation. Also, screw cryptocurrency and its wasteful usage of resources.
Connections are fast enough. Computers are fast enough. Self hosting is entirely viable and it cuts the gordian knot that is the content moderation problem. If it's a static HTTP site then there are almost no attack surfaces; it's magnitudes safer than running JS from an arbitrary site in your browser.
These non-web protocols do not dencentralize. Lets start with IPFS. It's a great idea but unfortunately, like other security/anonymization layers, it relies mostly on centralizing gateways to actually let people access content. Additionally it is design to disassociate people from their files. Not a great start.
WebRTC is just the sickness of modern browser and in-browser "app" architectures causing them to re-implement what already exists in the host OS. But this time in the browser, the most insecure piece of third party code running software there is.
And blockchains like etherium aren't even worth talking about until they actually do switch over to proof of stake like they've been talking about for the last decade and never doing. And even then it directly involves monetary transactions which is sure to make thing suck for everyone.
No, the decentralized web is the decentalized web. And it's easy to be a part of it.
No, IPFS does not need gateways: they are conveniences for people that don't have ipfs:// support in their browser or run a local daemon.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ipfs-companion/nib...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ipfs-companio...
At some point those ^ extensions should be folded into mainstream browsers unless Big Content pushes against it.
People are used to so much convenience, its easy to brush under the carpet, just how much work is happening behind the scenes. Just coming up with a basic list of 3 mordern conveniences you want to support for your family will be non trivial.
In fact, just try supporting one.
(Worked as an RA in a distributed systems lab back in the day, and just getting everyone who proposed the algos and systems to use them was a nightmare)
Lets not kid ourselves. The vast majority of people don't use the web. They consume it. And they will never care about IPFS or etherium layers. The distributed web is to create a refuge from the types of companies that serve those needs. But adding additional layers of abstraction doesn't help technical users achieve that goal, it's just a fetish. They can easily forward the port and set up a simple static webserver and as a big plus their non-technical friends can actually access the data.
[0] https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr
[1] https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/infrastructure
[2] https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/src/branch/main/...
[3] https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/diplonat
Not linking our main website because it's in French.
Technical users can already rent a vps for very cheap and do it there. HA works only as well as it was tailored to - no generic solutions will change that, unless they impose harsh complexity.
Who are the potential users?
With Garage, we are trying to eschew the need for a VPS, or at least provide on-premise failovers for individuals and tiny organisations.
Our argument, as stated by OP, is that domestic connections are now powerful enough to release the load on datacenters. We deem it more ecological and empowering to plug-in an old computer to your home box.
Unfortunately, in the real world peer to peer is a different problem due to carrier-grade NATs everywhere. I have to implement malware-like exfiltration and smuggling techniques in order to build an end to end encrypted network, because pretty much down the infrastructure is unreliable and manipulated by ISPs wherever they can, including unencrypted DNS or even DNS via TLS ports being blocked completely off the internet. [1]
Without those protocol in protocol techniques there'll always be a single point of failure, like with all "dApps" that are actually just gatekeepers on a centralized domain as a point of entry for their network. Those usually can be blocked off so easily that it's ridiculous to call them decentralized.
Somehow, between the 2000s and now, the internet got so crippled for endusers that it boggles my mind how that happened without resistance.
The IndieWeb community deserve a mention here, they're all about exactly this kind of thing: https://indieweb.org/
They take 50% or more of your income, and then give back 1%, and then ask us to thank them!
Talking about Gaslighting.
Who knows, it could be a gentle attempt at keeping talent from leaving, or FOMO because every other important nation is doing crypto-stuff and lastly, and naturally, the sheer incompetence of this overextended bureaucracy where one tentacle doesn't know what the other tentacles want to ban
Tell me, which Murdoch newspaper have you been binging on?
William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir."
Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Truth