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Comment by guilhas | Hacker News Reader

Yes we should. Very exciting time full of opportunities

If people ignore the buzzword scams, and focus on what is possible to change with these new paradigms... I am already getting FOMO

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Can you describe some of these possible changes?

There's a lot to say but one of the big ones for me is normalizing the use of public key crypto for identity management.

Now anyone can create a keypair offline and suddenly they have a way for people to interact with them and they don't have to run any of the infrastructure themselves.

I like that it inverts the concept of "self hosting" into "everybody hosting".

What problem does this solve? What's wrong with the way I currently do "identity management"?

It solves the problem of needing to make and remember a username/password on every site you use, it solves the problem of password hashes being leaked when a site gets compromised, it solves the problem of not being able to know that hihihihi1234 on hackernews is the same person as hihihihi1234 on lobste.rs, and it solves the problem of trying to make an account on a website only for your typical username to be taken already

How does me making an offline private key with the username Spivak fix the problem of someone else making their own key with the name Spivak? There is still a shared namespace of user ids. And if it’s fine that two keys have the same display name then you could just do what Discord does and do Spivak#42069.

There can still only be one twitch.tv/spivak.

It solves a few problems as mentioned below.

Every single form of your identity right now is mediated by a third party.

Your email. Your Instagram. Your Twitter. Your phone number. Your bank account.

Not only that, but each one is independent of the other. That's 5 different accounts with 5 different providers. Each of them has a vast infrastructure and duplicate copy of everything about you and everything about everything else. Each one of them has an off switch to your identity that they can freely flip on a whim with no recourse available to you.

If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.

Now the identity resides with the user, not any third party, which means they have full control over it, without having to rely on any one entity that can fail or turn against you.

> Your email. Your Instagram. Your Twitter. Your phone number. Your bank account.

These are identifiers, backed by accounts with credentials.

> If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.

What value does this have for your email provider? Instagram or Twitter? The phone company? The bank?

All of these companies provide value _through_ the identifier. Checking accounts and Credit cards issued by the bank. The phone number. Your handle on Instagram or Twitter.

Many of these need to have an idea of a real-world identity for regulatory reasons. For account recovery actions. For effective enforcement of abuse bans.

What about this off switch? Even if I show up with my own identifier - twitter can still refuse to post my messages. My bank could block access to my funds.

This vision seems to be able replacing these businesses with new businesses and new infrastructure.

Your first sentence greatly exaggerates the content that follows. I don't see any actual problems with the latter.

I do see more problems with the "solutions" actually.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So in this brave new world, if someone manages to steal a single piece of my data (my private key) then they can have unfettered access to my phone, bank, email and social media accounts? And none of those services have a customer support team who can restore my access and reverse the fraudulent transactions that were made in my name?

This doesn't require web3 though. We have Web Authentication already integrated into every browser.

Just being completely random imagine the internet is now the multiverse. And everything publish on it is an NFT, posts, videos, images, comments. Like the current internet but everything has a value. Creating a comment on StackOverflow could get you paid instead of just reputation

The NFT concept seems stupid at first, and a 60 million NFT is definitely stupid. But imagine Youtube is the metaverse where videos, or NFTs, are published, and the owners will forever receive royalties from Youtube advert/membership profits. People can upload similar videos, but then there is, for example, music rights violation arbitrated by the site that some or all the profits of the video revert back to the original creator. And generally all free for the consumer. By no means perfect

Mining could be people caching, and serving NFT content, through which they could get paid, and preserve internet. Partially replacing web hosting, and preventing censorship. Using your neighbors pcs to speed up video encoding

For example the Google News problem with Spain and Australia URLs can be NFTs, and have rules. If a site is referencing a URL and is profiting, a part should go to the URL owner, but if the URL is clicked then a part goes to the site that referenced it https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/3/22761041/google-news-rela...

You might say that people don't like these new concepts, or mining is bad for the environment, but right now we can make them what we want them to be. The internet will evolve somewhere and if we don't think about it, someone else will and we won't like the result! Everything is up for grabs, payment systems, identity authentication, personal data management, web3 economic model, social media, news platforms...

Just ask: How much money do you expect to get? Who currently has that money? Why would they give it to you?

1) more than I get now

2) ceo of Spotify is worth estimated $5billion maybe start there, shouldn’t that (be it money or ownership in Spotify) be going to the musicians who actually make the content and who get fractions of pennies?

3) they probably don’t want to. But we can just build systems that replace them. It seems to be working so far.

did you get involved in bitclout? it approaches decentralized social media from this “monetize everything” angle, with one click to mint NFTs from any post. I actually like the micro-tipping and fundraising potential, but honestly the drama just gets cranked up to 11 once people’s financial solvency is tied to randos’ reputations.

i’m of the opinion that everything monetization touches dies, tho i’m sure META will be full of content creators getting their royalties as people have no choice but to buy an NFT of any MP3 they want to play in their zuck-sanctioned surveillance-spaces, I still believe in the old cyberspace declarations [0] where government regulations and copyright law are considered quaint anachronisms.

[0] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

I agree with that, when there is money involved things can get poisoned very quickly, but we can develop better reputation systems. And people have jobs, this would be making it easier to earn while enjoying free time. People have been fight the internet advertising economic model for awhile. So there is some monetization dependency already. And we will have to decide where it will pivot next

We can't forget forget creativity, intrinsic value and allow dissent. But like I say above not everything will have to be valued, there is separation, you can put content into IPFS without emitting NFTs

I think blockchain technology promotes less lock-in, not more. Probably several METAs will appear competing with each other, we just have to choose the one that promotes more freedom and interoperability

What's in it for YouTube in this? It operates quite profitably without using blockchain to track ownership of videos and copyrights and who to send ad money to

I was just making an example that like an YT video, an NFT has value for content creators and can be the future of internet

Couldn't care less what happens to YouTube, hope something better comes along

The trend with this blockchain technologies is that single companies will have less power and control so they probably won't like it much, or will look for workarounds

But whatever happens for web3 probably most will have to adopt or stay behind

But that is the key question. Why would something else come along? You need backend resources for transcoding and serving. You need a search system. You need an ad system. And if you get big you need a copyright management system.

Alternatives come along everyday for varied reasons

https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/

Progress just happens now and then, newer people comes to the ecosystem and change things to their liking. And in this case the blockchain invention is to big and disruptive to be ignored

Someone is working on a blockchain related system for all the things you said

And probably in the future no one will trust a company without some sort of auditable public blockchain ledger

> Alternatives come along everyday for varied reasons

But they don't stick. Simply being an alternative is not sufficient to make a service better and very few people care about the fundamental difference between youtube and some website that serves videos that are IPFS references.

> And probably in the future no one will trust a company without some sort of auditable public blockchain ledger

Why? What undesirable action would youtube take that is prevented by having them reference a blockchain such that you now trust them? The core things that people don't like about youtube are

1. Making videos and channels unavailable on youtube.com

2. The recommendation algorithm

3. Google remembering your browsing history and later serving you ads based on their profile of your interests

All of those still exist even if all of the videos are instead IPFS references.

Don't know why you so focused about YT. I was just exemplifying how the NFT could be the future of internet by comparing to YT video ecosystem. Not specifically on the future of YT. If anything it was a compliment. But if it improves or is replaced, don't care

> But they don't stick. Simply being an alternative is not sufficient

Tiktok clearly overtook a part o YT for younger people. And some big youtubers already double publish in other platforms

> Why? What undesirable action would youtube take that is prevented by having them reference a blockchain such that you now trust them?

Imagine a new video service appears that hosts the video normally, without IPFS etc, but tracks the user views/likes/dislikes in a public blockchain

Now there is someone with 1 million to invest in adverts. Will they do it on a platform where can validate the actual numbers, or trust YT word?

Not even sure if feasible, everything at the moment is hypothetical. But it will come

I think this is the exact opposite direction I would like to see things go. We need to remove profit incentives to encourage more free thought.

If we have profit incentives in everything, we will see optimization for profits at the expense of everything else, including quality of information.

Completely agree, but you see this is like a 5 billion people driving a non stopping train, and it will go somewhere weather we like it or not, we can only help make it better

I don't like SPA, Electron, JavaScript in general, but the internet doesn't care

More on your comment, I can see what you say, someone not making a political controversial comment because it would mean losing money. But if we look at YouTube again, actually not every video is worth money, there is a lot of creativity and controversy still, more than before it

Every system is not perfect, and at the moment, by being, free a lot of people are not creating, or commenting or dev blog-posting, because they are not get paid for it, and they need to survive, so they have to invest their time on the 9to5, and after are to tired to investigate how can I profit by telling everyone "how did I do X interesting thing project"

Open source will probably see a bigger influx of money, there will be less friction to value people time

Like the time I just spent writing these comments for free!

evilmaid.crypto

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