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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

If users agree that the thing you have built is broken and want to opt into using a new less-broken thing, they can always do that, as would be the case (say) with software they download from you and are running on their computer (rather than software you host on your server, that you can change at will): you don't need the power to "reach your grubby mitts"--to put it bluntly--into their lives and fix what you built on their behalf in order for broken things to be fixed, and your definition of what is "broken" can easily be at odds with the user's preferences or even needs (which of course begs the entire question of how to avoid the incentive to be evil in the first place).

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> If users ... want to opt into using a new less-broken thing, they can always do that

Users don't necessarily have that much agency. The most successful and powerful businesses don't need to satisfy user preferences because the users are FORCED to conform THEMSELVES to the constraints imposed by the business.

I certainly understand that wanting to amass power over others (and, then, likely, eventually being evil) is both extremely common and extremely profitable... but the argument here is that it should also be frowned upon, avoided, and quite possibly even regulated out of existence. I thereby don't understand why you are re-asserting the status quo :(.

I'm not re-asserting anything, I'm just saying that our children won't really have an option NOT to work in the bitcoin mines.

I think the point is that the alternative where the developer needs the user's permission in order to push out an update that the user actually wants is already the scenario where the user is in control, as opposed to the status quo.

You don't need the ability to force something on them that they actually want, so the ability to force something on them can only be used for evil. The good update would be accepted without coercion.

I wasn't talking about updates. The user maybe hates using the platform at all. Or maybe doesn't think about it. But either way, knows there's no choice.

Network effect, or else some other monopoly, determines where you have to go to find jobs, where you go to meet girls, what kind of currency you have to pretend has value, etc.

Yes - even in what language you speak, what sort of fashion is appropriate, etc. To put it bluntly, because humans only want to interact with other humans, people will always be forced to change their ways and adapt to whatever the status quo is to participate in that human-to-human interaction (lest you decide to slice your tongue and go live in the woods, isolated from any other human). Without the conformity, nobody will be able to interact as they all want to interact in a different way.

The real potential solution to all this is standardization. It's conformity, but only on the communication layer itself and not the backend. For example, in online dating, if you want to use Tinder, go for it, but someone else might want to use something else while still matching with people who use Tinder. This is, of course, entirely impractical as of now given all of the side-effects nobody is willing to make (giving up user data, DoS threats, general increased infra costs with no real ROI), but perhaps a stopgap solution is to have a regulating body determine standards for specific types of services (eg. short-form blog platforms like Twitter), and they enforce products to conform to the shared standard if it's a similar enough experience to existing products in the category. This would still allow innovation in new areas, while ensuring giants can't form a monopoly via network effects in easy-enough-to-replicate platforms. This still leaves the issue of "all my users' PII is in 1000 different companies' servers" so maybe the body would have to vet & impose legal data restrictions on companies that want to federate with the incumbents, but that would impose on the goal of allowing new players to enter the market with low friction and further entrench the dominance of these incumbents.

> (giving up user data, DoS threats, general increased infra costs with no real ROI)

I'm starting to think the best way to solve this is to bifurcate it.

Create a P2P system which is free-as-in-beer but is possibly susceptible to DoS attacks etc., then have an option which is more robust than that where you pay Cloudflare or someone to host your data in exchange for money, but it's still part of the same network and interacting with the same people.

That way you can acquire new users without shoving a payment prompt in their face on day one but someone who just wants to hand a fistful of cash to a third party to take care of their problems still has that option.

> This still leaves the issue of "all my users' PII is in 1000 different companies' servers" so maybe the body would have to vet & impose legal data restrictions on companies that want to federate with the incumbents, but that would impose on the goal of allowing new players to enter the market with low friction and further entrench the dominance of these incumbents.

This is the kind of problem that gets solved much better by smart cryptographers than government bureaucrats.

Encrypt the data. Use a kind of cryptosystem where only the people who are supposed to be able to have it (i.e. your friends, not Mark Zuckerberg) can decrypt it.

Now some servers can host it so it's not offline when your phone is, but those servers can't read it, only the intended recipient(s) can.

Obviously this is only even necessary for posts that aren't intended to be completely public.

> Users don't necessarily have that much agency.

It's time to fix that.

Web 1.0: Read Web 2.0: Read/Write Web 3.0: Read/Write/Own

Based on the weekly reports of $XX million being stolen from $DEFI_ENTITY, web3 seems more like read/write/pwn to me.

Have you opened a Twitter account with that wit?

The fact is that you cannot verifiably compare those numbers to traditional finance hacks, because they're simply not transparently reported/cleaned up before the damage can be noticed.

Don't fault a good in-built bug bounty for bringing about the next generation of strong, distributed infrastructure.

Traditional finance hacks usually abuse tax / debt of large enough companies. Web3 finance hacks take all available money directly out of your personal account. That's a much worse situation for a normal user, because with a bank you can often say "this is wrong, fix this" and the bank is insured enough that they will. Compare to the situation in Venezuela where the in-built bug bounty currently takes a significant amount of people's savings and they have no way to revert it.

The problem is that we've given up our own knowledge and abilities as consumers to complete fucking snakes as people,

and they regularly abandon their duties to keep us safe, with varying degrees of recompense/Justice actually being served when the consumer gets screwed (less every year, from what I can see).

At least with SuperNewFastDeFi (vs Coinbase), I know I'm using a beta and could get screwed, as opposed to my current "stable, traditional financial institution" which just recently turned off everyone's 2FA during an infra migration, and acted like that's totally okay.

I know my home loan etc won't be T-shirt cannon'd off to even worse snakes as soon as I've left the parking lot.

Many forms of security and agency improvements this shift is bringing to the forefront now, and this community, for whatever reasons, sleeps on.

P.S. If the thing being hacked is government backed, you are the pay-back!

If you want to be that precise, then you are the 1/population part of the payback. Yes, collectively we pay the tiny fraction of insurance on each of us not having all savings wiped in a single hack.

Which happens as well for defi/crypto, but with no guarantees attached - you pay for the development/support with fees.

I don’t think you understand how bug bounties work.

This is relying on something akin to a free market for laws: immigrate to a place which has better designed laws. I find it way too simplistic for real life. Network effects and other cost of switching can sustain bad regimes for quite a while. This applies as much to people immigrating across national boundaries, to religions imposing death penalty for apostasy to musicians being forced to be present on Spotify despite its terrible economics.

Should constitutional amendments be outlawed - just because people are "free" to immigrate if they don't like it?

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