Hacker News Reader

Comment by qybaz | Hacker News Reader

In this day and age of censorship, I feel the same about web hosting. The American government should provide their citizens with a small space of hosting to share their thoughts.

View on HN

> The American government should provide their citizens with a small space of hosting to share their thoughts.

... why? What are you basing this on legally/morally other than your own want?

You could ask yourself the same question about all the public infrastructure that exists. I mean why even have roads, legally or morally??

Roads serve the public interest and have been legislated into existence at the federal level[1]. Your turn.

[1] - https://history.house.gov/Records-and-Research/Listing/lfp_0...

Were roads legislated before they existed?

Did they serve the public interest (as in, did everybody benefit from them) when they were starting to get built?

That's precisely what will happen with what I proposed.

I imagine getting your representatives to author and pass legislation for this (which will include raising money to pay for it) will be met with more opposition than you think. I think this because I don't think it serves the public interest :)

I do hope that web 3 brings a DNS service that can be bought once and owned forever that nobody can tear even from your cold dead hands. I'm not holding my breath though.

If there is a problem that web3 and blockchain can’t solve I’ve yet to hear about it.

On the contrary, I'd say I haven't yet heard of a problem that web3 and blockchain can solve better than other technologies.

There are a lot of problems for which you can create solutions that involve web3 and blockchain but that doesn't mean that technology is necessary nor sufficient to solve those problems, nor that it is the best solution (or a good solution, at least).

Web3 and blockchain do solve a number of problems in the specific scenario that you want to collaborate within domains controlled by the blockchain with individuals you actively distrust, though. With the obvious caveats that you have to trust the blockchain itself (which both in PoS and PoW means trusting people with sufficient wealth to control large portions of the infrastructure) and that everything you want to do has to be within domains controlled by the blockchain (whether the actual problems within that domain benefit from this or not).

So in a sense the question becomes how much you are willing to sacrifice to be able to solve that class of problems instead of redefining the problem so it doesn't require a blockchain.

I'm pretty sure they were being sarcastic.

unstoppabledomains.com?

I tried to design one, using a blockchain. [1]

It had all sorts of nice properties, including some resilience against Sybil attacks.

The problem was that, even with the ability to "forget" unneeded blocks, the storage requirement was simply out of reach for the regular person. [2]

And because it's out of reach of the regular person, it will inevitably centralize around companies that do it for people. And we're back to where we started.

So that's why I gave up on the idea.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-...

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/03/setting-aside-an-idea-decent...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com