Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

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There's a whole ecosystem of devs working on interesting stuff that have nothing to do with finance, they just don't get mainstream headlines today.

Copied from another reply I made a few days ago, here's some projects to check out:

- Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top of Polygon.

- Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently decentralized" way.

- ENS [https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system.

- Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc.

- Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git HEAD of a "project" essentially.

- Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.

“ Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.”

2 issues spring to mind:

- What happens when someone puts illegal content on it? Eg child porn. It claims to be censorship-resistant (not censorship-proof), but I imagine any system that cannot expunge data like this won’t be around for long.

- Where are the details on the 1000 years of storage? Have they got financing arranged (and already in trust funds/isolated from the rest of the business) for this storage, the maintenance of the software throughout the next 1000 years etc? Or are they relying on people to contribute resources? If I pay money to store data here (say precious, irreplaceable family photos), then come back in 50 years, what’s the odds that I will still be able to access them?

RE the first point: you don't have to store/host 100% of the data, content can be blocklisted based on hash or other attributes so your node doesn't replicate or retransmit it. The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 node on the network willing to host your content.

RE the second point: highly recommend taking a look at the arweave white paper. They use an interesting pricing mechanism that tries to account for the cost of the next 200 years of storage (dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200).

> The censorship resistant claim assumes there's at least 1 node on the network willing to host your content.

That’s a weak claim then. I wouldn’t call that censorship resistant at all. That’s no better than China imo. Wouldn’t be surprised- if this got popular- for people to publish blacklists you can subscribe to.

Re the pricing mechanism, if the project fails/people abandon it (because the arweave economy crashes for whatever reason) what happens to the data? Paying out an endowment over time to fund the storage only works if you have people who put value in the tokens. Which could no longer exist.

> dunno where 1000 came from, the spec plans for 200).

The spec plans for 200, but that's a minimum I believe.

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