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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should create a DeFi version of this that doesn't have an owner and can't be sued. Things like Omegle should be likened to an empty grass field in the middle of town, with nobody responsible for what actually happens on it except the people who choose to be there.

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The DeFI element, of course, would enable someone to pay so MORE people could see their penis unsolicited

This is a bad take on several levels. First the de-fi angle. You want a distributed application, no need to shoehorn crypto into there. But second and most important: the ultralibertarian angle of "you chose to be there so you take respinsabolity for whatever happens to you" is also not good. For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law enforcement is a good thing. Whatever replaces omegle will almost certainly have worse moderation, a less benevolent manager, and less eagerness to cooperate with authorities to, for example, hand over evidence of child predation. Free speech is not incompatible with the attempt to enforce laws.

> You want a distributed application

What would incentivize a huge number of people to run a decentralized and distributed application so that it actually continues to run? (Hint: the hope of a coin mooning)

TOR runs without some shitcoin.

The usefulness of said application. The fun of being part of it. Getting rid of the feeling of sadness expressed by many of the comments here.

If the only human motivation factor you know is monetary, I deeply pity you.

> For one, there's children. For another, moderation and law enforcement is a good thing

I think the idea that the government has any place controlling people's ability to freely communicate in private is at least five orders of magnitude more dangerous than allowing children to communicate freely with random adults.

But I expect you're one of those people who thinks everyone should be required to wear a microphone that uploads all nearby comversations to police servers in real time to be sure nothing criminal is going on so establishing common ground will be trickier than usual.

You could have had your first paragraph without the second and the world would have been better for it.

Aye, emotions got the better of me.

It happens.

Children shouldn't be browsing the internet without supervision. If they do I'd argue their parents should be regulated more, not the internet.

Ironic argument given the article, no? Did the author not just make a fantastic argument for structuring justice to protect rights?

I fail to see the reference. Can you elaborate?

How old were you when you first used the internet, and how supervised were you?

10. Very. It was a bad time for a curious mind.

I was probably 13, not supervised, but it was also too early. I saw things I would have liked not to see and I did things I am not proud of because I lacked the maturity to evaluate consequences.

Luckily nobody took advantage of me to my knowledge, but it would have been easy.

I believe my parents didn't know what was possible on the internet back then.

If there is no incentive to operate the network, who will sustain the infrastructure?

If there is no cost to using the system, how do you prevent spam abuse?

This is what crypto solves. It doesn't have to be a get rich scheme, just issue tokens to those that run the network, and have users consume tokens when they send messages.

But it doesn't solve it; it just deters some of it. If all it takes is to pay money, you can wave your penis at anyone. A paid service applies a downward pressure on spam, sure, but you can't go without moderation.

I agree you still need some sort of moderation, but maybe you can ameliorate that too if you scale cost by reputation, and also let users filter by reputation. If you keep waving your penis at people, maybe soon the only people who end up talking to you are people who actually like it and volunteer moderators taking the money to see if you're worth reporting... I don't know, it'd be hard to get the balance right, and you'd need to effectively "punish" people with a fresh identity quite harshly at first or people would just keep starting over, but I'd love to see someone try to tackle it.

I don't quite get your point.

A blockchain is just an infrastructure on top of which you run your business logic. In a sense, it's similar to what AWS would be in a centralised world.

So basically, you can add whatever registration, moderation, etc. logic on top of your infrastructure layer, whether it is built upon a blockchain, AWS, self-hosted or whatnot.

What blockchain gives you is something distributed, battle-tested, and some form of economics between infrastructure providers and platform users.

You can still decide to mimic existing business models of, say, Google on top of it. Give users unlimited free tokens on this blockchain if they provide you read access to their messages. Of course it seems outrageous stated like that, but it's pretty much the same business model than Gmail at the end of the day, with the advantage that users not willing to share their data can just buy usage tokens if they prefer.

being able to freely make whatever website / internet service you want is not ultralibertarianism. it's in fact an ultrastatist standpoint that there is something about internet communication that inherently needs policing

alas, the only good willed thing on that line of thought has ever been privacy regulations, which did not fix one single thing, just made everything worse because of cookie popups. it was a completely predictable outcome for any competent engineer of software and protocols, too. and it's the consumers fault for not opting to use a simpler protocol that doesn't dox you the moment you do anything.

the US police state won when they went after napster. you all ate that up. it's likely if we ever have a free internet again it will be outlawed, while the main internet has no purpose but to serve corporate propaganda harder and harder and align it with politics like "not buying a doordash mcmeal = racist" and "wanting private browsing = pedo". you will pay a $50 fee for the very most basic thing like permission to screenshot your monitor, and anyone who tries to fight it will be more and more criminalized. statism is the problem, not """libertarianism"""

Your analogy is skewed though; if you just show up on a field and get flashed, you aren't responsible for that, the other person is. For example.

also, the person who owns the land is often liable for what happens on it, unless the land is owned by the public (a la BLM land).

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