Tribler founding professor here, AMA.
2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of coding.
2x on HN frontpage! Most attention we had during 18 years of coding.
FC built a sufficiently decentralized platform, which seems to align with Tribler. They already have apps to compete with twitter/reddit (warpcast), tiktok (drakula), and others. A video service would be a great fit in the ecosystem.
It’s just a natural consequence that this creates scarcity.
If you think it's concerned about screens, you're wrong. It's concerned about "did this person really do this"?
Cyberspace does not exist without the physical substrate of compute resources.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.
In Dec 1960 we "decentralised communication", now called The Internet. Bittorrent decentralised broadcasting, leading to streaming revolution. Bitcoin pioneered decentralised money.
At Delft University I've worked for 25 years to decentralised trust, democracy, and economic cooperation in general. As an academic this focus on running code and societal change obviously kills you career protects. See my writing from prior century on "Open Information Pools" (pre-wikipedia era) [0]. Essentially what others called the Global Brain.
We deployed a decentralised trust algorithm based on the interaction graph to 94k people, see [1]. Theoretical foundations are based on proving that the Harvard impossibility result against Sybil attacks made too strict assumptions, [2]. Leading to trust scores with resilience against fake identities: MeritRank [3]. This is being released in first version in this Tribler version. So hopefully this trust framework will help stop spammers a bit. We now pioneered "Decentralised AI", that critically relies on such a trust framework to function in a trustworthy manner [4].
[0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/2000-usenix-annual-technic... [1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862... [2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/files/96914542/p1263.pdf [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09950 [4] https://huggingface.co/spaces/tribler/de-dsi
So running Tribler and reporting bug in Github. We are in desperate need of Win/Mac/Linux users which will help us with reproduce bugs. One time we found bugs in Python Async IO standard lib [1]. The 'once in a week' bugs are difficult to capture.
Suppose I want to download a torrent that's only seeded by one person running Deluge. My understanding was that this would involve making a connection to another Tribler user, and that user making the connection to that seeder. That would make every client a sort of exit node for bittorrent traffic, even for torrents they don't download. Is that not how it works?
From the https://tribler.org homepage it's very hard to figure out what tribler actually is, and the only screenshots are hidden away in the support and developer categories, and all feature vastly different menu items (without clear indication how to get those features, if they even still exist). The API documentation isn't linked anywhere.
And while installing the client and downloading your first torrent is easy enough, there isn't a lot of info on how to do anything else. And the help that does exist is outdated or wrong. The https://www.tribler.org/howto.html seems to be for a completely different version than what I get when I download and install the Windows version, and 3 out of 4 steps don't work as described (The text in 2 is completely wrong/outdated, I don't even have the menu item for 3, nor the icon for 4)
From the buzzwords, some kind of crypto scheme:
"Micro-economy", "self-sovereign", "reward content creators directly", "micro-economy without banks", "fully distributed ledgers".
It reads like crypto bolted onto torrents.
- No global consensus
which I think sets it quite apart from anything on a blockchain.
https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/%22TrustChain%22-arc...
But not much else about it. Would be interested to read more. Using torrent seeding as a form of Proof-of-Work that rewards tokens is actually an interesting use case for cryptocurrency, and not as energy-hungry. But no global consensus is different from any crypto I've ever heard of. How does it keep a consistent ledger or who owns what tokens?
Edit: full explanation here - https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/The-design-of-a-trus...
Better, says my gut, to let either sides of a contradiction compete for legitimacy in the eyes of whatever local audiences are relevant.
Assuming consensus from the get go just doesn't seem to square with how large groups of people actually work.
So I hope that these alternatives work out for them because I'd like to have more examples to point at when I try to express this.
Though, due to positive feedback and winner-take-all effects in complex systems like human economies, I don't believe that's a stable equilibrium. The critical resources of systems will concentrate and consolidate over time. The question is whether there's any way to manage that in the architecture or protocol to minimize the resulting harm, or whether it's better not to try.
Once the winners take all, they tend to redecorate such that their power is easy to keep and hard to lose. Once they've done that, they don't have to worry so much about continuing to display whatever merits made them winners in the first place. No need to deliver on whatever promises made. No need to support whatever products sold. You're on top, your enemies are pre-crushed, you can now relax.
I agree that protecting our ability to revoke their legitimacy is not a path to a stable equilibrium. It'll take work to ensure that they can not in fact relax. But I think it's work worth doing. Much like how a farmer selects cultivars based on their desirable properties, so should should the masses wield their ability to revoke legitimacy and artificially select a more desirable culture among their leadership.
...which is why consistency is the wrong part of the CAP theorem to preserve. It makes it possible for the powerful to forbid states where they're later not powerful by labeling those states "inconsistent". If you have consistency, revoking their legitimacy means abandoning the protocol.
If inconsistency is possible, you don't have to rebuild anything. Instead just reconfigure your part of it to trust different people.
Look how receptive these comments have been so far, that's a clear sign of HN's bias.
We have something much older then Bitcoin. It's a simple ledger who helped whom in the network. Simple case of earning points by helping others.
Economically, its complex. Coin creation is decentralised, everybody prints their own 'money'. The value of that help-currency is based on how connected you are to the globally connected transaction graph. Then we maintain fairness in this micro-economy against freeriders. See study with 160 million trust records and 95k users [1].
[1] https://research.tudelft.nl/files/89353583/1_s2.0_S138912862...
Then it's flawed. There's a reason why all earlier implementations failed. They were incomplete.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
But, you have to admit the crypto community hasn't done itself any favors: Hype and endless promises that never came to fruition, astronomical transaction fees, frictionful technologies, exhausting volume of promising ("world-changing!") projects that under delivered (putting it mildly), rug pulls, thefts, and other outright scams, massive use cases for money laundering and criminal activity.
Kind of hard to stay positive through all of that.
"Numerous other projects try to create a generic approach using an ICO for funding and promising the early adopters a dazzling return-on-investment. Tribler is different. rant warning. We are non-profit academics. We do not want to replace the old elite with a new crypto-currency elite. What is changed if we replace backroom deals, lobbyists, middleman, and legal monopolies with the tools of the new elite: algorithms, early investor rewards, proof-of-dominating-stake, and smart contracts? Replacing the analog world and breading digital-native inequality does not make the world a better place."
totally agreed, that's my problem with all of the bitcoin hype - it's mostly there to make the early investments more profitable which doesn't excite me much
So like middlemen and the big businesses that exist now? Crypto democratizes
I like cryptography, the blockchain, decentralization etc. but the pitch of almost every ICO is- get in now and become massively rich (at the expense of people joining later), almost the exact same dynamic as investing in a company like Visa.
If we're talking about investing in currencies, anyone that could have made the same kind of investment in today's major currencies would have had to do it so long ago that they're dead now.
If we're talking about investing in smaller entities, then you have the opportunity to get on the ground level of a thousand companies every day. That's not something that needs crypto.
But, yeah I relate to the comment in your last paragraph. There was a lot of of early talk about democratization, etc. but at the end of the day it seemed to be more about replacing the old centralized incumbents with new ones. Or, in some cases, just giving the old incumbents a new way to extend their incumbencies. There was really nothing to insulate the space from the latter. This all became really apparent during the "DeFi" craze.
I do think a lot of earnest folks got caught up in the hype and were sincerely invested in the idea of democratization. The scammers and grifters just seemed to overwhelm the idealism. The Web3 hype was probably the apotheosis, before it popped. What's interesting is how much VCs seemed to rush into that space, yet there was barely a whisper when it all came crashing down.
Kind of makes you wonder what it was really all about.
Some of the technologies were/are interesting. It just seemed that, even so, the applications never fully materialized. So the tech started to feel like solutions looking for problems. And, after a while, the excitement of the promise wears thin.
A lot of the proposed use cases were duplicative of existing capabilities and were frequently some variation of, "but, this is trustless/decentralized". I just don't think that was as compelling as assumed for most people who routinely give up their data, location, etc. in exchange for convenience. And, the crypto-based "solutions" frequently required tech experience and/or some inconvenience to onboard. Turns out, centralization is pretty convenient.
Then, after all of that, we're still left with some form of centralization in the form of node operators, foundations, etc.
So, there was frequently a gap between the tech and the social aspect.
Other use cases were a little grifty from the start.
Does "people don't like my idea, they must be biased" apply to murders, urethral sounding, and kicking puppies? Have you considered the possibility that some concepts earn hostility?
yes, i am biased against putting my hand on a burning stove top.
Thanks for working so hard on a such an admirable project.
The principle we hope will work is to out-compete abusive platforms. Textbooks say capitalism requires realistic future profit and growth. The goal is to show Wall Street that profitability of Big Tech advertisement model is doomed.
Forming non-profit collectives we aim to organise alternatives which are superior to existing offerings. So you still end up with a monopoly, just under democratic governance. This is in-line with the thinking at European Commission level, DG Grow [0]. We are trying to invent the tech to form digital collectives which scale beyond millions. Very hard. Plus collective decision making. Then you have self-sovereign citizens owning these collectives, not markets.
By design Tribler is self-organising and self-scaling. We have build a DAO using shared Bitcoin capital [1] with one extension using fancy crypto based on FROST [2].
[0] https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=... [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3565383.3566112 [2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:f45f85a0...
I’m not sure why technology is the “solution” to an alternative… people seem to just want good content delivered well. Content creators want to make as much money as possible. And that’s for “honest” content… the internet is filled with disinformation and people trying to spread conspiracies, recruit for X, or otherwise mass influence the entire population.
How a decentralized Bitcoin based model magically get us amazing content, something people want to use, and minimization of negative forces? Why is technology the key issue?
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
See here a description + full implementation of a music industry based on Creative Commons content. Artists release their music and receive direct Bitcoin donations from fans. 100% artists, 0% music label, 0% Big Tech, 0% credit card fee. It's a Bitcoin DAO with Spotify-inspired music discovery.
[1] https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/files/11814767/First.Depl...
It might be hard to re-imagine the content industry without the current monopolists. Linux showed how disruptive an open model can be.
There is a stark difference between the case of Linux and content. In the case of Linux, ROI is measurable in dollars. In the case of content, value is in large part the perception of customers.
This is going to be very difficult in the particular use case of news media, which is arguably the most critical area. We're already in a situation there where "value" is in the form of the strengthening of biases and misinformation.
The point here, is that to succeed, Tribler might have to find a niche where superior value generation becomes undeniably obvious to some sizable segment. (Perhaps music can serve this function.)