mattwilsonn888

* Markdown and LaTeX working stably out of the box. * Side-by-side view. * (Isolated) File and folder browser in the immediate UI

I originally started with it because it's Open Source and can link to other documents saved in Joplin - I don't actually use that feature though.

Other than that it's fairly sane. Just works, no real bugs so far, and you can export in a variety of different convenient formats; I've come to trust exporting as a single .jex (Joplin Export) file, but MD and HTML are supported.

And the security of two chains does not add up, in fact, the more resources are split up between multiple chains, the less secure they all become. So this doesn't solve for the security side of the trilemma.

If Bitcoin scalability is the problem Lightning Solves, then it almost tautologically fails when you realize that entering into a Lightning Channel requires a base Bitcoin transaction. If every person on Earth tried to take on-chain Bitcoin into a LN Channel, it would skyrocket the fee-rate.

The only other option then would be for all Bitcoin purchased to exist on Lightning, so people simply buy LN Bitcoin. This is not impractical to get started; exchanges simply send and receive LN BTC. But Lightning security relies on the ability to get a transaction posted to the base layer Bitcoin.

If everyone is using lightning, and thousands of users are attacked on Lightning at once, the chain would not be able to handle the influx and would leave many victims. Not only that, but the LN node network would naturally centralize, especially with liquidity requirements.

It would be much better to properly scale some base layer.

If you're reading this on Saito, you already have a key-pair, wallet and lite-node running in the background. There is no Web3 experience in the world that is as open as and easy to use and get started with as Saito is.

The recent release of our Multi-Wallet continues this trend. Email backups alongside more traditional options make preserving access to your funds as painless as possible for all demographics - that's where mainstream adoption starts.

Web3 & Crypto UX needs to be as useful for Grandma as it is for crypto-natives; the proof is all around you that we're well on the way and far ahead of any competition - that being said, critical feedback is welcome.

https://saito.io/redsquare?tweet_id=211fcead5012df99360f3355...

What you have done is justified 'everything under the sun' so long as it technically operates in a free market. But the ability for users to switch does not guarantee that the incentives to compete are at all healthy or robust.

You are correct when you say centralization affects users indirectly and they will simply use services which are most immediately convenient. But competition is not giving users much benefit because every centralized service has a monopoly on their instantiation - it's not like you can make a few tweaks and give everyone a moderately better experience - you have to start from scratch and make yet another siloed and extractive platform for any and every improvement. And then if you do they can easily copy you back before you build a fraction of their momentum.

X isn't going to let you improve the experience and just take users; they're going to say: "Have fun building up user trust and security infrastructure - also you're never getting our users." That's the difference between a protocol and a platform. The reason companies build platforms is because they need to fund infrastructure and opsec at scale so they effectively need to build monopoly protocols i.e. 'platforms.'

So "switching is easy" is meaningless. Building successful competing platforms is, by design, very difficult; it takes large investments and huge risks and a lot of rebuilding what's already been done just for the sake of catching up to platforms who have obvious incentives and built-in methods to discourage competition via their tight, centralized structure. Even if the platform is better, it will probably fail relative to its predecessor.

Decentralization most directly helps builders. If the basic requirements of a service are sufficiently decentralized security, networking, front-ends, then a builder who wants to compete via small (or any sized) improvements *does not need to rebuild the entire service.* Small builders who would otherwise not have access to startup capital, risk tolerance, or excessive build-hours would be equally able to compete because their decentralized access to the basic requirements cannot be locked behind an extractive economic scheme.

Imagine every talented programmer making open source software could leverage it atop secure, robust and interoperable networks. And they could earn money from it.

There is a massive difference between being a passive proponent of the free market and a maximalist for market competition. Your justification for the state of the field is a passive retreat to free-market capitalism. Users certainly have the ability to choose, but there are all sorts of schemes and situations in a free market where competition is choked. Honest proponents of decentralization are maximizers of opportunities for competition - they recognize that the free market is a gradient and not some binary quality which automatically imbues every operation inside it with good accountability.

We used to have DAI, which was fully decentralized and over-collatoralized by Ethereum tokens (the native currency of the platform DAI is rooted on) - but the founder mysteriously died as the DAO was taken over and made to begin collateralizing DAI against USDC and USDT, ironically.

It is a shame how far crypto has fallen culturally that this stablecoin business is some niche story. Most people are in it for the money, but many good people are not.

Do you have any specific critiques? I'm not going to guess your meaning if you aren't going to address my points directly.

I will, again, reiterate that a Sybil attack is about power, not about convincing people you hold multiple identities - that is simply the means - it is not an effective attack if it doesn't get you that power over the network. The proof in the post clearly demonstrates how Sybilling reduces power in that scheme.

Your attack is not a Sybil attack - you've simply surrounded a user with extremely uncooperative nodes who manipulate or censor the user (the former of which isn't even economically feasible in the scheme of the OP, but that's tangential). If the uncooperative nodes surrounding the user all authoritatively proved they were unique identities, well, it obviously wouldn't be a Sybil attack then.

Yet these *unique* uncooperative nodes can perform the equivalent attack you keep bringing up. If you've read carefully at all, then you know I've just proven it can't be a Sybil attack - because *it has nothing to do with node identity and is not reliant on duplicating.*

Furthermore, this attack you describe, which is not strictly reliant on Sybilling, is on a user and not the network. I go as far to argue that even this individual user has recourse, which is beyond the primary claim - and as far as I'm concerned, true.

So addressing that - your argument is that nodes can afford to attack users because they can budget in the expense and surround users. But you can't carry this through - it always involves ripping users off and getting more money from them, and there are various ways for users to escape, including getting a new ISP.

In fact, even traditional monopolistic strategies don't even work to drown competition - because the network is open and it cannot be 51% attacked, so no majority can ever exclude competing nodes from publishing to the chain and earning rewards.

If a user has a constrained network which only routes to one provider - that isn't a Sybil attack, and it certainly isn't an attack on the network itself. I took the liberty to go above and beyond and argue that even these practices become unsustainable when you have a network with these qualities.

But I do not concede that just because one way you can perform this attack is by Sybilling that it is actually a Sybil attack - as I proved by showing you can perform it without duplicating oneself - hell you can do it with a single presented node to the user; what you are describing is hoarding network traffic.

If you are that concerned with reputation, you can ask for token lock-ups - further diminishing the ability of many identities appearing distinct.

But the greater point is that these are not Sybils, because they do not gain power over the system. If your counter-point to that is that users will waste money then clearly this attack is not sustainable - some node can take that revenue by saving users' money.

And if your concern is so extreme that a whole network around a user is locked down, then I can make a similarly unusual case that physical transmission of data is incentivized - because it is.

Of course recovering from extreme cases is not user-friendly - but the point is that you can recover and these states of total control are not sustainable; it would take a lot of work to even get into one of these states and it wouldn't even offer the attacker an ability to hold it.

So in practice it is unlikely to happen. The same way it's unlikely you will keep buying bread from the guy that charges twice the market rate.

Otherwise, if there are no extra hops, then what is the attack? A single router (posing as many) gets transactions into blocks as fast as anyone else?

As soon as he starts Sybilling that data to earn more fees or censoring it, every recourse I mentioned (not just may last comment) makes it unsustainable and unprofitable comparatively - opening the door for others to take his spot.

If your point the whole time was a censorship operation through Sybilling, the user can identify that quickly AND honest nodes will seek out those users. I addressed it earlier - the more extreme the censorship, the greater the incentives for other nodes to remedy it themselves.

Such an attack is referred to as a "long range attack" and is 'solved' by 'finality' in Ethereum, the largest running PoS network. Finality basically means a hard checkpoint. I won't make you say it: finality can of course be changed on different forks, and that's the core issue in PoS.

There is probably some utility in adding friction to such corruption, but that the mechanism doesn't ultimately prevent it and really just adds incentives to controlling it.

Attacks on PoS are more convoluted, but there are more of them and more ways to approach them. I fully agree this fact is lost in obfuscation and jargon.

Short answer is that as such activity continues the incentives to compete by behaving less duplicitously also increase - that may mean unorthodox means of finding those users in extreme attack scenarios like your example tends towards - but in basic cases there are proofs nodes can provide of previous performance which can't be Sybilled.

Stepping back: you don't even need to trust initial hops based on their identity - they can offer proof of how many hops their routing chains accumulate by showing users those transactions, linked to historical blocks, which are expensive to fabricate.

You can use a succinct commitment scheme to prevent would-be Sybils from only sharing their 'well-routed' transactions: A node commits to a Merkle Tree header hash, and the user is allowed to randomly sample from branches in the tree.

A user expects to be provided with their random sample and see that:

1) The transactions are from a sufficiently 'worked' on chain which is prohibitively expensive to fabricate.

2) The transactions involve the router committing to the Merkle Tree.

3) The transactions involve less hops than other routers the user is sampling transactions from.

The Sybil you are describing now must divide the size of their Merkle Tree sampling for every new identity they wish to inhabit - and if they are in fact consistently Sybilling users, will be forced (statistically) to reveal their excess hops.

What you describe is still very inconvenient for users - to have to sort through all these nodes and compare their samplings, but it is at least a demonstration that this Sybilling behavior is not sustainable. I tried to assume the worst case scenario (related to your concern) when devising the above scheme.

The more the censored transactions build up, the easier it is for any honest node to swoop in, outpace the attacker and earn the rewards. And then those users now have a node who is willing to include their data - the incentive structure leads to these connections.

The point is that nodes who censor are giving up money to anyone else willing to include the data.

Many people argue that because nodes can still create an arbitrary number of identities, that they are in fact Sybilling. I believe that is incorrect, and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack) seems to agree:

"[A Sybil Attack] is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by creating multiple identities"

If you take 'reputation system' generally to mean a system where nodes are gaining power from their identity, or in the case of Saito: their behavior, then you can easily say Saito is Sybil Proof even if it allows arbitrary identities because the 'reputation' you use to influence the network cannot be gamed by making additional identities - even though making them is free.

But the attack vectors are the same, and now there is an incentive to pull off an attack since the system is representing money people are willing to trade for goods. I think PoS is dangerous for this reason - same vulnerabilities and defenses but with higher stakes on both sides.

Not defending PoW wholesale, but it is fundamentally different as a network defense tool - though, it too has a reward for attacking it, so long as you can get 51% together - or less with selfish mining (network latency attacks).

If so, the response to that is: 'this type of behavior doesn't grant this node an increased ability to influence consensus compared to if they routed all data under the same identity.'

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Routing nodes will lose to competitors if another routing path on the same fee is included in a block. They also diminish the 'work' in the transaction (which overcomes the threshold to make blocks) by adding hops - so it's only worth it to add hops in order to 'win the race.' All nodes in the path have an expected value on the fee, but the further into the chain of hops, the more that diminishes.

In a technical sense, it isn't necessary to then reward those routing nodes to keep the anti-Sybil property for the routing network itself, but it does give other nice properties related to trustlessness and network provision.

1. Data pays no fees, routers get no rewards

Assuming data is published to a shared medium which requires some threshold of "work" which stems from the data, then even just the act of including that data into your medium becomes more difficult the more hops it accumulates. You then of course rely on trust assumptions to fight spam.

2. Data pays fees, routers get no rewards

If you use some measure of cost to create data, you can handle spam, and that cost determines how much work the data carries with it and thus how likely it is to be included into the medium (trying to be very general here, but in the linked article that medium is a blockchain). The trust assumptions here rest with the routing nodes 'doing their duty.'

3. Data pays fees, routers get rewards

This is the model Saito has - it removes trust assumptions for users and routers as if one tries to 'scam' the other (either a Sybilling user creating fake data, or a Sybilling router creating fake hops), the native money can be leveraged to create recourse without an authoritative audit or punishment - purely economic.

A blockchain with authoritative access has marginal use: it can reduce trust (but not realistically defend against economic attacks) - it certainly pales in comparison to the societal application of a network which is robust while allowing arbitrary participation in consensus.

People, skeptics included, get stuck on the word blockchain and build arguments stating that any data structure which is a cryptographic chain of hashes is the true subject of interest. Blockchain doesn't offer the compelling parts of "crypto" anymore than a care without an engine offers the ability to drive.

Economic (or game theoretic, if you like) defense against converging power is the primary draw. It is why technologically minded people so often don't truly grok it - because the cryptography is (important) implementation details. It is the incentives which emerges from those schemes that is primarily important.

One can reason about fundamentals more competently than the average market participant. Isn't that the point of this community? Venture capital adjacent folk who profit off of being more well informed than the market.

No, not really. A blockchain without a native currency is imparted no special economic security i.e. insurmountable costs to rewrite data.

If you want a system that allows anyone to participate and secure high stakes transactions, you cannot allow cheap revisionism or censorship which is exactly what traditional systems allow (through power or bribes). A blockchain without a native currency is void of any economic security.

I'm not sure what you believe the "gotcha" is when your hypothetical removes the most crucial aspect in order to try and prove the tech is useless.

Bank gets bailed out? That's a dire sign for the fundamental value of the dollar to regular people if this is a regular practice.

Bank gets bought up? Well we don't really have 5k banks anymore do we?

1. Be the guy that posts the news articles

2. Try the same post multiple times if it doesn't 'make it'

3. Timing is important - weekends are good opportunities.

I am not a "Bitcoin maxi," but your reasoning is flawed - if you believe other layer-1 blockchains have superior value you should have more justification than price to back that up. I'll start:

https://mukdde.substack.com/p/the-economic-solution-to-the-b...

Bitcoin can be the best technical alternative for money, which I believe it currently is, but if people in general do not believe it is money then it simply is not money. But in fact, the bar is even lower than that for Bitcoin (or any alternative money's failure) - if the government(s) decide that you cannot accept Bitcoin (or any money) easily in trade, then it loses dominance as money (and thus is not really).

When people say Bitcoin is not backed by anything, the intuition they are trying to communicate is that Bitcoin's value relies on people believing and accepting that value (of course so does the US Dollar, but look who is in the ring fighting for it).

What people truly want out of a crypto-currency is value which is more objective, which is not reliant on the belief of others; it is the difference between a monetary chain, like Bitcoin, and a commodity chain.

https://mukdde.substack.com/p/a-monetary-blockchain-is-less-...