yafujifide

The need for a true, decentralized p2p network is to solve the problem once and for all so that we can shed all of the moral hazards around having a company at the center. If a company starts the project, and abandons their ideals and starts censoring content, users can just download the same content from other nodes. The ideals are salvaged. On the other hand, if 99% of users agree that some content shouldn't be permitted, it would be really hard to find that content.

"Unique identities", or naming, is a hard problem by itself. One way to solve it for our purposes that I think would be sufficient is to just let each user own a keypair to authenticate messages, and the names are NOT unique.

As for a concrete proposal, it takes a lot of time to write something like that, and I just haven't done it yet because I was unsure of the community interest. However, it seems there is a good deal of community interest based on this article. Perhaps I could write a whitepaper, or maybe just a longer, technical document, where I try to solve all the problems. Note I don't actually claim to have solved them all yet - but maybe I would be able to solve them all in the course of writing the paper. Having community feedback really helps identify the problems that need to be solved (thanks!).

"Upvoting" on such a system would be a little less like voting and a little more like tipping - think Changetip. There are some real problems here. What if a user pays theirself, thus voting their own content up? One way to solve this is for funds to be locked in some sense before they can be used. A user would have to lock up a significant amount of funds for a while before being able to vote, so it would be really annoying and expensive to commit fraud. There are also bitcoin transaction fees for putting bitcoin into and out of the system, so there is always that disencentive to fund a bunch of separate accounts for the purpose of committing fraud.

I find it encouraging that someone hates the idea so strongly. This idea has potential.

Author here. AMA. Happy to work out the details of how this would work if anyone would like to see. It takes a little more than just "bitcoin" - you don't want most transactions to be on the blockchain, for instance. Instead, we would do what Streamium did, which is to use payment channels. That will allow for tiny payments.

Also, how the hosting and sharing of content works requires a lot of effort. We can use Web RTC to do the p2p communication over the web. Most people don't yet know this exists - but p2p communication over the web is indeed possible. The only catch is that you need a rendezvous server. That server would be run by anybody, so the network would be two tiered - the simple-to-use web clients that share content but don't provide the rendezvous service. Then the "full nodes" where the users would also run a rendezvous service, allowing people to find each other.

To most users it would look and feel similar to reddit. Anyone would be able to run a "business" by just running the "full node" app full-time and delivering the content to users.

Of course there's a lot more to it than this. I've solved many of the problems, but not all, and there is no prototype yet. But I believe the fundamental technology now exists to create a decentralized reddit, where the users get paid for hosting the system and providing the content.

Twitter should be on the list of alternatives. I have found twitter to be a more valuable professional tool than LinkedIn (though I doubt my experience is like others).

I don't think anyone is going to run a full node in a browser any time soon, but if they do, IndexedDB.

I have no idea if they would be interested, but I would be happy to help write any such blog post, so as to make sure the technology is accurately represented.

Issuing shares to millions of people would have made reddit a public company. reddit did not want to be a public company. This is a contradiction.

Turns out I wasn't rate limited - I wasn't seeing the "reply" button because of a completely different mechanism on HN that makes the reply button not appear for some comments that may be involved in a flaming or something.

For sure! I'm a strong believer in transparency. Trying my best to be open and honest.

Well I'm not really sure, because it felt extremely turbulent while I was there for my brief 4 month tenue. I think the culture will change. I think the culture was a little more loose, autonomous, and with little management before. I think it will be more hierarchical and managed moving forward. However, please realize that I have extremely limited experience at reddit and may simply be wrong about that.

Yes, that is the primary concern. "We" in the bitcoin community haven't yet figured out how to write 100% correct alternative implementations of bitcoin. We will have to figure out how to do that first before I would ever recommend anybody actually run an alternative implementation as a full node and rely on it for seeing the blockchain.

Not in the form of a webapp. It would have been a browser extension and/or mobile.

Yes exactly. I think people who are not whatsoever involved in the javascript world assume that javscript means "delivered by a webserver", which is just not necessarily true.

Thanks, that's exactly what it was! That's why the "reply" button was not appearing, and I thought I was rate-limited. This very thing happened to your comment - I am replying by visiting the permalink.

> The "reddit is giving 10% of its shares to its users" thing was very positively received. My understanding was that redditcoin was part of that effort. Is the 10% thing still going to happen in some way? If not, why not?

I think they intend to make the 10% thing happen eventually, although the project is currently paused. I estimate 1+ year before any aspect of the project resumes. However, I am not privy to the conversations the executives have had about it, so I don't really know.

> Regardless of the answer to the question above, hearing that redditcoin is being cancelled would likely lead members to conclude the new leadership doesn't want the community shares system that was so touted previously. Is that the case, if you know?

I don't know.

> Why would Reddit's staff, of all people, think they could do something involving Reddit quietly?

Ha. No idea.

Yes, agreed. I don't think there is necessarily anything bad or wrong about what happened. Writing a blog post about "we're cancelling cryptocurrency and firing the enginer" would have made it into an even bigger deal than it is. The way it is happening, people who care about it hear about it, and people who don't care don't have to bother.

Another piece of drama that happened last year was that reddit let a former employee go, who made an AMA about it, and then Yishan publicly criticised the former employee. The new leadership is probably very, very hesitant to say anything about anybody who was let go - they don't want to repeat that mistake.

Sorry, it seems I can see the reply button now. That may have been my error.

Had I been consulted before "reddit is issuing shares on a cryptocurrency" was announced, I would have suggested doing something with less legal headaches first. It would take a $100 billion dollar company, much larger than reddit, to actually make such a project legally possible.

If you know much about the bitcoin world, implementing a new "cryptocurrency" is not exactly a technical challenge. I never created one because I could have done so during any one-week or so period of time. The problems were entirely legal.

Also note that my primary goal, misunderstood by everyone but Yishan, was not just to make reddit notes work, but build reddit's cryptofinancial system. p2p payments on reddit had enormous potential, now substantially delayed.

Yes, he quit over a disagreement about the precise location of the office. Definitely camel's back. Reddit has been through a lot of turmoil recently:

1) Moving entire remote company to SF

2) Raising $50 million

3) Many employees, sometimes key, quitting

4) Celebgate

The disagreement over Daly City/SF probably just put Yishan over the top. Since then, more turmoil:

6) Yishan quit

7) Entire company actually performs the relocation

8) A new office is found and moved to in SF

9) New executives take over. Probably some power struggles which I didn't see.

10) New product plan is laid out for 2015. Does not include cryptocurrency.

1 month severence

That has nothing to do with javascript-the-language, but rather the way the web works. Obviously even with https, javascript delivered by a web server has a vulnerability whereby the web server may be compromised, which is outside of the users control. Any javscript delivered by a web server should be executed with that understanding. i.e., delivering a wallet from a web server is probably not the right thing to do. Note that javascript can also be run in the form of a browser extension, server-side node, node-webkit, apache cordova, etc. Javascript-the-language is not intrinsically vulnerable to a compromised webserver.

There is no working javascript full node. I believe the future of bitcoin is brighter if there are many independent implementations of bitcoin running as full nodes.

I want bitcoin running in a browser because browsers work on every platform and can bring bitcoin to more people. Also keep in mind that reddit is primarily a website, to using javascript is a pretty appropriate first choice of language for bitcoin stuff.

Can you do serious crypto in C? Only if you know what you're doing and don't screw up. Same goes for javascript.

Why isn't what being brought to the reddit userbase? That they fired me? That reddit notes is now paused? They are probably waiting for the right time to make an announcement I guess. They probably didn't realize that by firing (or letting me go, whatever) that they would draw the interest of the media.

Yeah $50m is a lot. We would have hired several more cryptocurrency engineers. Not any more. I'm not exactly sure how they are going to allocate resources moving forward, but you can see who they are hiring here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditjobs/

It's pretty simple. I was hired by Yishan and reported directly to Yishan to lead the cryptocurrency engineering wing of reddit. This was his idea - and I was happy to lead it. Yishan then suddenly quit, and new leadership took over. The new leadership is not interested in pursuing cryptocurrency at the moment.

I think "laid off" is probably the better term. The new executives are not interested in pursuing bitcoin or cryptocurrency at the current time. I was going to be the lead engineer of the cryptocurrency engineering wing of reddit, but they have let me go, and removed the other "cryptocurrency engineer" positions from the job page. The executives have their hands full with things like mobile and improving reddit.com infrastructure. Not to mention the legal difficulties of reddit notes.

Ryan X. Charles here. AMA.