
So Much for the Decentralized Internet - pseudolus
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/twitter-hack-decentralized-internet/614593/
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kilo_bravo_3
I love the outsized importance applied to Twitter by journalists and news
junkies who lazily rely on it.

The vast, overwhelming, majority of human beings would not notice if Twitter
had disappeared last night if it weren't for lazy journalists and news junkies
reporting on its disappearance.

Journalists writing about twitter remind me of novels about quirky authors,
songs about musicians on the road, and movies about Hollywood: self-important
inside baseball.

~~~
kylebenzle
So true. Whats funny, is a perfectly good decentralized option exists and
works great but they wont use it because usability and security are not things
they care about. They want to write short stories based on tweets.

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carterklein13
I'm not advocating for or against blockchain / DLT here, but I find it kind of
weird that this article explicitly talks about not just the lack of
decentralization in the modern internet, but about cryptocurrency... and
doesn't mention the claims from DLT companies that they're fixing that.

Ethereum is almost a household name as much as Bitcoin. IPFS is obviously more
niche but if you were to spend an afternoon reading about blockchain you'd
surely stumble upon it.

I just find it odd that this article presents a very clear problem, but
doesn't present the thousands of people working on hundreds of projects who
passionately feel that they have a solution.

~~~
artfulhippo
Your tech bubble mentality is leaking.

Passionate feelings aren’t solutions.

To date, Ethereum and IPFS have yet to provide value to regular people. The
blockchain/DLT space is focused on financial infrastructure, and until scaling
is solved (“6 months away”) it just isn’t relevant to a general audience.

Ethereum is nowhere near the brand that Bitcoin is. Bitcoin at least enables
people to commit crimes.

~~~
carterklein13
Refer back to my comment where I explicitly said that I'm not advocating for
blockchain / DLT, nor did I say that Ethereum / IPFS provide any value.

But, there are millions of dollars in investment and research being poured
into these pieces of technology that attempt to address the problem stated in
the article. I'm not saying they do or do not solve anything - my point was
that it just struck me as odd that an article explicitly talking about crypto
and the problems of centralization, didn't so much as mention that there are
folks out there trying to fix it.

It would be like saying "fracking is a problem" without mentioning any group
that's trying to address that problem. It's pointing out a problem without a
call to action. Whether or not that call will actually fix that problem is a
different story.

~~~
artfulhippo
The Atlantic is an institution with a storied history and strong reputation.
The blockchain is a wild west known for (at best) overpromising and
underdelivering and (at worst) pump-and-dumps, fraud, and black-hat hacking.

If they mention a blockchain project, it's basically like sending some of
their audience straight to Binance to get rekt.

Do you see why it's not a slam dunk for them to shoutout some project that's
passionately trying (and unlikely) to solve these hard problems?

~~~
carterklein13
What...? I'm well aware of what The Atlantic is. People aren't (or shouldn't
be) using it to guide how they spend their money.

~~~
artfulhippo
The missing concept is trust. Blockchains are ideally trustless. Media brands
are trustful.

In a high-trust environment, a mention is an implied endorsement.

If the Atlantic wanted to mention a blockchain project without encouraging
their readers to invest, it would need to explicitly criticize it in the same
piece.

This may seem weird but it’s how it is.

~~~
carterklein13
Interesting - I hadn't thought about it that way. I'm no journalist, so it
just struck as a surprising omission. But, that being said, I have to imagine
this would strike many other people (certainly not most, but a large amount)
as a noticeable omission as well.

You're saying it's more just in their best interest, as a large and reputable
source, to risk potentially bothering that small group in order to keep their
hands clean from inadvertently endorsing anything?

~~~
artfulhippo
Ya there is an asymmetry for sure.

If you already know about projects deep down the rabbit hole, you can go to
their website/github/chain explorer/chat and do your own research.

But if you don’t know anything except that bitcoin is darknet money, the first
mention of e.g. “smart contracts” may lead you down the rabbit hole...

I think that everyone who gets into distributed systems by reading news
stories about blockchain goes through a “holy s __* this is revolutionary!”
phase, and for too many people that means buying tokens without performing due
diligence.

~~~
carterklein13
Lol - I remember that phase well. Luckily I was still in college at the time
so I had no money to sink on it.

I'm a believer in the tech, and have a little money in it now, but in terms of
expected earnings... well, I treat it just as I would treat having money on
Rushie winning Blue Grass Stakes. Just like I wouldn't bet anything I'm not
comfortable losing on a horse, I treat any crypto "investments" the same way.
I try to separate the money from the tech as much as I can.

All that aside, that's an interesting insight that really hadn't occurred to
me before so I'm glad you pointed it out!

