
Design of a digital republic - state
https://medium.com/@urbit/design-of-a-digital-republic-f2b6b3109902
======
nbadg
This is a really interesting article, and it's nice to see a lengthy
discussion of treating sites like Reddit, Facebook, etc as a kind of digital
nation-state.

But one point in particular bothered me (and perhaps I'm misreading it):

> It’s incumbent on anyone creating a new network of any kind not just to
> avoid using it yourself for criminal purposes, but to design it so that it’s
> not useful for criminal purposes.

Isn't a network, by definition, useful for criminal purposes? Perhaps the
author means not _more_ useful for criminal purposes than for legal ones, but
what exactly might that mean? And by whose laws are we describing criminality?

I also think this argument is tremendously problematic, maybe even self-
defeating, in the context of encryption. If we, as the author proposes, were
to have a network designed from the beginning to be capable of eventual
decentralization [1], doesn't that imply heavy use of cryptography? I can't
imagine a digital network where you can create privacy (and therefore agency)
any other way.

And yet clearly, government entities like the FBI are publicly railing against
encryption as a useful tool for terrorists and criminals. Plenty of people,
myself included, find this policy debate to be frighteningly under-informed,
but if your goal is to avoid government attention to maximize the chances for
success, it's not _our_ opinion that matters, it's the FBI's. So I think think
this kind of friction is unavoidable, implying the smart money is on people
who can cleverly minimize its impact.

[1] On a related note, I'm working on exactly this problem, at a protocol
level. If you're curious, check out our documentation repo
[https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse](https://github.com/Muterra/doc-muse)

~~~
pcmonk
Almost anything is useful for criminal purposes. The point is that if
something is unusually useful for criminal purposes (e.g. megaupload), then it
will be heavily scrutinized. Just because crowbars are useful for crime
doesn't get them regulated. Anthrax, on the other hand, does.

You are correct that privacy without cryptography is infeasible. Urbit
definitely does make heavy use of cryptography. Some government agencies may
not appreciate this, but the point of the cryptography isn't primarily so that
the NSA can't read it, but that other people don't impersonate you. It's
important to not only not violate the current letter of the law, but also the
spirit of the law.

The goal isn't simply to minimize government attention to maximize the chance
of "success". "Success" that doesn't accomplish the rest of our goals isn't
success at all, so there are some things that Urbit can't compromise on.

~~~
nbadg
The distinction between "useful" and "unusually useful" for criminal purposes
is a very important one. It might be worth highlighting more explicitly in the
article, since it sounds like you may be the author.

> "Success" that doesn't accomplish the rest of our goals isn't success at all

I'm not talking about survival, I'm talking about success. In the article you
draw a distinction between failure by death ("range safety") and failure by
incorrectness ("mature non-republic"); the remaining option, then, would be
success -- including meeting your goals.

My point is that survival is implicit in this definition of success, and from
a risk management standpoint, political pressure from entities like the FBI is
a very real threat. Many of us understand that the FBI's argument is
enormously problematic, but that's largely irrelevant: _they_ think it's
valid, and that's all that matters when _they 're_ the ones applying real-
world political pressure.

Put plainly: the FBI is advocating changing laws to make strong end-to-end
cryptography illegal (unless the feds have access, which by definition isn't
E2EE). This pressure is a real-world fact; what are you doing to mitigate it?
Or what about Turkey, where it's already quasi-illegal?

~~~
pcmonk
I'm not the author, but I do work for Urbit.

Sure, success is impossible without survival. But survival without e2e crypto
can't be success, which is why it's baked into the system. Some risks are
avoidable while some aren't.

How do we mitigate this risk? Don't give the FBI any reason to worry about us
in particular. Don't market to unsavory types. Be above board and make a
useful service that lots of people use. Nothing more complicated than that.

------
Animats
The article is more of a random rant - all whining, no solutions. It's not
about a "digital republic" at all. There have been proposals for governmental
systems with lots of online voting, but this isn't one of them.

Federated systems work fine technically, but few have achieved widespread use.
USENET was quite successful, but Google effectively took it over. (Google
Groups was originally just a USENET node, but now most people are unaware that
many "Google Groups" are really USENET groups, with traffic flowing in both
directions, and you don't need a Google account to access them from the USENET
side.[1])

If there's no place where someone can put a boot on the air hose and cut off
the air supply, systems are not highly profitable. This is why federated
systems are not widely successful.

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.c++](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.c++)

~~~
yarvin9
As I hope TFA makes clear, "republic" is not a synonym for "democracy." [1] If
it's possible to build something useful and effective with "lots of online
voting," I don't know of any examples.

Successful multipolar/federated systems (which are republican enough for me,
anyway) have existed. Like Usenet.

As a Usenet veteran, I have a tough time with the idea that Google killed
Usenet. Google bought DejaNews in 2001, and Usenet was already pretty dead in
2001. Yes, some Usenet groups survived and have become effectively Google
groups, but without Google I suspect they'd just be dead.

The conventional wisdom, which seems right to me, is that Eternal September
killed Usenet (with the assistance of alt.binaries). It would be interesting
to see an argument against this theory.

You also seem to be suggesting that Usenet died because it wasn't profitable
enough. I suppose it wasn't profitable enough to carry alt.binaries. But its
costs, for regular text posts, didn't seem extreme even in the 90s.

In fact, not to get all commie on you, but one of the neat things about Usenet
as a digital republic was that no one owned it, and no one profited from it.
The positive social value of this principle is seen in a variety of
institutions. Compare to Burning Man, for instance. Who would show up for
burningman.com, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic)

(edit: formatting)

~~~
daveloyall
What is TFA?

~~~
yarvin9
Sorry:
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA)

------
Rmilb
>It’s incumbent on anyone creating a new network of any kind not just to avoid
using it yourself for criminal purposes, but to design it so that it’s not
useful for criminal purposes.

What happens when your point of view is "criminalized"?

~~~
yarvin9
As a practical matter? You censor yourself. And/or practice the great art of
Ketman [1].

Criminalizing points of view is harder to implement, as a practical matter,
than criminalizing behavior that most people today see as actual, victimful
crimes. There's no equivalent of "grass mud horse" [2] for terrorism,
childporn, etc. As the Chinese government is very aware, even a well-censored
network is way more dangerous to them than no network at all.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketman)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grass_Mud_Horse)

------
state
Also available in the urbit docs: [http://urbit.org/docs/theory/network-
goals](http://urbit.org/docs/theory/network-goals) which are served from an
urbit.

