This seems to be a webpage entirely made of buzzwords.
Store things cheaply, without blockchains or servers, so where is it stored? No infrastructure, so who is paying for it? Oh right if you click a little deeper, there's a cryptocurrency token issued on Ethereum you need to buy in order to buy credits to buy compute time in a marketplace of other people's machines.
When posting I was hoping more people would chime in that worked with Holochain, hear about their experiences and impression. I know about Holochain mostly from people name-dropping it. There's a developer section, and it also has documentation on its concepts:
The blockchain ecosystem is famous for people namedropping BS to try and drive buzz (often but not always as part of a pump and dump scheme). I dont know why you think people namedropping something in this space is positive.
Well, because these people weren't involved in Holochain itself in any way and just looking for decentralized enabling technologies of which HC is but one. They were also people that are just as negative in their view on the blockchain craze as I am myself.
I would bet very strongly that nobody has, or ever will use this for a serious project or service. You walk into a room with something like the diagram below and you're just going to have people laughing in your face.
I doubt there are many developers here who do anything with Blockchain development. Blockchain is pretty well shunned here, generally speaking, exceptions apply.
> These simple building blocks create something surprisingly robust—a multicellular social organism with a memory and an immune system. It mimics the way that biological systems have managed to thrive in the face of novel threats for millions of years.
Yes. If you want to scam, then smart thing to do is avoid the term "blockchain" or explicitly mention you are not blockchain. OTOH, if a complex project is honest, non-blockchain and has a lot of high-level concepts to explain, then the only way to verify its honesty is to deep-dive into the complex codebase.
Similar to people telling me "No, Holochain is different", other people say this of Safe Network [0]. Just like until now with Holochain I stay away from that, as I just can't tell without thorough investigation.
I don't know much about holochain, but it's in the camp of crypto/blockchain projects that sound almost unreasonably ambitious (Multivac, ICP, Saito, and Mina are in this camp as well), but I'm staying away from because.. there's a significant chance they're scams, or that the people working on them are in over their heads.
One of these might be the real deal (well.. not Multivac or ICP IMO), and actually deliver something amazing, but I'm staying far away from them until I have a strong reason to believe that's the case.. I don't have time to do a deep dive of every project that promises the moon.
I had someone punt this at me some years ago now, at the time I read through their material and couldn't make much sense of what the actual offering might be - it seemed that there were going to be chains of everything, everywhere, constantly, all somehow interconnected and syncing up with each other, and for whatever reason that was a good idea.
I see no reason to pay any more attention to this than any other cryptocurrency-related "Grand Vision", or even something like Urbit, until projects have been delivered using it which have useful capabilities that are just not possible without it.
(edit - and given the ICO was 4 years ago now... eh)
One actual use case I've seen is how IPFS is enabling websites like Tornado Cash to evade censorship (and yeah I know Tornado Cash is used by criminals but so is every privacy service in existence, and there are other ways to catch criminals besides tracing everybody's transactions)
Privacy of communication is fine. Anonymously sending funds globally is different, the criminal uses vastly outweigh any legitimate use.
If privacy is really needed use cash, the difficulty of having to move large quantities of cash around physically is a good limiting factor. If you are worried about banks knowing your transaction history most shops still accept cash.
I mean, it's not though, as things stand right now, is it? Absolute/mathematical financial privacy in particular we're talking about.
Maybe you'd like it to be, but right now it's not the case, basically anywhere, no matter how righteously you assert it. And you're a bit of an outlier if you think it should be. TBH, AFAICT, most folks think things like dark money, tax evasion, terrorist funding, proceeds of crime, proceeds of dictatorship and oligarchy, political bribes etc etc should be tracked and intercepted, so you're going to have an uphill battle trying to establish it as any sort of right.
And as we've seen with tornado-cash - if you deliberately build systems that enforce it, working around the law by making transfers that can't be traced, you don't magically solve the 'problem' of the law applying to you. In fact you probably create more.
Yes, yes it is. It might be that you are okay with that being violated, but it does not mean that it stops being a right, and it does not mean that people should accept losing it away.
> Absolute/mathematical financial privacy in particular we're talking about.
If you believe that, feel free to stop using WhatsApp or whatever e2e encrypted system you are using right now.
> dark money, tax evasion, terrorist funding, proceeds of crime should be tracked
Can governments make their best effort to track all of that? Sure. Does that mean that law-abiding citizens should lose their rights over it? Absolutely not!
Honestly, citizens like you that want to normalize State Surveillance concern me more than any "darknet hacker" ever will. Didn't you learn anything with the Patriot Act?
> working around the law by making transfers that can't be traced
No. No one making a transaction using tornado cash is "working around the law". Using tornado cash (by itself) is not a crime.
Making payments online without being worried that people can access your whole transaction history is crucial for it to be a viable alternative. Please stop with this absurd FUD and stop associating privacy with "something only for the interest of malicious actors".
No, not it's not. Being able to use Tornado Cash is not a human right.
You are the type of person that harms the fight to enforce the core rights described by something like the ECHR by calling any action you don't like by a government "against my human rights". It's reductive and harmful.
The privacy rights enshrined in the ECHR (sorry I'm not familiar with what rights are granted to US citizens, i guess they are those in the US Constitution) are those of correspondence (WhatsApp etc.) and to have a private family/private life (no Stasi listening devices in the plant pot).
Both of these have an exception for targeted use as a part of a criminal investigation.
You may not agree with the definition, and Tornado Cash is a core human right as far as you are concerned, which is fair enough. But there is no legal authority to enforce this, as there is with something like the ECHR where there are a large number of countries who have placed the convention into their domestic laws.
> It might be that you are okay with that being violated, but it does not mean that it stops being a right
But it's not a right. If something is not a right in any jurisdiction on earth, the idea that you have this right is a philosophical exercise, not something based on any sort of reality. You can’t really even claim it’s being violated if this absolute right to financial privacy is not enumerated anywhere and never has been.
> it does not mean that people should accept losing it away.
They've never had such a right to lose.
> If you believe that, feel free to stop using WhatsApp or whatever e2e encrypted system you are using right now.
Speech and money are not equivalent.
> Does that mean that law-abiding citizens should lose their rights over it?
Rights they don't have?
> Honestly, citizens like you that want to normalize State Surveillance concern me more than any "darknet hacker" ever will. Didn't you learn anything with the Patriot Act?
Citizens like me who think that, with appropriate warrants and appropriate circumstances, the state ought to be able to access financial information relating to serious crimes? Citizens like ... basically everyone?
> Using tornado cash (by itself) is not a crime.
Except it pretty much is now, as a sanctioned service. So there's that.
> Making payments online without being worried that people can access your whole transaction history is crucial for it to be a viable alternative.
The fact that your blockchain solution can either give total transparency to everyone, or absolute, mathematical privacy that can't be broken even under warrant, is a problem for your blockchain system not the rest of us and not the legal system.
> Please stop with this absurd FUD and stop associating privacy with "something only for the interest of malicious actors".
How about you please stop this FUD? How about you stop throwing around accusations about normalising state surveillance at people who don't agree that absolute, unbreakable financial privacy under all circumstances is a good plan? How about you engage with arguments about what your needs are and why you consider them reasonable, with a backdrop of acknowledging the harm done, instead of engaging in the usual, boring, facile, black-and-white thinking that if I don't agree that a service that North Korea can use to hide a billion dollars is a good thing, I must be for total state surveillance?
2. I mean yeah, I don't really think that's a good thing. I think there's a whole world of middle ground between "tracing everybody's transactions in the open all the time" and "complete, mathematical privacy forever". Personally I think things should be discoverable with an appropriate warrant, for example.
I also don't consider freedom of speech and financial privacy to be equivalent, "criminals" are only a small part of the problem there. Financial privacy in the way proponents seem to want allows everything from total tax evasion to the rich outright buying politicians. However much you think lobbying is bad, and political funding is bad, it could only make it far, far worse.
OK, but now we're talking about very esoteric systems to set up codified economic activities and interrelations as an extension/plugin to a niche, federated social media platform ... it doesn't seem that interesting to me, or any less buzzword-laden.
I would wager that neither have most of the Americans and Europeans who seem to be behind this stuff. In fact it seems to have been authoritarian governments who stand to gain most from such systems, for instance North Korea who were using tornado cash.
Further, systems such as these that enable hiding of funds and flows of money are also perfect for abusive, exploitative dictators and oligarchs who want to obscure the source of money they've extracted from their countries to make themselves rich in the west while their people are crushed in poverty.
I would say yes that’s absolutely correct considering you are hyper-focused on negative reports and oblivious to situations where such methods aided activists against their tyrannical governments and that includes the plight of Wikileaks against crimes committed by western governments.
Except I'm not hyper-focused on negative reports. I haven't made the claim that only criminals use it.
Other than the instance with Vitalik, and I don't consider him anything of a thought leader so much as some sort of idiot savant, there is no mention of mixers there. And regardless - I don't think the solution is either a panopticon or absolute financial privacy, I think we need to have a mature discussion about this as a society (or set of societies) rather than throwing our toys out of the pram when something utterly predictable like Tornado Cash being sanctioned for money-laundering happens.
Store things cheaply, without blockchains or servers, so where is it stored? No infrastructure, so who is paying for it? Oh right if you click a little deeper, there's a cryptocurrency token issued on Ethereum you need to buy in order to buy credits to buy compute time in a marketplace of other people's machines.
Absolutely nothing interesting going on.