I love how they say "We used to do X on some non-Google sight, it was so fun; but I can't do that on Google - so GoOgLe hAs FaIlEd anD iS BaD."
Why not just use another site, that you know, isn't Google? Like they suggested, you can search Reddit, or you can search Tumbler, or you can find a Facebook group, or where we found this article: Hacker news.
I miss the yesteryear when people didn't expect Google to somehow be the answer to everything on the web. Here's an idea: your fan sights can co-exist as well as Google.
And the irony is, the authors own blog home page uses a dark pattern to try and convince you to subscribe to their newsletter! Talk about ruining the web for commercial purposes!
Or even proud of sitting on extremely absolutist statements like 100% of all of it is going to be wiped out, or even the other side suggesting that everything is going to take over the current system.
Both outcomes are simply not going to happen and those supporting either of those outcomes will be disappointed.
Co-existence with the current system is the most highly likely outcome with some cryptocurrency projects staying around and meme-coins, tokens will disappear even after regulations coming in.
Skiff.org charges $8 USD/month for it's premium service, and it's just an implementation of PGP encryption. I have no idea what this as to do with crypto.
ens.domains is a privately owned and managed DNS provider. It's litterally the exact opposite of what web3 claims to be. Having a "constitution" is just re-wording "Terms of Service". I love how it sells hard covers versions of it's Terms of Service for fiat at Blurb.com. And no, Blurb does not accept cryptocurrency payments even, lol.
Signal.org existed well before they added crypto, and quite frankly, yes I did just about completely stop using it - and so did many others. The introduction of cryptocurrency in that app litterally chased away users rather than improve adoption.
Skiff allows login with MetaMask and Brave wallet, lets you store files with E2EE on IPFS, and lets you send/receive emails to your wallet address. And of course you can pay for your subscription with crypto. There's no coin, because there's absolutely no need for one.
Again, how is this a web3 service and not just a version of SSO that allows for a couple not-so-commonly-used centralized authentication services? Taking payments in crypto doesn't really seem to me to be anything "web3"-related apart from their finance department participating in the speculation game on the backend.
Way to miss the point. ENS being "privately owned" or "having a constitution" only really matters if you care about participating in the governance - which I will admit is silly - or if you want to have have some influence in further developments. But as an user, none of this matters. You can claim an id and no government or "owner" will take it from you. No registrar will give names to squatters to put in marketplaces. Actual ownership is public and transparent. Prices are reasonable. You can now have completely censorship-resistant sites by tying a ENS address with an IPFS page.
ENS is already super useful if you care about owning your identities without worrying about intermediaries.
> But as an user, none of this matters. You can claim an id and no government or "owner" will take it from you...
I don't think this is even true.
For one, the service has a public governance process, and it is almost certainly the case that a proposal could be passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".
Second, any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction of has the ultimate veto power -- they can order it to take action under the threat of legal charges against their company's principals, or the seizure of their infrastructure. You may see this as a problem, but it isn't a problem which can be solved by software.
> passed through that process which seized ownership of a "domain".
No, this is not how it works. To be able to do that, they would have to rewrite the smart contract with the specific rules to revoke ownership, "upgrade" the contract (which I am not even sure if it is something supported by ENS current protocol) and then they would have to convince everyone else (or the significant majority of users) to migrate to the new contract as well.
> any actual government that this service is operating under the jurisdiction
What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one. There isn't a company behind this, there is no ZIP code, and so on. You can not stop tens of thousands of people running ethereum nodes all around the world. You might try to stop the current developers from doing further work, but the contract that is already deployed on the blockchain can not simply be removed. It is physically impossible to do it. That is the meaning of "censorship-resistant".
> What is the jurisdiction of "the internet"? There isn't one.
It’s the US, except for when it’s China or Russia.
You may feel you aren’t under their jurisdiction. It turns out it doesn’t matter what you think though, much like if an elephant is charging at you, your opinion of the situation doesn’t really have an effect.
US controls all financial infrastructure everywhere. You can’t buy coins if you can’t use the onramps (due to KYC), can’t use the off-ramps (due to Chainalysis and exchange KYC noticing your coins came from a wallet used for crimes a year or two ago). They can extradite you and just wait for you to give up your keys. And so on.
You can’t get away by just not being interesting right now. Transactions are public and forever on most blockchains, so anyone can find you at any time in the future.
These people tried but they barely got to spend their winnings due to how hard it really is to launder money.
I am not asking about the finance side of things, and I am not asking as someone who is trying to do anything illegal.
The question was "how the US government can stop people from making a transaction on the blockchain?" More specifically: what government who would have the capacity to stop people from using a dapp?
Can the US government stop people from getting their (completely KYC'd) crypto and exchanging on Uniswap? Can it stop them from making a Tornado Cash transfer? Can it stop them from buying a domain name on ENS?
The answer, of course, is no, they can not. Your talk about government reach is just unrelated bullshit.
That’s a theoretical argument; in real life it doesn’t matter what happens in a single transaction right now. All those services are operated and used by real people, if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.
Assuming you expect to still be alive in the next few years, it’s not a good idea to pretend like you don’t have to care about this. You can end up in front of a judge if you do something illegal, and they aren’t impressed with “you can’t stop me” as an argument. They can find someone who can do something and they can order them to do that.
> if they’re legal now it’s because they’re complying with laws, and if they stop complying with laws they won’t be legal.
Laws from what country?
OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped. A government could try to stop its citizens from using the service but even if they were successful (good luck with that...) the service itself would still be around.
Contrast that with, e.g, The Pirate Bay. To stop the service, Governments could and did manage to go after the individuals, or the hosting providers and even the DNS registrars. These were all the choke points that the governments tried to use, because these are points where they can have some jurisdiction. But no government can order an ENS domain to be suspended. No court can stop an IPFS hash to being a representation of a file, and while one could get an order for a specific server to be disconnected, there is no way to issue an order to delete all files of a given hash from the network. There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
And no, this is not a "theoretical argument". It is a very real one. The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature. If dapps were not censorship-resistant, then of course developers would just stick with what is more efficient, cheaper and well-established.
> OP's comment was trying to argue that "the country of jurisdiction has veto power". My question was "which country has jurisdiction over a distributed application running in thousands of independent computers spread around the world?"
The US. No, it doesn't matter where you live, it's the US. As Bandit Keith says, every country in this world belongs to America. (Except for a few like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.)
> It's not about the individuals, what I am arguing is that the service itself can not be stopped.
It can continue, but this is a Pyrrhic victory, ie there's no way this could work out in the real world that anyone would be happy about.
Imagine if someone puts child porn in your immutable distributed database. Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
More mild real example is crypto exchanges banning coins that were transferred out of a coin mixer in the last few transactions. Which is something they have done, and will do more of:
> There is no one who can remove a contract that is deployed on a blockchain, so there is no way that a judge "can find someone to do something about it..."
But they can! Judges are more powerful than you and more powerful than computers. The mere fact that you can't technically fulfill the order makes everything /worse/. Whoever they find is in contempt until they find some way out of doing something impossible; better to have had admin capabilities in the first place.
> The main reason so many developers are attracted to "web3" is because of its "permissionless" nature.
Well, or because a16z is giving them money to do it. I don't agree that not getting prosecuted is proof it's fine; you need to get prosecuted and be found not guilty, get an SEC no-action letter, etc.
> Is anyone getting away with it merely because it can't be deleted? No, now the service is illegal for everyone, forever.
We could extend that "logic" to the Internet itself. Let's then just declare that because there are illegal things done in the Internet, all of it is illegal. Also, the only reason we are not suffering any repercussion is because Uncle Sam doesn't care about us (yet).
This is nothing but a cheap rhetorical trick. Hasn't anyone called you on your bullshit before?
> Let's then just declare that because there are illegal things done in the Internet
The difference is that the various law enforcement agencies across the globe frequently succeed in taking sites offering child porn down and prosecute those involved. The point being made was that once it's on your immutable blockchain you can't do that.
You certainly need to have people validating incoming blocks, and currently you need to have at least some nodes archiving all the data if you want to be able to reconstruct the whole history. But there is a lot of research going on in regards to state pruning, which would let nodes discard parts of the chain that are not interesting.
I agree if you can find a way to delete things then it's fine. That's not exactly immutable, but it may be workable, maybe.
But currently all blockchain users have to download the entire thing unless they're just accessing it through a web API, which would be "centralized" and makes them not really blockchain users.
Surely then, we ought to ban pools, wall off access to the beaches and lakes, and generally prohibit human contact with water, as drowning is 100x more likely to kill than school shootings. And any parents of innocent children who have drowned are no doubt incensed by the outcome!
While we don't ban beaches and pools, we do require them to be monitored by trained lifeguards! I think we should have reasonable safeguards in place for guns as well.
Can I buy an extended magazine for my private, backyard pool? Or should we just admit this metaphor lost all meaning some time ago?
Like, really, that’s what you’ve got? But what about backyard pools? That’s your humdinger, parliamentary argument for why inaction is better when confronted with a logical comparison? To extrapolate the comparison further and a-ha! the degenerate cases like you’re arguing philosophy in Plato’s company?
What is it about topics like these that make a forum of otherwise intelligent people argue like they’re practicing bird law? In any other context someone making the point you’re making would be ridiculed for taking the argument here.
This does not address the argument. It merely also points out that beaches, etc are dangerous. Nobody is arguing the beach model is a _good_ model to follow.
if I accept the GP's statistics, it looks to me like by not arguing to close the beaches 100x more than arguing about guns, yes, people are comparatively arguing that they are ok with the beach model.
I'm litterally about to jump from 8 to 17 this week, so that's good to hear. It seemed seamless on my local setup and was wondering if it was just too good to be true. It's a great piece of software.
You are correct about the documentation. I find the tragedy of open source documentation is that the people who need it most - the novices - are the ones whom could write it best - if they only knew if what they were saying was accurate. And then by the time you become an old-timer, and know thy ways, you just want to wipe your hands and walk away, because your tired....and still not sure if all your knowledge is accurate.
But anyway, once it's all figured out, it runs very reliably.
Nice try big government, but a tax will only increase prices for end consumers and will disportionately affected poor people while actually doing jack shit to reduce consumption.
Competition will do the work—if my business deals with the tax by raising prices for consumers, your business can instead invest into R&D to figure out how to keep prices steady. Your business wins, and the consumer wins.
No, there are blatantly obvious things about packaging software that you are missing.
- you will need a copy of each platform running in order to build the binary
- it's X-times++ as much work to package for X number of platforms.
- The code you chose might not compile well on all platforms without code changes.
- Dependency conflicts can be a pain.
It may be, may not be. Either way, I'm not opening on my work mac. Do you have a release for Linux, since it's written in rust?
Also, I think if you make it a .app with a developer license from apple, the creepy message goes away.