Web3: The Decentralized Web

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Naturalplastic
First....I need to add an important part... I forgot AWS and Google and they are the real centralizers controlling our data. We need to dispense with server-side and client-side.

Problem: For starts, if we couldn't publish our own books, that would be a problem. Having publishers as gatekeepers is censorship. But, today, we can totally publish our own books, and I recommend it, if you can afford it. I just published one: Meditate Yourself Fit at Balboa Press https://www.balboapress.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/823007-meditate-yourself-fit ... But it's costly! and you have to be willing to work on marketing it.

So, that brings us to the main problem: Tyrannical governments CENSOR outrageously to keep their propaganda going. I recommend Edward Barneys' book Propaganda
(https://www.amazon.com/Propaganda-Edwar ... 394&sr=8-3)
It's almost a hundred years old...so they've been working on this for a long time, including changing laws that allow it more. That's why we have people divided in this nation....bc of the different news sources and each with their own propaganda, now legal. Careful if you read the Propaganda book...it contains propaganda. Witness also, governments in the Middle East turning off the internet to prevent people from finding out what's going on in the world. It's a BIG problem.

There's also the problem of PRIVACY, and how AWS, Google, Amazon, and many more are using the data we give them, and the data we allow them to have with cookies.... They use this against us! (companies that share it with advertisers, data brokers, and (involuntarily) hackers.) Instead of us managing our private information how we choose.

The internet connects people and things.

People and things are more complicated than we want to think.

Just a few:

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/06/10608388 ... -lines-too

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/23/79863019 ... om-hackers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... ellphones/

https://www.wired.com/story/hacking-a-p ... asy-steps/

http://www.dsn.jhu.edu/papers/scada_ICDCS_2018.pdf

A quick run-down from a programming channel (FireShip):

The bottom line of all of these videos seems to be:

There is no such thing as "decentralization".

Either the Net is controlled by the tyrants.

Or the Net controlled by the criminals.

There is no secure way of giving "power to the people".

Odd. Nearly a year ago, I decried the idea of big tech giants cornering the market and deciding who does and doesn't have a voice. Who can and can't be deplatformed. At the time, I was met with "the private website has every right to silence whomever they want for whatever reason they want; the fact that they have a quasi-monopoly over the Internet is irrelevant."

Where are those folks now?? Not speaking up in this thread. For those who are posting, it seems like the people here and now are matter-of-factly stating things that I was derided for nearly a year ago.

I'm forever ignored or ridiculed, yet I'm lightyears ahead of everyone. Christ, it's frustrating to be in this position. Don't care how arrogant this sounds. It's difficult waiting for everyone else to play catch-up, then assume their new-found ideas are unique and novel.

What makes sense to me, on the spectrum between authoritarianism and anarchy, is that 1) the idea is that defi, dao's, dex's, etc. are supposed to offer us de-intermediated economics and both economics and finance that are much more difficult to cheat because there's a public ledger (add to that - alternate assets people can hop onto if their government starts printing money like crazy or one of their property megadevelopers defaults on their obligations). At the same time the goal is to have, at least from the outside, relative anonymity as the public keys aren't names and addresses of users, just the public key to whatever wallet they used.

I was just texting back and forth with a friend on this. On one hand if I can think about what keeps the federal law enforcement guys I know up at night it's mostly human trafficking, and some people they work with are also dealing with terrorism, the funding of it, etc.. I would want law enforcement to be able to break anonymity when something like that is going on. What I would not want is for employers (current and prospective) looking up someone's purchase history, insurance companies being able to discriminate against prospective clients based on their Amazon.com history, and even more importantly I wouldn't want that set of records available for blackmail and grudges or political aggression such as doxing.

The goal then would be to make it as difficult as possible for anyone who isn't in law enforcement to obtain identities to public keys outside of exchanges themselves who might set up the wallets (Coinbase, Binance, etc.) and there too this would require almost HIPAA-like levels of security. To anyone who'd be completely freaked out by federal law enforcement already having that information - I'm sorry but your screwed, best choice is go live off grid somewhere and try not to do anything that you'd need to worry about.

HIPPA security and living off grid went out the window with vax requirements, but people are finding ways around it. Decentralized web is one effort.

The vax contains nano tech so big brother can track your every move and thought.
Just saying.
(ok, that is not true at all - I don't know why I say things like that).

LOL. Right, absolutely not true. Experiments have proven it.

(On another note, did you know that experiments (A/B testing) cannot ever actually prove if something is really true or really false? All they can do is determine that there is strong evidence that it is likely not false or likely not true. Thing is, you NEED TO HAVE ALL THE EVIDENCE! (excuse me....) So, if stuff is censored, you can't even distinguish signal from noise. You may have only noise.)

cryptographer Moxy Marlinspike on web1 and why it turned into the platform-centric web2 - and why he can't see how tge protocols supposed to shape web3 should fare any better:

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

it is a very entertaining read.
plus: I was of the opinions NFTs were a bit of a scam, but here I learned that, actually, the code doesn't even necessarily do what people say it does. There's no need to discuss a new paradigm of ownership of digital goods, because NFTs aren't creating that at all. They're less of a scam and really more of a joke.

For my opinion on web3, search web3isgoinggreat. I'm too new to post links yet sadly. For blockchain, see the documentary "line goes up" on Youtube.

The web is an unfixable dumpster fire. Its scope is limitless which is the same as reckless. The entire network stack including the web needs redesigned for more privacy, freedom, and security.

Tor, I2P, Freenet, IPFS, Zeronet, etc. are important. They all solve different problems, but Gnunet is the only decentralized internet project I'm aware of that addresses the whole stack by rebuilding it from scratch. In my opinion, that's what really needs to happen. The stack itself is too old. It was created under assumptions that are no longer the case.

As for digital cash, GNU Taler is way more realistic than cryptocurrency, which is just planet-destroying digital tulips.

The challenge won't be the technology. It will be adoption for sure. We already have free decentralized networks, but people prefer the centralized proprietary ones.

Dislike web3 stuff and how google is supposedly going to alter websites or extensions although may lead to more FF users which is better than chrome by far but still crappy.