Okay I'll bite. I've worked in both retail and corporate banking for over a decade. I've been responsible for software that processes large payments and receipts daily. I've cloned a few cryptocurrencies for fun and have a pretty good understanding of them. I cannot understand anything on this entire site. Does anybody know what this is all about?
I've studied Bitcoin for many years on a technical level. I've studied altcoin and ICO scams from the beginning. This site has all the hallmarks of a technology scam.
Case in point: nowhere does this site articulate a problem to be solved. This has become my litmus test for a technology scam. Instead we see marketing happy talk - lots of it.
Most ICO and altcoin scams make vague references to Bitcoin's limitations. This one makes vague references to Lightning Network's limitations:
Layer 2 such as lightning network has a deposit in order to participate and two transactions to build a channel, then can scale micro payments across a network efficiently.
Gobbledygook designed to bamboozle the technically illiterate.
Looks like another rung has been added to the evolutionary ladder of the Bitcoin, But Better scam. First altcoins, then ICOs, now not-Lightning.
I've read through the whole thing and it's essentially a hand-wavy marketing pitch without any concrete details. At one point they link to a repo containing some node code (2-year-old code, mind you), but that didn't exactly help elucidate things for me.
From what I understood it uses RDF triples, linked data, and uses an ontology, that is compatible with Solid aka linking a "Person" to a "Wallet" and actions to a transaction/service/resource
I think rather than advertising an actual payments system, this is an example prototype application built with the Solid stack, with the intention of promoting Solid development. https://github.com/solid/solid
Seriously? If you clicked the link on Solid and webcredits, you can get the general gist of it. Ideally they should have everything on one page, but it took less than a minute for me to get the gist of what it's all about.
The term “coinbase” was in widespread use before the startup by that name. They’re not going to be able to retroactively trademark it any more than Square can prevent others from making square-shaped electronics.
what is it to explain? its all on the website. private silo with private data giving only what you need to the websites. Look up maidsafe and bra e browser they have somewhat same concepts.
The solid infrastructure looks promising to me.
Based on the other submission today on Solid[1], there are varying opinions on whether it will take off and really be able to challenge the big social media.
However, I think we _need to want_ this to succeed, even if there are other ideas of what decentralised architectures should look like.
It may not be the best system to everyone, but it has some clout with Tim Berners-Lee behind it and its architecture and capabilities can -and will- evolve. It looks to me like our best chance to start 'disrupting' the current status-quo, even if it flies under the radar for a while.
I can imagine an Instagram-like app that would let me import a take-out archive from my Instagram account and just let me continue where I left off.
Maybe I would need to rebuild a user-base, but that's OK, there would be new people on that platform and and more control over what I want to see, rather than some ad-optimized algorithm deciding for me.
A payment systems built on top could allow direct monetisation for content-creators without having to go through a 3rd party that enforces arbitrary rules over what content gets and doesn't get monetized.
Disruption is driven by need though. Uber succeeded because traditional cab companies suck. I can’t remember when people weren’t complaining about cabs, even before the internet, and Uber came and removed almost all of the annoyances. Sure they were bad for labour, but for the customers it made sense.
I’ve never seen anyone complain about Instagram or visa. How can you disrupt services that people love?
I mean, it should be obvious by now that almost nobody cares about privacy.
> I’ve never seen anyone complain about Instagram or visa.
Then you are not listening to everyone. According to some, Instagram is the most toxic site out there, and Visa leeches fees from their customers. I'm not necessarily in those camps, but I certainly have heard the criticisms.
Industries that are ready to disrupt have loyal followings that they think everyone loves them, when in reality much of society would be just as happy to see them fade. The web as a whole is reaching that point. Whether you dislike the privacy issues, the money-driven nature of startups, the demographic who lives online without engaging with the world, or any other reason... the web is not universally loved, despite the many people who still think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Heh we obviously have very different groups of friends. Everyone I know complains about Insta and existing payment methods all the time.
On top of the people complaining there are those the market hasn't appealed to yet. I'm a very social person but I'm not on any social networks. My mum is (wisely) a bit scared of sharing her data on the internet and also using the internet in general. I've taught her some of the basics so she can eg. receive photos from my by email but she doesn't want to use social networks because she doesn't trust them. I feel the same way. She has plenty of friends she could be keeping in contact with regularly too.
I've seen people wishing they had a Solid-like concept for years, asking for ownership of their data with fine-grained control over who/what gets access to it. And I think that those who haven't wished for this (eg. the general population) will see the benefits once they actually try to use it.
Whether Solid can pull this off is another question but I think this is an area that is driven by demand and it's only through ignorance that people aren't generally asking for this.
This example doesn't include people who never took cabs but started using Uber because it was easier. Need isn't the only thing that drives disruption or innovation.
There's just a ton of better projects out there solving this problem with a much higher focus on architectural clarity, running code, competing seriously with major platforms, etc.
2nd solid post today and despite being familiar with the concepts I don’t understand any of the detail.
Marketing spiel is fine but somewhere concrete details need to be provided without the BS. Very disappointing that Tim Berners-Lee would be associated with something so poorly expressed.
In the case of SOLID, I'd probably cut the guy who started the web some more slack than a cursory glance at the work and determine if I can't immediately understand it - there can't be any understanding or value in it.
Some things that take years to design and put together, might take a while for all of us to catch up to.
I hope examples continue to come out, but more importantly, those who develop can spend some time to hack with it. Maybe some brains are seeing this that are primarily wired to work and understand through a lens of front end, or back-end development, where but Tim Berner-Lees like lots of other devs here is used to end-to-end.
It seemed pretty simple to me, and pretty simple to follow along with. If we're looking for something shiny, the web wasn't shiny on day 1.
I don't disagree that it could be easier to understand.
My point is presentation doesn't wipe out the initial or potential long term relevance of the tech, only accessibility and approachability to create beginners. Bitcoin comes to mind.
Maybe some experienced power users helping tell some more stories.
You probably would if the Solid websites actually explained anything about how it works, rather than being filled with ridiculous marketing speak. I'm honestly really disappointed that TBL is obviously OK with this.
Read about Solid yesterday and was super fascinated by the idea of Pods and since am solving a payment solution, I saw it would be a kickass solution for payments.Now solidPay is out but sadly it's confusing, how do I begin implementing it
Or maybe there's something to it, and it's still being worked on?
I have no opinion either way on Solid (yet), but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical considering they're still rolling it out and it's a work in progress.
When I read the OP link above, and the other submission today, I just see an early-stage project that is still being actively developed, no different to thousands of other projects posted on HN.
I do think their marketing/buzzword approach to be a bit "thick", but that could also be said about 90% of HN-loved products/services.
> ...but the comments on these submissions seem extremely critical...
I think there are very good reasons for the critical commentary. Tim Berners-Lee made the comment recently that it took 15 years for us to get "here," where here seems to be a bunch of handwavey marketing fluff and broken demos. I am going to take what he says and believe he meant that the broken demos were built upon 15 years of prior work on bits and pieces that no one put together until recently; at least that is slightly more palatable. But Solid Pay suffers even more from the handwavey marketing fluff, because its handwavey marketing fluff relies on Solid's handwavey marketing fluff.
> Solid builds on 30 years of Web research and development. It has a cutting edge semantic layer with proven scalability...
Since when has Solid proven its scalability? The demos don't even work. Even if it overcomes the infirm state of Solid, it then suffers from the apparent fact that while Solid Pay is intended to interact with the existing monetary infrastructure, no one working on Solid Pay seems to understand that infrastructure. In Solid Pay, a Credit increases your balance; but everywhere else, a credit decreases it. This sounds simple, but if you mess up simple, I fear for the complicated bits will be worse.
There are real problems here, and we can't just hope they go away; we must be critical of them or else we risk dealing with them for quite some time should these systems actually materialize.
Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about the Semantic Web[0], which is what this grew out of, since 1998. If you can see RDF's use in Solid, it's not like he's just getting on the hype train just now.
That's not how I see it. There is definitely hype around decentralization and something is bound to come out of it. If I had to chose someone in this space to trust it'd be Tim Berners-Lee. He's shown his merit and we know he keeps the best interest of the WWW at heart. To me, his work on (re-)decentralization is just a natural extension of what he's always been doing (WWW, linked data, open data,...).