There's a lot to say but one of the big ones for me is normalizing the use of public key crypto for identity management.
Now anyone can create a keypair offline and suddenly they have a way for people to interact with them and they don't have to run any of the infrastructure themselves.
I like that it inverts the concept of "self hosting" into "everybody hosting".
Every single form of your identity right now is mediated by a third party.
Your email.
Your Instagram.
Your Twitter.
Your phone number.
Your bank account.
Not only that, but each one is independent of the other. That's 5 different accounts with 5 different providers. Each of them has a vast infrastructure and duplicate copy of everything about you and everything about everything else. Each one of them has an off switch to your identity that they can freely flip on a whim with no recourse available to you.
If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.
Now the identity resides with the user, not any third party, which means they have full control over it, without having to rely on any one entity that can fail or turn against you.
> Your email. Your Instagram. Your Twitter. Your phone number. Your bank account.
These are identifiers, backed by accounts with credentials.
> If you invert that and say that your identity is no longer mediated by any specific entity, or array of entities, it is mediated by a provably neutral public infrastructure that is completely opt in and costs only the amount that is proportional to your usage.
What value does this have for your email provider? Instagram or Twitter? The phone company? The bank?
All of these companies provide value _through_ the identifier. Checking accounts and Credit cards issued by the bank. The phone number. Your handle on Instagram or Twitter.
Many of these need to have an idea of a real-world identity for regulatory reasons. For account recovery actions. For effective enforcement of abuse bans.
What about this off switch? Even if I show up with my own identifier - twitter can still refuse to post my messages. My bank could block access to my funds.
This vision seems to be able replacing these businesses with new businesses and new infrastructure.
So in this brave new world, if someone manages to steal a single piece of my data (my private key) then they can have unfettered access to my phone, bank, email and social media accounts? And none of those services have a customer support team who can restore my access and reverse the fraudulent transactions that were made in my name?
It solves the problem of needing to make and remember a username/password on every site you use, it solves the problem of password hashes being leaked when a site gets compromised, it solves the problem of not being able to know that hihihihi1234 on hackernews is the same person as hihihihi1234 on lobste.rs, and it solves the problem of trying to make an account on a website only for your typical username to be taken already
How does me making an offline private key with the username Spivak fix the problem of someone else making their own key with the name Spivak? There is still a shared namespace of user ids. And if it’s fine that two keys have the same display name then you could just do what Discord does and do Spivak#42069.
Just being completely random imagine the internet is now the multiverse. And everything publish on it is an NFT, posts, videos, images, comments. Like the current internet but everything has a value. Creating a comment on StackOverflow could get you paid instead of just reputation
The NFT concept seems stupid at first, and a 60 million NFT is definitely stupid.
But imagine Youtube is the metaverse where videos, or NFTs, are published, and the owners will forever receive royalties from Youtube advert/membership profits. People can upload similar videos, but then there is, for example, music rights violation arbitrated by the site that some or all the profits of the video revert back to the original creator. And generally all free for the consumer. By no means perfect
Mining could be people caching, and serving NFT content, through which they could get paid, and preserve internet. Partially replacing web hosting, and preventing censorship.
Using your neighbors pcs to speed up video encoding
For example the Google News problem with Spain and Australia
URLs can be NFTs, and have rules.
If a site is referencing a URL and is profiting, a part should go to the URL owner, but if the URL is clicked then a part goes to the site that referenced it
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/3/22761041/google-news-rela...
You might say that people don't like these new concepts, or mining is bad for the environment, but right now we can make them what we want them to be. The internet will evolve somewhere and if we don't think about it, someone else will and we won't like the result!
Everything is up for grabs, payment systems, identity authentication, personal data management, web3 economic model, social media, news platforms...
Completely agree, but you see this is like a 5 billion people driving a non stopping train, and it will go somewhere weather we like it or not, we can only help make it better
I don't like SPA, Electron, JavaScript in general, but the internet doesn't care
More on your comment, I can see what you say, someone not making a political controversial comment because it would mean losing money. But if we look at YouTube again, actually not every video is worth money, there is a lot of creativity and controversy still, more than before it
Every system is not perfect, and at the moment, by being, free a lot of people are not creating, or commenting or dev blog-posting, because they are not get paid for it, and they need to survive, so they have to invest their time on the 9to5, and after are to tired to investigate how can I profit by telling everyone "how did I do X interesting thing project"
Open source will probably see a bigger influx of money, there will be less friction to value people time
Like the time I just spent writing these comments for free!
did you get involved in bitclout? it approaches decentralized social media from this “monetize everything” angle, with one click to mint NFTs from any post. I actually like the micro-tipping and fundraising potential, but honestly the drama just gets cranked up to 11 once people’s financial solvency is tied to randos’ reputations.
i’m of the opinion that everything monetization touches dies, tho i’m sure META will be full of content creators getting their royalties as people have no choice but to buy an NFT of any MP3 they want to play in their zuck-sanctioned surveillance-spaces, I still believe in the old cyberspace declarations [0] where government regulations and copyright law are considered quaint anachronisms.
I agree with that, when there is money involved things can get poisoned very quickly, but we can develop better reputation systems. And people have jobs, this would be making it easier to earn while enjoying free time.
People have been fight the internet advertising economic model for awhile. So there is some monetization dependency already. And we will have to decide where it will pivot next
We can't forget forget creativity, intrinsic value and allow dissent. But like I say above not everything will have to be valued, there is separation, you can put content into IPFS without emitting NFTs
I think blockchain technology promotes less lock-in, not more. Probably several METAs will appear competing with each other, we just have to choose the one that promotes more freedom and interoperability
What's in it for YouTube in this? It operates quite profitably without using blockchain to track ownership of videos and copyrights and who to send ad money to
I was just making an example that like an YT video, an NFT has value for content creators and can be the future of internet
Couldn't care less what happens to YouTube, hope something better comes along
The trend with this blockchain technologies is that single companies will have less power and control so they probably won't like it much, or will look for workarounds
But whatever happens for web3 probably most will have to adopt or stay behind
But that is the key question. Why would something else come along? You need backend resources for transcoding and serving. You need a search system. You need an ad system. And if you get big you need a copyright management system.
Progress just happens now and then, newer people comes to the ecosystem and change things to their liking. And in this case the blockchain invention is to big and disruptive to be ignored
Someone is working on a blockchain related system for all the things you said
And probably in the future no one will trust a company without some sort of auditable public blockchain ledger
2) ceo of Spotify is worth estimated $5billion maybe start there, shouldn’t that (be it money or ownership in Spotify) be going to the musicians who actually make the content and who get fractions of pennies?
3) they probably don’t want to. But we can just build systems that replace them. It seems to be working so far.