[pkcsecurity]

Moxie makes so many good critiques (some are so subtle, it might be worth a second read). I got the sense he’s trying very hard to be even handed and constructive about a situation he feels pretty badly about, but his true feelings are bleeding through in some of the side points / parentheticals.

One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implication that the Internet went wrong because it failed to stay decentralized. To hint at great cryptography as the solution, as he does im his conclusion, is baked deep in his bones as an amazing cryptographer, but I think he’s prescribing the wrong cure. The problems with the Internet are fundamentally not about decentralization - they’re about trust. It’s a people problem, not a technology problem. Because of this, cryptography (I do not mean crypto) simply cannot be the answer - even the best cryptography is, like a great legal system, only capable of dramatically reducing the overhead costs and risk of operating in a given environment. When it comes to what great cryptography can achieve, I think HTTPS and maybe some E2E stuff that’s happening with Signal is as good as it can get (interestingly, HTTPS is good in large part thanks to Moxie) - it cannot bring us back to some golden Internet age.

[asimpletune]

It’s pretty interesting to consider the intersection between what counts as “people” and “technical” problems.

For example, concurrent version control systems (like perforce) were horrible. This can be thought of as a technical problem, but it was actually right at the intersection of something technical and a people thing. What git understood is that having a canonical repo was a people issue, and it correctly abandoned a central “source of truth”… basically no amount of technology can fix what is a people problem, so no repos are “special” or “the one” from a technical point of view. It then forced people to sort their shit out. However, because of this insight, git was able to get the technical aspects spot on. It correctly recognized that what was needed was the right data structure. Git is extremely simple software, that basically does two things really well: branch and merge, but it needed the right data structure.

I think talking about centralization (APIs and infrastructure) vs decentralization (protocols) as a people vs tech problem is exactly the same sort of thing, and to get the correct view on it you have to really mail in detail where the people/tech problems begin/end.

[DyslexicAtheist]

it's impossible to talk about trust without talking about cryptography.

from an implementation pov "trust" is a distraction where anyone can quickly derail any argument citing "Trusting Trust" or "the show me the root of trust" ...

So to avoid meta-discussions talking about cryptography instead of trust skips the noise and goes straight to the heart of the issue.

Consider this:

  - Talking about cryptography is hard but it's unambiguous. 
  - Talking about trust is easy but ambiguous. 

Cryptography forces us to look at the reality of implementation instead of a "meta-psychological concept" from meat space. Problem with talking about trust in engineering is that we like to lift things from meatspace and model it within the digital space.

But we forget trust isn't "a thing", it constantly changes, it's useful only as a tool to accept randomness/chaos of life. And so we'll perpetually fail when discussing trust in the digital space or try to pin it down in order to allow converting it into a spec or an implementation.

And I think Moxie understands this and so skips the noise by going straight to cryptography which is the only "tool" that is meaningful when we talk about the things we base trust assumptions on (cia triad).

[walterbell]

Instead of cookie warnings, could every NFT/web3/crypt0 discussion be preceded by a warning about implicit trust?

[DyslexicAtheist]

we need to bring back "Clippy" but instead of a paperclip it's the ghost of Ken Thompson chasing your mouse pointer around and slapping it with a copy of "Trusting Trust".

[mattwilsonn888]

To be fair, the vision of crypto isn't to revert the web back to when it was better, that is pretty much not possible. That doesn't mean it can't lead us somewhere forward, different from the past, that is also better.

[AnimalMuppet]

> One point that I disagree with is his almost axiomatic premise that decentralization is an inherent good and the implication that the Internet went wrong because it failed to stay decentralized.

But isn't decentralization one of the points of crypto and Web3? It doesn't matter if Moxie agrees with decentralization or not. If the direction everyone is charging in is "decentralization", and it's not really decentralized, then it's a movement that isn't heading where it thinks (or where it claims). That's still true, regardless of what Moxie thinks the direction should be.

[playpause]

> it cannot bring us back to some golden Internet age

Why? Because trust is a human problem not a technological one? What does that actually mean?

[doublerabbit]

The golden internet age was innovation and community. You wanted your own X? Code it yourself. You looking for a certain subject? You may find a forum.

Web2 has been polluted by frameworks, modules, libraries and that the generic website now looks like the next. It hasn't gotten any easier its gotten harder. Where do you actually start if you want to create a new website or "app"?

My mother knows html, she has her own website. When it comes down to wanting a gallery to display her portfolio the easiest answer is to say "install wordpress". Which isn't easy in any shape or form.

And then if you wish to be part of Googles Search Engine you have to pay sponsorship.

The golden age was the innovation, the new, creativity, surprisingly freedom. Folk putting work in to developing a new platform. Sadly we are now surrounded by walled gardens and one of the caveats are that if you want it on display, you have to pay.

[neuronic]

Isn't the fundamental discussion we should be having if decentralization embodies trust? Is something decentralized automatically trustful? Or can trust only be established in a decentralized way? Which way is it?

The only thing I see people agreeing on is that centralized setups are never (infinitely) trustworthy.

[lordofmoria]

This is insightful, but a bit depressing. How do you propose solving these problems if cryptography is not the answer? At least Moxie is suggesting that there is a viable path forward by focusing on solutions that decentralize the infrastructure.

[walterbell]

> a great legal system

We have centuries of data and precedent from human legal systems. How could human and machine governance be improved with the aid of modern technology, including but not limited to, revision control of legislation and public caselaw, graph databases for threat analytics across time/space/network, automated identification of gaps in machine governance which require human intervention, and yes, all the tools of web3/crypt0.

[biztos]

> revision control of legislation and public caselaw

Even in pseudo-democracies, even in many outright autocracies, the information needed to build such a thing exists and is public. I don't know if anyone's built a git repo for all US federal law, but the information is there if you want to do it and it'd probably be a really fun project.

A quick search suggests there are repos but not with all the history.

I wonder if anybody has tried modeling real-world legal systems in a DAO. Probably too complicated, but I think you could pretty much cover the US constitution just as a thought experiment.