[birracerveza]

>I agree with you that trust is an open problem, but it's one that I think is getting solved automatically for free by ubiquitous surveillance, if we administer it sanely.

The problem is, who watches the watchmen? And who watches the watchmen who watch the watchmen? And so on, because at some point you have to trust someone not to act maliciously. Not to mention that ubiquitous surveillance is a problem in itself, because again who can we trust to administer it sanely? It all goes back to the same root problem: trust, which is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. The best course of action, IMO, is to do away with it entirely by using trustless systems.

>The advantage of centralization is efficiency.

Exactly! And because of that a certain degree of centralization is pretty much unavoidable, and it's why decentralization is not a silver bullet, and why the answer lies in the middle. A balance has to be found. A purely decentralized system is very slow to develop, maintain and update compared to a centralized solution; because of the glacial pace of development in the space, lots of detractors say that Bitcoin has been around for 10 years and nothing has changed, but I disagree with that! The ecosystem has matured a lot under the hood in these years, but it took a very long time to get to this point compared to what a centralized could do in the same span of time, with a lot of fragmentation and plenty of time spent coordinating actors towards a common goal. It's the complete opposite of "move fast and break things" :D

>Speaking as an open-minded but skeptical outsider, you would have to convince me that the blockchain provides/solves decentralization better than existing alternatives.

The only decentralized solution I see that works and has adoption is just torrents. Maybe git, if you stretch the definition a bit. But I don't see a way to build and deploy websites that doesn't involve blockchain, for example. What are the alternatives? The fediverse? Someone still has to maintain the instances, and once those go down the content is lost. Scuttlebutt seems to fit the bill, but barely anyone uses it.

>Again, not to be a spoilsport, but it sounds like I could do a lot of that with git and some cryptography. Maybe I just don't get it?

Well yes, but you'd just be reinventing web3 with none of the adoption. git can be thought of as a sorta blockchain, and wallets are simply public-key cryptography. The core issue is making it accessible to everyone and then actually getting people to use it, but luckily (and sadly) there is an economic incentive to drive adoption and usage, which is why crypto has experienced an explosive growth in the last years. Without that you're never going to put any kind of dent into the existing centralized systems, anything one would develop would just be a passion project at best. (again, scuttlebutt)

>On that we both agree. This stuff you're describing sounds interesting, and nothing like the scam-fest "crypto" stuff.

It is! I am one of the few who is unironically in it for the technology. Sure, the money would be a nice bonus, but these are shark infested waters so any money I throw in I just consider it a lost gamble. But it's interesting to see what people are building, there's plenty of people chasing stars and impossible pipe dreams, such as a fully decentralized society down to the government, and it's really hard to discern who is a snake oil salesman and who is actually interested in developing whatever they're peddling, but interesting projects do exist. The hard part is wading through the scams, of which crypto is 99% comprised of because of the lack of regulation. Hopefully this crash will cleanse the ecosystem and finally let actually useful projects that aren't just overly complicated financial games to shine through.

[carapace]

First off, let me apologize for not writing a more in-depth reply, you've put a lot of thought and effort into this and I appreciate it. I'll try not to waste your time. :)

> The problem is, who watches the watchmen? And who watches the watchmen who watch the watchmen? And so on, because at some point you have to trust someone not to act maliciously.

I've thought about this and I think the likely answer is that the system has to be self-referential (a recursive function, if you will.) The infrastructure and personnel of the panopticon must be subject to the panopticon. E.g. members of the CCP must be subject to the Chinese "social credit" system.

It seems to me that if everyone is subject to the system then we still have a techno-tyranny but it's ruled by Mrs. Grundy. Otherwise, if there are privilege levels to the panopticon, you're going to wind up with masters and slaves.

> Not to mention that ubiquitous surveillance is a problem in itself, because again who can we trust to administer it sanely?

I don't think we can avoid solving that problem, I think ubiquitous surveillance is unavoidable due to economic factors (e.g. the fleet of self-driving cars is a de facto surveillance network. See also "sensing for wi-fi": your router can see you.) It's already happening, eh? Our cell phone track our locations, etc.

> It all goes back to the same root problem: trust, which is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. The best course of action, IMO, is to do away with it entirely by using trustless systems.

Here's where I strongly disagree. I don't accept the "it's human nature" argument against our higher values. I've lived in high-trust and low-trust enclaves and high-trust is just better. It's more efficient, but more importantly it's just fantastic! It feels great! It's just as natural if not more so to love and trust each other as it is to hate or fear each other. The best course of action, IMO, is to foster the higher human values and establish and grow trustworthy regimes within the chaotic larger systems and eventually establish a kind of techno-utopian Golden Age. :)

Well met!

[birracerveza]

Cheers! It's not wasted time to have a sane and level headed exchange with someone who is interested in actual discussion. Usually it's just people looking to dunk on those dumb cryptobros for le epic upvotes, so this was a nice change of pace. Thank you! I enjoyed the talk, it has been a while since I geeked out about it.

>E.g. members of the CCP must be subject to the Chinese "social credit" system. It seems to me that if everyone is subject to the system then we still have a techno-tyranny but it's ruled by Mrs. Grundy. Otherwise, if there are privilege levels to the panopticon, you're going to wind up with masters and slaves.

The problem with this, panopticon aside, is that someone is bound to have these rules bent to their will: if the system is centralized then someone will inevitably have more power than someone else, and that someone will inevitably abuse that power. Bonus points if they create a narrative that convinces the public that the abuse was a good thing(tm) and is therefore accepted, swept under the rug or even considered the system working as intended. You know, as it already happens on a daily basis.

In an ideal decentralized system, everyone watches everyone. There is no one who has more power than any other, and everyone is bound to the same system with the same rules with no room for abuse. Of course, this is a utopia and not at all appliable to the real world, but it's an interesting thought experiment: how would such a system work if applied to humanity as a whole and no trust is required in your fellow human being anymore, as that trust is guaranteed by The System? It's not necessarily a good thing, mind you, as we'd have a different kind of panopticon: it might not be abusable by a single person, but it can be abused by the masses... and as we've seen lately that might be even worse.

>I don't think we can avoid solving that problem, I think ubiquitous surveillance is unavoidable due to economic factors (e.g. the fleet of self-driving cars is a de facto surveillance network. See also "sensing for wi-fi": your router can see you.) It's already happening, eh? Our cell phone track our locations, etc.

That's exactly why we need to solve the problem! We can't escape ubiquitous surveillance because it's here, and as long as we have the internet and electricity it will be here to stay. What we need to ensure is that it cannot be abused, bringing us back to my first point of watchmen all the way down.

>Here's where I strongly disagree. I don't accept the "it's human nature" argument against our higher values. I've lived in high-trust and low-trust enclaves and high-trust is just better. It's more efficient, but more importantly it's just fantastic! It feels great! It's just as natural if not more so to love and trust each other as it is to hate or fear each other. The best course of action, IMO, is to foster the higher human values and establish and grow trustworthy regimes within the chaotic larger systems and eventually establish a kind of techno-utopian Golden Age. :)

It's understandable that we disagree on this point, because doing away with trust is to reject part of what makes us humans in the first place. Trustless systems cannot be applied to all aspect of our lives, lest we become meat automatons bound by The System, but it can be applied to critical pieces of societal infrastructure to make lives better for everyone and distribute resources in an efficient manner. How? No idea, because such systems don't exist yet. I often see detractors parrot the "cryptocurrency is a solution looking for a problem" line, and that is partly true. We can fix some of the problems that plague society with cryptocurrencies (or better, tokenized decentralized systems), but we need to analyze these problems first and then create decentralized systems to fix them. Again, I've seen plenty of attempts at tackling such problems in the space; some turned out to be scams, some died, some are currently being worked on, but hopefully, eventually, some will see the light of day and bring some much needed positive change in our life... should it take years, if not decades.

In the meantime, we must do our best to improve society with the tools we have at hand. Even if those tools are often broken.

See you!

[birracerveza]

* But I don't see a way to build and deploy websites in a decentralized manner (as in, you don´t have to host the servers yourself or to a centralized entity like AWS) that doesn't involve the blockchain.

Fixed