Zooko: Decentralized, immutable and uncensorable microblogging

https://github.com/publiusfederalist/zooko

by abriosi • 5 years ago

112 135 5 years ago

verdverm4• 5 years ago

Handshake has been co-opted by the same person who took over Freenode. That handshake has become toxic should come at no surprise.

I feel for this dev, I had a similarly unpleasant experience with the Aragon team and decided the community was not for me.

publiush4• 5 years ago

If we're talking about the same person, he was the only one who actually encouraged what I was doing and even gave me the idea for Zooko.

However, the admins on their discord, were less than encouraging.

EDIT: As per the same person's advice, I'm going to start a new discord community without the toxicity.

verdverm4• 5 years ago

I walked away from the crypto community at large, highly recommended. There are many more meaningful things to put you talents towards.

kragen9• 5 years ago

Have you talked to Zooko about using his name for your project? He might not appreciate you trading on his reputation this way, particularly if your designs or implementations turn out to be fundamentally flawed.

dqpb• 5 years ago

These children remind of me of Lord of the Flies.

I think most people in blockchain Discord "servers" are actually children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the same palpable feeling that I'm talking to teenagers. It's odd.

fnord77• 5 years ago

possibly adults who have not matured intellectually beyond teen levels.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

A lot of dopey young people who have medium-sized inheritances/trust funds that they're gambling with in the hope that they'll never have to work, mixed with overpaid tech workers fresh out of college hoping to buy Bay Area homes.

webmaven• 5 years ago

Naming this after Zooko is a nice hat tip. I remember back when he was interleaving his last names to form O'Whielacronx.

nottorp3• 5 years ago

I guess this is addressed to whoever lives in the crypto bubble. I don't understand what a handshake is, why it passes dns records and if it can be used to publish twitter like messages who is going to read them and how.

Also from the little i know about this current fad:

If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?

verdverm4• 5 years ago

Handshake is a blockchain based alternative for ICANN. DNS resolvers still work the same, and HNS could play nice with ICANN, but largely seem to want to replace it rather than be peers with it.

The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and verification.

nottorp3• 5 years ago

I could attach TXT records to my own domain and publish "tweets" like that couldn't I?

theamk• 5 years ago

Handshake is a blockchain which wants to replace existing DNS registration system. So when you want to look up example.com, instead of consulting IANA's database for "who owns .com", you consult the Handshake's blockchain.

The zooko system uses a "hack": since, this is blockchain, there is entire past history on the chain. So you can keep repeatedly updating a random field (like a TXT entry for some domain) and use equivalent of "git log" to read the entire timeline.

This will need a special client, which will parse blockchain for such updates, but everything on blockchain needs a special client, so not a big deal.

Re "5 million users" -- this is a very good point, and yes, if this takes off this will be significant problem for Handshake blockchain. I suspect this is the core of disagreement between Zooko's author and designers of the Handshake blockchain ([0]).

From the point of Handshake authors, Zooko system uses blockchain resources, but does not help with main mission (make Handshake team super rich by taking over existing DNS system).

From the point of "publiush", there is this Handshake blockchain which has authentication solved, and it can be used for all sorts of fun stuff. The fact that this was not original intent just makes it more fun and exciting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29912944

rasengan• 5 years ago

From the point of Handshake authors, Zooko system uses blockchain resources, but does not help with main mission (make Handshake team super rich by taking over existing DNS system).

Actually, I gave the idea to publius for this as he had mentioned. I'm myself excited by the no-censor DNS root system, but I'm passionate about the ownership of your own 'namespace' generically much more so than the DNS. That's why I made a pull request [1] to Bob Extension for example which later enabled publius (in his own words) to make applause [2].

I did also see what happened between publius and the admins of that discord, which is just another Handshake discord as there is no official Handshake discord, and I don't agree with what happened either to be fair. Political discussions can occur in much more mature ways on both ends of the spectrum.

[1] https://github.com/kyokan/bob-extension/pull/15

[2] https://github.com/publiusfederalist/applause (very cool)

navbaker2• 5 years ago

I understand the very basics of blockchain technology, but I guess I'm missing some context or background that would allow me to make the mental connection between "blockchain" and "unblockable microblog". Does anyone have a good pointer to something that would explain this more in-depth/like I'm 5?

wepple• 5 years ago

My guess is that because blockchain is decentralized, in theory nobody could censor or block it, because nobody “controls” the blockchain.

Compared with any modern social media site which is mutable and controlled by an organization who gets to police content

Edit: a good example of this is that folks have put malicious content into the various blockchains (ascii images of child harm material, or strings of data that trigger antivirus). You can’t stop it being added, and once it’s there you cannot remove it.

littlestymaar• 5 years ago

You can’t stop it being added

It really depends what you mean by “you”, of course I can't, but miners can since they are the one actively adding stuff to the chain. In fact, they may even be legally responsible for what they add to a blockchain (IANAL though), and since miners are physical entities most of whom have a publicly known IP address, it may even be realistically enforceable.

m3kw92• 5 years ago

Eventually a company providing a UI layer will be the central access point for all the content coming from the block chain. The central point will then be able to censor posts. This is no different from OpenSea, or Coinbase.

roywiggins6• 5 years ago

I think it's embedding posts directly into the chain, so if you can sync the chain then you can access everyone's posts. Since these posts are cryptographically embedded in the chain you can't block any of them without blocking access to the entire chain, or attacking the chain and rewriting history.

navbaker2• 5 years ago

Thanks, this was the piece I was missing. Their comment about using a chain that is too popular to easily block makes more sense now, but that still seems like the weak link, right? You're still depending on authority figures being too afraid of opinion to take action against a particular chain.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo• 5 years ago

"Uncensorable" if all nodes go down it's down. It's like that torrent/magnet you really want to have but it's at 0/0.

an-allen• 5 years ago

Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no one has asked for!

hobs• 5 years ago

It's almost like twitter users have been asking for an edit button for N years, so let's make everything EVEN MORE immutable!

mcculley• 5 years ago

An edit button should also come with an immutable history of edits.

thebean112• 5 years ago

Maybe not directly, but I actually see plenty of complaints about link rot and news publications silently editing or removing old articles.

rhizome• 5 years ago

While at the same time, people are still receiving consequences after the discovery of things they said and did a long time ago. What a world!

Kadin• 5 years ago

Nothing about "put it on a blockchain" helps that.

If you are actually putting the page contents onto the blockchain, you have basically constructed an append-only, replicated database. Which will almost certainly become unmanageably large over time. (Why would a user want to maintain a local archive of this content? There's no incentive for them to keep it on their machine, aside from wanting a copy of the content for themselves, which they could achieve in any number of other ways. Like just... saving it to disk.)

If you aren't actually putting the content into the blockchain itself, but are really just storing a URL that points to the content, you haven't solved the linkrot problem at all. You've just created a very roundabout way to send people URLs. You could put something like a PURL in there, or a DOI, but that just moves the problem around. Again, the blockchain isn't solving anything.

Here's an easier solution, if you want to try and ensure the availability of a piece of content into the future: strip it down to its most minimal, plaintext version, and post that to a well-known (and subject-appropriate) Usenet group. It will immediately be archived in several places across the world, which have a pretty good track record of keeping ahead of the flow of incoming content and keeping it available. No, you don't get a guaranteed URL, but the Message-ID is a very unique search string that can be used later on to find it.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

ummm. government censorship is real

SomeCallMeTim2• 5 years ago

So are laws like the Right to be Forgotten. [0]

Which, as soon as one of them is violated, the entire system will be torn down to stop it.

[0] https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1562/right-to-be-fo...

tablespoon8• 5 years ago

Ah an immutable blog! A feature literally no one wants and no one has asked for!

Must be the solution to some important problem, then! Let's try to apply it everywhere and strongly insist that it's the future.

roughly• 5 years ago

People keep using immutable like it’s a good thing. Any of y’all who still want to fully stand by the things you said, did, and thought 20 years ago might need to reflect a bit.

akvadrako• 5 years ago

I think this is the most interesting part:

https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake

publiush4• 5 years ago

I've decided to begin my own community. Those toxic admins can't control the blockchain.

NetOpWibby• 5 years ago

Huh?! No one controls the blockchain.

DangitBobby• 5 years ago

Unless there's some conversation not shown here, it reads to me like they are using "garbage" to refer to random contents of people's messages and/or posts (and saying that the whitepaper is not garbage, as opposed to random messages and posts, which are not "useful" on chain). I don't think they meant to call your project garbage, just that it adds garbage to the chain.

m3kw92• 5 years ago

So you pay to post, otherwise who will pay miners to post blocks? That will surely disincentivize too much posting and solve inherent scalability issues. This service is a no go.

codespin• 5 years ago

I'm excited to try this out, I was toying with the idea of creating something similar.

I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko goes farther in the right direction.

roywiggins6• 5 years ago

This seems like a different definition of "control"- sure, your posts can't be deleted by anyone else, but they can't be deleted or edited by you. They are preserved and public forever.

I'm not sure that's what people think of when they think of having control of their data?

macintux• 5 years ago

Seems analogous to the discussion of which licensing type gives the developer more freedom: GPL or BSD. The answer depends on how you define freedom.

dannyw3• 5 years ago

Yes, like it or not that's practically how the internet works.

You don't believe Facebook actually deletes your messages, do you?

magicjosh7• 5 years ago

This is a neat hack. I've always been curious about these type of "publish right on the block" schemes like the picture of Len Sassman or the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Bitcoin addresses are up to 35 characters, so you could think about doing something like this on the Bitcoin chain as well. Example: "zooko:hi hackernews".

In this case, my understanding is they're updating the TXT record of your Handshake address (at least that's how it could work on ENS, but that's on the Ethereum blockchain) rather than the block itself.

Has anyone had a chance to test it out?

acdha8• 5 years ago

This is “uncensorable” in the same way that “sovereign citizens” are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something which is actually illegal, they’ll learn how useful blockchains are for prosecutors.

The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths:

1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.

2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.

roywiggins6• 5 years ago

The readme does explain that you could censor it by blocking access the chain entirely, it's not pretending otherwise.

But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since you can do all that offline.

phoe-krk• 5 years ago

As long as there is illegal content on the blockchain, they can simply state that you are hosting a node connected to a network that downloads and shares illegal content, which will be true, and therefore that you possess it, which will also be true. And that can be enough to get you prosecuted regardless of how many crypto bros are going to try to convince you, or them, otherwise.

acdha8• 5 years ago

Okay, so now you’ve downloaded the entire chain. Does that seem safe to have in your possession in this scenario? Even if I have the storage, I would not want to find out that someone else had uploaded something illegal when the police search my computer/phone and I have to prove to their satisfaction that I didn’t know.

If you don’t download the entire chain, your traffic connecting to certain nodes and downloading certain sizes can be enough to track you - there are academic papers about using this to figure out what movies you’re watching over HTTPS – and that’s assuming that you don’t learn the hard way that the fast server with all of the underground content is the secret police’s honeypot.

This is all probably moot in any case because it’s tricky to build something like this which never does DNS resolution, connects to a suspicious server, etc. The average user is going to have a very hard time avoiding mistakes like that, and that’s assuming you don’t have police informants encouraging unsafe opsec or use of treacherous apps — real things which happen to dissidents and activists all over the world. Remember Citizen Lab’s report on the use of NSO’s malware to go after supporters of a soda tax?

What bothers me most about cryptocurrency proponents are that most of the claims are being made by people who will not personally suffer the consequences of being wrong if someone follows their advice. If you care about people in dangerous legal environments, that really needs to focus on changing the system rather than advocating use of electronic systems which even experts cannot use safely in those environments.

friendlydog• 5 years ago

Let's say you use something like a striped raid on different nodes.

Node A contains the odd bytes for something copyrighted like "the love guru" those bytes by themselves aren't the copyrighted content and no one claims rights to them.

Node B has has the even ones.

Downloading either doesn't yield the copyrighted file, but on a person's own machine if they combine them it does.

Still illegal?

mmastrac• 5 years ago

Yes. The law isn't naive and seeing content A appear when using innocent content B as a key is beyond a reasonable doubt.

edoceo• 5 years ago

Having copyrighted works isn't the inherently illegal part. It's the act of obtaining them outside the licensed methods and then holding them. At that point, according to some, is when it becomes theft.

Hosts with unknown blobs of bytes can, and have, been taken to task by various authorities.

Maybe it's grey-area but looks more towards the illegal side to me.

Not a lawyer.

hash8722• 5 years ago

Let's say instead of 'copyrighted file' it's CSAM material instead. Is it 'illegal'? Maybe you can convince a judge otherwise.... after your home has been raided, you've already done at least some time in jail where all the inmates know you've been arrested for CSAM, your friends & family know you've been arrested for that, that's what comes up under a Google search for your name for all time, thus making you unemployable.....

Yes, after spending $500k-1 million on a defense attorney, it's possible that you could convince a judge that that content isn't 'illegal', sure. (How many judges- average age over 60- can learn what a 'striped raid' is?) But none of those other consequences can be reversed, even if you 'win' at trial

acdha8• 5 years ago

Yes. What happens is that the FBI uses the system to download the illicit content and every IP they connect to gets a letter to their ISP demanding that they identify the customer.

When they show up at your door, you get to hope they believe you saying that you had no idea your system was hosting that content and/or that you never had the decryption key. If you say anything which a judge/jury believes untrue, that’s a federal crime in its own right.

Better hope that you don’t need any of the hardware they seized as evidence (possibly for years - see Steve Jackson Games), and that your employer doesn’t hear the news and sack you.

dane-pgp• 5 years ago

This is the question / thought experiment that the Owner-Free File System explored[0] (based on the XOR operation), and the legal / philosophical issues are discussed in the famous essay "What Colour are your bits?".[1]

An idea that is often missed in these discussions is that if you have two random-looking files which, when XORed together, produce an interesting file, it isn't clear which of the two source files were created by someone with access to the interesting file. For example, if you produce a sufficiently large random file, I can create another file which, when XORed with your file, implicates you in copyright infringement.

My non-expert conclusion is that unless a third party can prove which file was created first, there is no way of knowing who to prosecute, like having an eye witness trying to separate identical twins (which I believe has been a problem in court cases before). There is, however, the counter-argument that merely publishing large random-looking data files is evidence of a conspiracy to aid copyright infringement, although the same could be said of running a Tor node.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

moolcool• 5 years ago

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think the law is as interested in pedantic "you're technically correct" loopholes as HN is.

tablespoon8• 5 years ago

The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow.

Thanks for describing that error so clearly and succinctly. It's one of those fundamental misconceptions that's depressingly common.

Don't assume you've defeated the them because they haven't cared enough to come after you.

dd444fgdfg• 5 years ago

is that true though? CP on Etherium blockchain is a well known problem, and no prosecution jurisdiction is doing anything about it. Who would even have jurisdiction on something so decentralised? Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all of them. And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more quickly than you can kill them. So prosecutors really are powerless. I think. Am I wrong?

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

Could the reasoning behind that not simply be that there is only finite resources to use so you want to target where you get the most effect for the least resource and “CP on blockchains” ends up way down in that priority list?

tablespoon8• 5 years ago

So prosecutors really are powerless. I think. Am I wrong?

Yes, you're wrong.

Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all of them. And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more quickly than you can kill them.

Your error is here. If prosecutors actually decide to start shutting down nodes because of CP and make successful prosecutions, it will deter people from running new nodes in that jurisdiction. If hosting a copy of the Etherium blockchain had a high chance of landing you in jail for CP possession, would you start up a new node to replace one that was shut down? Instead of "new nodes ... pop[ping] up vastly more quickly than you can kill them," most operators would get scared and quickly shut down their nodes and wipe their HDs, and the rest would get prosecuted. Maybe you'd have a few stragglers hiding out on Tor, but at that point the network is unusable for any legitimate use.

Don't believe me? There's even been a recent example of something like that. China banned Bitcoin mining, and the miners there shut down or GTFO of China:

https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-cryp...

Available data shows that crypto mining no longer exists in China and that China's crypto mining ban completely upended the global Bitcoin mining industry. China went from controlling up to two-thirds of all Bitcoin mining in the world in April to not contributing to the industry at all as of July 2021, according to data compiled by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of Chinese Bitcoin miners relocated their operations to places like Kazakhstan, the U.S., and Canada or simply sold off their equipment at discounted prices and left the industry.

acdha8• 5 years ago

That’s why I put it in terms of how much they care. I’d be surprised if there is something on the Ethereum chain itself because it’d cost a small fortune but if there was, the authorities could easily require all companies to block access to those records, filter network traffic for all but the most determined users, etc. because it’s a complex always-on network system with a fair amount of volume.

The underlying problem here is discoverability. If I can find your content, so can the police. If sharing it is personally risky, most people won’t and they feel who do won’t for long. Censorship has never relied on absolutely preventing anyone from saying something prohibited — it’s always the potential for retroactive consequences. This is why successful movements have generally needed outside support, anonymous communications (e.g. printed samizdat which is most risky if they catch you when you’re actually in possession of it), or some kind of social network which is hard to infiltrate (family, religion, etc.).

alangibson• 5 years ago

where you can make up rules for the government to follow

Exactly. It always reminds me of that scene in the Simpsons where Burns goes through tons of security in the nuclear plant, then a dog walks in through a screen door.

nonameiguess• 5 years ago

Since it isn't really clear, Handshake protocol is an attempt to create an alternative DNS without authoritative root name servers, where instead users auction names priced in Handshake coins, the initial bulk of which were gifted to various FOSS developers and organizations to try and keep rich people from hoarding everything. Instead of querying root servers for TLDs, you query a blockchain to get the records.

This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records, and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed, the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you can now never delete or edit a Tweet.

KETpXDDzR• 5 years ago

I stopped reading after

"Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them."

The claim that Handshake isn't easy to abuse lacks proof.

endisneigh2• 5 years ago

I don’t understand the popularity of immutability and uncensor- ability.

What if someone posts naked photos of their girlfriend on this?

Furthermore it says you can block access to the chain completely do it doesn’t even do what it claims.

klyrs• 5 years ago

I was thinking about the children™, personally. I wouldn't touch this technology with a 10 foot pole.

dannyw3• 5 years ago

some people believe information should be free, period.

There's am argument to be made that the drawbacks of revenge porn are outweighed by the benefits of free access to information.

endisneigh2• 5 years ago

you don't need this to have free access to info tho.

pjerem• 5 years ago

some people believe information should be free, period.

There is nothing wrong believing some ideology.

However, enforcing your beliefs without caring about consequences is called extremism.

You can believe information must be free but acknowledge that it don’t include revenge porn. Or you can act like it doesn’t matter but then, you are a danger for the society.

timeon2• 5 years ago

Dystopia is created when context and adaptation is not considered while implementing the Utopia.

judge2020• 5 years ago

Every technology has pros and cons. The pro here is that some blog about corruption can't be knocked offline by some government authority lest they block the entire network, which would be a problem if any businesses use such a decentralized network for their own means. The con is that everything is immutable and unchangeable, and that has consequences - for reference, despite that the story about CP being on Bitcoin is false[0], it's definitely possible if anyone ever wanted to spend a few hundred thousands in gas fees to store an arbitrary jpeg on ethereum.

0: https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockcha...

tablespoon8• 5 years ago

The pro here is that some blog about corruption can't be knocked offline by some government authority lest they block the entire network...

Let's not kid ourselves with the idea that's even likely to happen. The main use case of stuff like this is for people to say stuff that would get them banned on Twitter, and most of that consists of being an asshole or spreading lies.

The blog about corruption will be put up on real Twitter, where the eyeballs are, and preserved by getting scraped by some organization like the Archive Team and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

vannevar• 5 years ago

Anyone interested in this field should also check out Freenet, a distributed, encrypted and censor-resistant platform that's been around for 20 years.

https://freenetproject.org/

flubflub• 5 years ago

How much does this cost to use yourself as it is on a blockchain?

rvz2• 5 years ago

Maybe all these projects that have typical Discord chats talking about blockchains, DAOs, NFTs, etc are full of kids given that some users can get easily upset and hate your pet project and they don't give any reasons other than character attacks. I always see this when someone attaches their own identity to a technology or project that once someone criticises the project (but not you directly) they feel 'personally attacked'.

Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this project. I don't see any character attacks on the user from the project devs.

In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to have 'won'.

romaniitedomum• 5 years ago

Oh dear. Another allegedly censorship resistant platform, and where do they put their code? On the most censored and censorable place possible, github. It's just one DMCA complaint away from being taken down, or Microsoft may decide to just lock out some or all of the developers.

dang2• 5 years ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rvz2• 5 years ago

There you go.

It is no wonder that these projects that claim to be 'decentralised' still relying on using centralised services like Discord, GitHub, Etherscan, Coinmarketcap, Coinbase, Binance and Twitter, and they scream about 'web3'. Whatever that means.

On your point towards Github there is a solution and that is to self-host the source code via using something like GitLab, cgit, gerrit, etc in which many free and open source projects already do this.

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

Nothing stops a developer from putting their code elsewhere, should it be taken off github.

Choosing a different host than GitHub to begin with is basically self-censorship (as fewer will see it).

benpiper2• 5 years ago

Exactly. The platform is only as decentralized as the codebase. Most people are going to blindly download and run whatever the developers put out. Decentralization and immutability are illusions. See: Ethereum DAO fork.

dang2• 5 years ago

Recent and presumably related:

Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 - Dec 2021 (186 comments)

tablespoon8• 5 years ago

Zooko was named after Zooko Wilcox O'Hearn, one of the few remaining, original, Cypherpunks.

It's super weird to name a project after someone who's not dead, and in this case not even that old (Wikipedia says he's 47).

SomeCallMeTim2• 5 years ago

It's extra weird when you know Zooko. One of his kids shared a kindergarten class with my oldest and I used to hang out with him.

Clicked on this to see if it was something he'd done.

oh_sigh2• 5 years ago

And most importantly, seemingly not involved in the project at all.

tromp• 5 years ago

No; but quite involved in running another blockchain...

kragen9• 5 years ago

It's not weird (is there anything wrong with being weird?), but if it's done without his consent, it's bad.

fsiefken• 5 years ago

i wonder how the handshake protocol compares with the hypercore protocol or scuttlebut and if there are other similar suitable protocols for social media. for example iris.to uses hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/

benpiper2• 5 years ago

This already exists. It's called Usenet.

ThinkBeat• 5 years ago

Something I always like to figure out in any decentralized system is where it is stored.

Here it is stored on a blockchain. (yay) But where is this actually stored?

Is it expected that N users will store it for everyone else?

Will everyone have a copy of the entire thing?

If this were to become popular I presume it would grow pretty big.

Zooko: Decentralized, immutable and uncensorable microblogging

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