In case anybody still believed that self-hosting is going to save them from tech companies taking their stuff down with no explanation or recourse: fwoof.space/@johann/1127828619…
Johann (@johann@fwoof.space)
From a Fanfic author's Discord server, @everyone We've got a response from Fanfiction at last. And it's a worrying response. The below paragraph is directly quoted. http://fanfiction.Fwoof Space 2.0!
AllDragonsAreDead
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •This stuff is why we *need* the blockchain, nobody has yet come up with any other system that our tech overlords cannot control.
The fediverse, with its reliance on DNS and TLS, is basically no less immune to any of this than X, Facebook, Instagram or any other centralized social media service.
modulux
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to modulux • • •@modulux Kademlia/IPFS solve one specific problem (namely that of being able to download some data whose hash you already know), blockchains allow you to run any algorithm computable by a Turing machine.
THe problem with Kademlia and IPFS is that you need to know the hash of the data you want to download beforehand, and there's no way for the data's original author to distribute updates. There's also the problem of discoverability, there are no human-friendly names, so you need a centralized index of names to hashes.
Kuba Orlik
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •what about
docs.gnunet.org/latest/users/g…
The GNU Name System — GNUnet documentation
docs.gnunet.orgKuba Orlik
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •Kuba Orlik
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •@kuba No.
A blockchain can provide a unique mapping of names to values. It's centralized in the sense that there's only one mapping and every network participant agrees on what a given name is mapped to, but decentralized in the sense that only authorized users (where the smart contract defines what is meant by "authorized") are allowed to change mappings.
THe reason such a system cannot possibly work without a cryptocurrency is that you need some incentive against scalpers taking all the names for themselves on day one. If names are completely free to acqquire, somebody is inevitably going to get all the interesting ones and then they won't be free to acquire any more.
Kuba Orlik
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •What happens when someone forks a blockchain and people disagree which one is the true one?
Also, how do you read the data from the blockchain? Do you download the entire blockchain to your HDD? Or do you rely on some intermediary who wraps the blockchain in a lightweight API? Who is the intermediary then? How do we trust them?
Also, what's supposed to happen when someone steals your domain through some hacky means? Then there'll be no way to get it back, it will be gone forever.
Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •@kuba Blockchains have built-in mechanisms to decide on how to deal with forks. This is why proof-of-work was originally invented, with PoW, clients always choose the fork with more work applied to it. Proof of stake and other consensus mechanisms provide similar guarantees, but require far less energy.
You can make a hardfork (essentially changing the rules of your blockchain), but then it's up to which client you use, if you use a client that respects and implements the hardfork, you're on the forked version, otherwise your client treats the hardfork as illegitimate and only uses the unforked version.
Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •Kuba Orlik
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •@kuba You do, you have all the headers.
See Handshake's technical design for the juicy details. They've gotten a lot of things wrong, particularly on the marketing / grift front, as most cryptos do, but the technical foundations and ideas are sound.
Kuba Orlik
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •@kuba Re: hacking, this is a fundamental dilemma, if your registrar has the ability to forcibly transfer your domain to somebody else, they can help recover it in case of a hack, but they can also disable it when their automated AI systems mistakenly flag it as suspicious.
There are ways to mitigate this problem. Handshake for example has a concept of "domain burning", if somebody steals a copy of your key and tries to transfer your domain to their own, you have some time (two weeks I think) to disable the domain completely, making it unavaiblable to both you and the hacker. This removes any financial incentives for domain hacking, as most people would rather lose their domain than have it go to a hacker.
There are also other designs where you have multiple parties that need to authorize a transfer. You could even design this in a way where you need a both your key and a registrar's key to transfer a domain to somebody else, but the registrar's key isn't allowed to make any changes to the domain without your express consent.
Kuba Orlik
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •> This removes any financial incentives for domain hacking, as most people would rather lose their domain than have it go to a hacker.
Not really, irreversibly destroying someone else's domain would be an incentive for many
Kuba Orlik
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •> > There are also other designs where you have multiple parties that need to authorize a transfer. You could even design this in a way where you need a both your key and a registrar's key to transfer a domain to somebody else, but the registrar's key isn't allowed to make any changes to the domain without your express consent.
That sounds like centralization with extra steps
Mikołaj Hołysz
in reply to Kuba Orlik • • •Mateusz Turczynowicz
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz • • •