Problem with this claim is that it's hardly verifiable. Telegram's backend is closed source, and the only thing you can be sure of is that their backend sees every message in plaintext.
Crypto is really hard. You have to trust that whoever implemented the crypto is smart and diligent, and you have to trust that whoever operates the crypto is smart and diligent, and you have to trust both of those parties.
Centralization means that it's very easy to trust that whoever implements and operates the crypto is smart. Do I trust them? I don't know. I trust myself, but I don't think I am independently capable of operating or implementing crypto - if I want to make assertions like "this is end-to-end-encrypted" and ensure those assertions remain true, I will need a several million dollar a year budget, at a minimum. "Decentralized" means you've got tons of endpoints that need securing, and they can share crypto implementations, but the operations are duplicated. Which means it's more expensive, and you're trusting more operators, especially if you want resiliency.
Yes, something like Signal or Whatsapp means you've got a single point of failure, but something like Matrix, you've got many points of failure and depending on how it's configured every point of failure can allow a different party to break the confidentiality of the system.
Decentralization is great for resiliency but it actively works against reliable and confidential message delivery.
It's always very easy to trust as long as you're allowed to be mistaken in your trust. That's literally how people fall for all kinds of things, including wars, advertising, etc. It's much harder to fool all the people all the time, than corrupt some of the people (the ones in charge) all the time:
The mistake Moxie makes (and you do as well, you should really click on the links I posted to understand why)
is that "no one wants to run a server". In fact, an entire industry of professional "hosting companies" exists for Wordpress, Magento, etc. It's a free market of hosting.
You can't trust the software they're hosting, that's true. Which is why we have things like Subresource Integrity on the Web, IPFS, and many other ways to ensure that the thing you're loading is in fact bit-for-bit the same as the thing that was just audited by 3 different agencies, and battle-tested over time.
Think UniSwap. I'd rather trust UniSwap with a million dollars than Binance. I know exactly what UniSwap will do, both because it's been audited and because it's been battle-tested with billions of dollars. No amount of "trust me bro" will make me trust Binance to that extent. The key is "Smart contract factories":
In short, when you decouple the infrastructure layer (people running ethereum nodes) from the app layer (the smart contracts) all of a sudden you can have, for the first time in human history, code you can trust. And again, there is a separation of responsibilities: one group of people runs nodes, another group of people writes smart contracts, another group audits them, another makes front-end interfaces on IPFS, etc. etc. And they all can get paid, permissionlessly and trustlessly.
Look at Internet Computer canisters, for instance. Or the TON network smart contracts. There are may examples besides slow clunky blockchains today.
What do web3 and crypto moneys have anything to do with the discussion?
Decentralized protocols have existed for a very long time. Email have existed since the 70s. Telephone is also arguably decentralized and have existed for even longer.
The technology has potential to be decentralized, but telephones were famously considered a "natural monopoly" and ended up centralized under Ma Bell.
Government split Ma Bell into multiple smaller pieces, but they still operated as a cartel and kept prices high. They had centralized telephone switchboard operators etc.
It is only when authors of decentralized file-sharing networks like Kazaa (who built them to get around yet another government-enforced centralized regime of Intellectual Property, RIAA, MPAA etc.) went clean did we get Skype, and other Voice over IP consumer products. And seemingly overnight, the prices dropped to zero and we got packed-switched networks over dumb hubs, that anyone can run.
That's the key. We need to relegate these centralized platforms (X, Meta, etc.) into glorified hubs running nodes and earning some crypto, akin to IPFS nodes earning filecoin, or BitTorrent nodes earning BTT, etc.
You are not answering my main concern. Again, you snick in crypto into the discussion. Why?
We have decentralized stuff. Email, xmpp, matrix, the fediverse, all this works without this web3/crypto stuff. Those things are not perfect, including their decentralized aspect (sometimes to the point of doubting that decentralization really works well, although I personally think decentralization is a good thing).
I didn't downvote you but I suspect this is exactly why you are being downvoted. Since you asked. Many of us just think cryptos and this web3 stuff is bullshit and gets mentioned totally off topic without any convincing link to the discussion every single time.
Because crypto is literally how entities on a decentralized network get paid in an autonomous network. It's not via cash transfers. It's not via bank transfers. Or having accounts in some central bank.
Look at FileCoin and IPFS, for instance. Once you automate the micropayments and proofs of spacetime, it becomes a cryptocurrency. And then the providers of services can sell it to the next consumers.
Just because you hear the word "crypto" doesn't mean it's automatically off-topic, when it's literally the thing that is inevitably used by decentralized systems to do proper accounting and reward the providers for providing any services. Without it, you'll still be sitting -- as you are -- with no viable alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.
> Because crypto is literally how entities on a decentralized network get paid in an autonomous network
That doesn't ring true. What is an autonomous network? Those things runs on the internet, largely backed by infrastructure funded by traditional money. Moreover, emails, tor nodes, xmpp servers, matrix homeservers, fediverse hosts... None of those need cryptocoins to fund themselves, and are indeed largely and for the most part funded using traditional money. Micropayments are also not something needed for decentralization.
Decentralization is way more than just about decentralizing money and many of us don't trust crypto coins.
> it's literally the thing that is inevitably used by decentralized systems to do proper accounting and reward the providers for providing any services.
Or just like, advertisement. ActivityPub, Matrix, PeerTube, NextCloud and Urbit are all fully decentralized and let any instance host monetize themselves however they want.
Decentralized services, even for-profit ones, are not synonymous with cryptocurrency. Stop spreading misinformation to promote an unrelated topic.
"Urbit IDs aren’t money, but they are scarce, so each one costs something. This means that when you meet a stranger on the Urbit network, they have some skin in the game and are less likely to be a bot or a spammer." https://urbit.org/overview
Who pays for the hosting of ActivityPub and Matrix instances?
What if one instance abuses other instances too much? How do you prevent it?
I met the founders of LBRY / Odysee and other tokens that are actually being used for actual streaming. LBRY is a genuine utility token being used for instance.
You are totally ignoring the part that people need to get paid for storing stuff, and at the same time the payment needs to happen automatically.
> Who pays for the hosting of ActivityPub and Matrix instances?
And
> What if one instance abuses other instances too much? How do you prevent it?
Simple, they get blocked by other instances?
How cryptos change anything to these three questions?
> Oh, look at that, Nextcloud and Sia announce "cloud storage in the blockchain"
That just means Sia wrote a Nextcloud integration for their stuff and somehow nextcloud decided to showcase this integration. That doesn't mean Nexctloud has much to do with blockchain stuff. Nextcloud integrates with anything and its dog.
> What if some spammer abuses Nexcloud?
What kind of spam are you imagining and how do you think crypto coins are going to solve this? You don't use cryptos for this, you use good old system administration and in particular antispam systems, which don't use coins.
> You are totally ignoring the part that people need to get paid for storing stuff, and at the same time the payment needs to happen automatically.
We're not.
First, they don't always need to, some people run stuff out of advocacy for instance.
Second, getting paid with regular money is not an unsolved problem, there are plenty of options, many of which also coming with some builtin guaranties against fraud. It's literally how the whole world works. Now, I can't say I'm a huge fan of our financial system but that's a social issue in need for a social solution, not a technical one.
I'm stopping here, it's pretty clear that I won't get a solid, reasonable argument in favor of cryptos here. And that since your top comment is flagged to death, nobody reads us anyway.
I could go on for literal days. The blockchain isn't a panacea, and rationally most solutions don't ultimately settle on a bespoke transactional network with audited consensus protocols. It is stupid, overdesigned, and as a sign of its poor fitness it dies over time. I'm not relaying some "evil villain" speech from someone that wants to see decentralized services die, this is a reality check from your peers who also hate centralization. Borderline intervention if it has to be - you've echoed this same sentiment in several threads while apparently ignoring the self-evident failure of protocols that embody your vision.
This was a cutting-edge and untested concept in maybe 2011. You missed the boat by a decade and a half.
> LBRY is a genuine utility token being used for instance.
Yeah, last I heard of their brand was when a member of my graduating class became a neo-nazi for six months and incessantly uploaded videos detailing his hallucinations to the internet. You're in good company, it sounds like.
I believe there should be a way to have a rational discussion about this, point by point, maybe threaded. This ain't it. But whatever.
I am not married to blockchains, I have literally criticized blockchains. I have said that smart contracts and distributed systems are what we need, whether that's Internet Computer canisters, SAFE network datachains, IOTA DAGs, Hashgraphs, or Intercloud (something I designed). I don't know why people on HN love to do this strawman over and over.
Blockchain is a settlement layer. I don't even say it's needed for day-to-day micropayments. I explain how the systems could work, which could use any smart contracts for their settlement layer, I don't care about the underlying technology for those, but the Web2 elements are there: https://qbix.com/ecosystem#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONTENT
> The last I heard of [LBRY]
Yeah, they got sued by Gary Genzler's SEC even though their coin was one of the few actually being used as a utility token. They were forced to shut down their entire company, and only the network survived. Similarly with Telegram, with the SEC. I will wager that you're reflexively on the side of Gary Gensler and the government "because blockchain". But I would have liked to see this innovation grow, not be killed by governments.
> Many people on HN silently downvote anything that has to do with crypto and decentralization.
I primarily downvote them because I haven't seen anything come out of that space that seems like it's remotely capable of actually achieving decentralization (for which I also see a dire need in today's structure of the Internet and the applications running on it).
95% of the time, these things are built as a Potemkin village of technical decentralization backed up by complete administrative centralization, with the path to actual decentralization "very high on our public roadmap available here, we promise!!!"
I wish the downvote button would require at least a private message to the person of why they are being downvoted. (Upvote could have an optional message).
Otherwise it's the most toxic feature on HN as it promotes extreme groupthink activism.
A public message seems better. There's zero accountability in private messages - you can just smash your keyboard. You can't leave such a message if it's public.
