> This is why there should not be a single entity that runs the network. Make it fully decentralized with economic incentives for node operators.

Just make the network work based on open protocols, where anyone can run a server that interoperates with others. (Matrix.)

For the non-developer end-user, they can use one of the existing servers, who in theory could charge their users.

Yes, it would be hard to maintain branding cohesion, and the product/service would lose to a centralized service. However, transitioning to heterogenous social/messaging landscape (from current oligopolies) could make smaller services like that competitive.

IMO it’s not clear we should treat a legal/political issue with technical workarounds, it doesn’t seem sustainable.

Matrix system sucks because the servers are branded with domain names and the server operators have total ownership of your account.

In a network like Status or Session, you don’t need to know and don’t care who runs the node you happen to be using at a given moment.

So what you are proposing is TOR but with a twist to charge connections?

Actually, what OP is proposing is federation, like e-Mail.

Some people do pay for their e-Mail providers today...

Yes, that was the idea. Matrix does something like this for messaging.

It can be made illegal to be an operator and to use those incentives in the sanctioned marketplace.

The state can shut down anything in theory. In practice it is much harder in a liberal democracy to shut down a network where operators are numerous, interchangable and have low capital requirements.

like drugs, prostitution, and myriad of other small time victim-less crimes?

All of which the state has failed to stop?

Are you aware of how easy it is to find drugs and prostitutes?

Is it? I honestly don’t know. Seriously.

I’ve never been offered drugs by anyone in my life and I couldn’t tell you if someone standing on a street-corner is someone simply wanting to cross the street when the lights change or an undercover cop… or an actual prostitute. What am I supposed to be looking for?

(Yes, I’m on-the-spectrum and don’t get invited to parties, so I’m not representative of everyone else’s experience, but I am being sincere in my anecdote)

Similar situation as yours yet I got offered several times to so it's just a matter of learning how to spot them and not of going to parties, although that would make things faster (more people would help you ID the professionals).

Going downtown around 1am on a Sunday morning should get you the full package, at least in most European cities. City parks, albeit edgy and dangerous, are an almost sure bet.

Dealers usually ask you if all is fine and you need help with anything, prostitutes clues are usually attitude and attire, plus they often work in groups. A good undercover cop will be unrecognisable, for obvious reasons (they have to copy criminal behaviour to be successful).

Providers have a harder time than their customers (longer jail time and higher fines) hence the secrecy which makes it diffocult to spott them.

When in doubt assume it's not a professional, if they are they will make it obvious.

The drug war has claimed millions of lives and drugs have never been as plentiful. There are no words in the dictionary strong enough to describe this kind of failure.

(This is not advice to seek out these things)

In reality most people aren’t going to (or rather, shouldn’t try to) seek out drug dealers and prostitutes on the street. For the former it’s more likely someone will “know a guy who knows a guy”, or maybe use the dark web. For the latter there are websites and classifieds, you just need to know the right terminology, etc (from what I’ve gathered, I have no personal experience...)

So yeah, it’s underground, but not that underground.

Come visit San Francisco. Lots of prostitutes on Capp street, and lots of drugs being offered in the Tenderloin.

I've never paid for sex but prostitution is commonly known as "escort" services which are trivial to find and drugs are mostly sold by word of mouth wherein you socialize with the kind of folks who buy illicit substances and are introduced.

Insight, or lack thereof, may be both a blessing and a curse.

Is the fentanyl death rate or trafficking of underage girls harmless?

The trafficking of underage girls (and the trafficking of adults, for that matter) is a crime in and of itself, not because of what they are being trafficked to do, and it's a shockingly immoral misattribution of blame to say that the problem with trafficking is the crime of prostitution being "committed" by the victims of trafficking.

(Analogously, this is why law enforcement professionals and the like have been moving to the term "child sexual abuse material" instead of "child pornography": the problem with it is not that it's pornography, it's that it's sexual abuse.)

It is not only entirely possible to fight the crime of trafficking people and forcing them to do certain acts without criminalizing those acts, it is in fact significantly more effective. Imagine, for instance, if Abraham Lincoln had tried to eliminate slavery by declaring that picking cotton was illegal. Not only would it not have addressed the problem, it would have made the problem worse - slaves are in no position to refuse to do an act because it's illegal, and a fugitive slave would be liable for the crimes they committed as a slave.

I made that point to say that drugs and prostitution definitely have victims and are not victimless. I could bring up STDs, robberies and killings due to drugs as well, its possible to fight trafficking without criminalizing it, but its not likely to happen nor would a moving target of decriminmalizing actions they do be a realistic goal.

I understood your point full well, and it is both wrong and immoral.

Prostitution does not have victims. Forcing someone into prostitution has a victim - the unwilling prostitute. This is a crime committed by the trafficker against the prostitute, not a crime committed by the prostitute against the client (or even vice versa).

Again, take the example I gave of slavery. The analogous argument to yours is to claim that cotton picking is not victimless. Obviously there were victims in the antebellum south. But to say that cotton picking is the crime is to miss the point entirely and to hurt the victims of the actual crime. Cotton picking is victimless, unless you think cotton feels pain. Forcing someone to pick cotton is a crime.

STDs are not a crime*. They are a potential downside of sexual activity of all kinds. We are comfortable with all sorts of activities having potential injurious downsides which are not criminal. You can get a concussion playing football, but that doesn't mean giving someone a concussion in the course of playing football (as opposed to because you specifically set out to attack them, of course) is a crime, and it certainly doesn't mean that playing football itself ought to be criminalized. If someone claimed that the only way to stop football concussions was to criminalize the game, we would find that position laughable or at least dangerously authoritarian.

Robberies and killings are a crime, and they can be prosecuted in their own sake. Robberies and killings also happen in, say, banks; we don't say that this is a reason to make banking illegal.

In fact, it is because banking is legal that police and regulated armed guards can be at banks and stand by as legitimate, victimless banking transactions happen, and that a bank under attack can call for the police and know that they will not get shut down. Going back to the example of the fugitive slave - a slave who knows he's been forced into illegal actions is unlikely to seek his freedom and is quite likely to seek the effective protection of his master, preventing him from accessing the liberty due to him in a just society. Similarly, people participating in the victimless crimes of the sex or drug industry generally have little recourse to the justice system. Robberies and killings (and mistreatment of prostitutes) happens because criminals know that their victims do not have the same ability to pursue justice as the general public does. Fully legalizing these industries is the only plausible first step to solving this problem.

* I should probably say that they should not be a crime. Some jurisdictions have such laws, and they are widely recognized to be both unjust and ineffective, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_transmission_of_HIV_i...

In an artificial environment sure, you will have prostitution with no trafficking, but it is never that way in practice. Even in places with brothels you still see humans trafficked. It is irresponsible to assume they go away with legalization.

Concentration of money will cause unscrupulous people to gather.

Realistically, legalization doesn’t end these issues.

The fentanyl death rate is almost exclusively an outgrowth of US drug policy. Compare US and Swiss rates of OD’s for some perspective.

Is the drug policy really the issue here? Singapore is so against various consumables you get jailed for vaping (nicotine). You are assuming its policy, but its more likely drug culture.

Drug policy isn’t simply binary do X or Y, it’s a system that can work or fail. Singapore’s policy drastically reduced consumption, thus it was effective just as Sweden’s policy was. US drug policy on the other hand has failed to see similar results and thus it failed.

If you're killing yourself with drugs in private, it's on you. Despicable choice for sure, and it sucks if a bad environment drove you down this road - but that's on you: don't make me pay for your healthcare.

Trafficking underage girls is obviously a crime against another human being, it's not a victimless crime like drugs and should be punished.

Should this not also apply to unhealthy eating? How do you feel about:

If you're killing yourself with unhealthy eating in private, it's on you. Despicable choice for sure, and it sucks if a bad environment drove you down this road - but that's on you: don't make me pay for your healthcare.

I think it's a fairly well-understood causal inference problem to figure out how much effort (money) needs to be spent on other people for GDP growth from that one person to offset the money spent on them by society.

We just need someone to step up and collect the data.

Doesn't this already apply to eating? We don't forcefully commit unhealthy eaters into institutions where they are conditioned to avoid unhealthy foods.

Honestly I’m surprised it’s legal to run a Tor exit-node at all given the sheer volume of morally reprehensible things that go through it - regardless of its utility for journalistic freedom.

Tor was created for the US Navy to hide their intelligence operatives and wouldn't work for that purpose without the rest of that noise. It requires that everyone uses it for anyone to reasonably be considered hidden.

Do you have any source on that?

It's not exactly a secret and any discussion of Tor's history will immediately bring it up, but sure.

> For the onion router to work properly, the Navy needed to step back from running it. A cloaking system is not useful if all the cloaks say “Navy” on them. “If you have a system that’s only a Navy system, anything popping out of it is obviously from the Navy,” Syverson says. “You need to have a network that carries traffic for other people as well.” Tor Project was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2006 to manage operations. [0]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-23/tor-anony...

Ah - wow, dang. I believed the cover-story that Tor was a side-project of a humanitarian org in the US gov that wanted to provide people in firewalled countries a way to access the wider internet - of course, Tor does do that (just as a nice side-effect, and to be fair, the US does benefit and encourage democratic (...and neoliberal) ideals worldwide as its in their own interests to).

...it's kinda like how we were all told that the 1950s-1970s space-launches with monkeys and other animals in them were for bio-scientific experiments when they were really just cover stories for launching spy-sats and military satellites.

> just as a nice side-effect, and to be fair, the US does benefit and encourage democratic (...and neoliberal) ideals worldwide as its in their own interests to

To be clear, they encourage democratic ideals where/if it's in their own interests to. There are plenty of places where they encourage non-democratic ideals as well (or directly fund their own coups to put usually military leaders they like in power).

The space race was a test for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Probably most Tor exit nodes are run by agencies trying to snoop on traffic.

I wouldn't trust Tor to solely protect my identity since there might be ways to attack it. But it can be an useful asset in a "pipeline" designed to protect one's identity.

> Probably most Tor exit nodes are run by agencies trying to snoop on traffic.

Well, that would explain why the nodes don't get shut-down when the local police come knocking...

Still, that must require some very awkward conversations when ethics committees or even departmental budgets are approved - not to mention inviting consternation from the general-public who really don't approve of their tax-money being used to knowingly facilitate dark-net activities, especially horrific child abuse, ugh. (I'm a utilitarian myself, but personally I'd pull the plug on it: surely there are better ways for embedded agents to exchange information? What about digital-steganography, and concealable satellite comms hardware?)

Signal fights decentralization anyway so they are not a reliable actor.

Aren't both XMPP and matrix networks decentralized? XMPP has been around since 1999 according to wikipedia. It is my understanding that providers could keep metadata/logs about accounts involved.

They are both metadata sponges, but Matrix is on a whole different level of bad because it gossips that metadata to every server it connects with.

Not to mention that you don’t actually own your accounts unless you run the server yourself.

you purposely ignored the biggest name? or is matrix not as popular as I thought?

Matrix system sucks because the servers are branded with domain names and the server operators have total ownership of your account.

In a network like Status or Session, you don’t need to know and don’t care who runs the node you happen to be using at a given moment.

what do you mean by ownership of account. You can migrate to other servers if you want? Or does that mean you lose your user ID which is tied to a provider/domain?

Isn't registering an account necessary to avoid impersonating? how does Status ensure a stable user ID?

It’s actually quite brilliant on Status.

Everyone gets a random super long number for an ID. Your friends can assign your name when they add you as a contact (just like phone numbers). And then you can also get a globally recognizable name like ENS domains if you want to pay a little. It’s like a vanity plate on a car.

but what prevents me from using your ID? I'm guessing something like a blockchain.

It’s just a random keypair. You can’t use my ID because you would only see my public key.

https://specs.status.im/spec/2#initial-key-generation

That already exists, it's called the Internet

Problem is, messaging platforms in "the Internet" aren't interoperable. If I use service X, I usually can only talk to people that also uses X. So "the Internet" is mostly composed of silos.

Silos are the reason that platforms get centralized in the first place: people generally enjoy using the same X as their peers, so they can communicate in a single platform.

The issue is the internet doesn't provide the required service for individuals to find each other directly.

We need DNS for everyone, not just the rich...er those bothering to register a name.

Make it GUID based, and let people contact each other by GUID instead of phone number.

Preferably add privacy enhancing encryption too so that only those with your public key could decrypt your GUID DNS entry to then find your IPv6 address.

Or something smarter than that probably.

As far as I know, Matrix wants to do something similar to this. They want user IDs to be public keys. A user ID can be bound to a name, but can change the name over time and keep your connections.

I'd say the big problem at the moment is that people are not used to paying for service. Lots of stuff related to naming is very cheap. But if you require it to be free, then you will get bad incentives like trying to build a silo and fill that silo with ads.

Would it be a thing that ISPs could manage/charge users for?

That way, users ARE paying for it. And honestly, it is a fundamental internet service, just not in the way most people think of.

LDAP could have been that service - a distributed directory. I'm not sure why it didn't become universal.

OpenLDAP's a bugger to configure, and it's much more than you need for a simple directory. But ActiveDirectory is nearly omnipresent.

as soon as you create a namespace like that, you've made the lever that will be utilized for centralized control. In reality, if you had no chance of getting somewhere without the centralized registry, you don't have the connection.

What I am proposing is an extension to DNS to allow individuals to find each other directly rather than having to go through middlemen like FB etc to simply message each other.

DNS already exists as a point of centralised control. Service Providers already have to log IP vs user accounts.

don't see how extending DNS for the masses could make things any worse.

As a sibling comment points out though, who pays to run it?

Don't Tor onion services basically work like that already?