It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world."
Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.
Most of what people actually don't want to do is reliability engineering. You can host it off your phone, but then it goes down if you're out of range or the battery dies. You can host it in your basement, but now you need to buy hardware and it goes down if you lose power or internet. And you have to keep up to date with patches etc. So just pay someone <$100/year to do it for you.
But the design should make that thing the most commodified thing in the world. You should be able to switch to self-hosting and back or to another provider by just changing the host's address in your configuration. Everything should still point to you on the new host. Your own device should keep a copy of everything needed to switch even if the existing provider is unexpectedly incinerated by a meteor. They should not have the ability to prevent it and should be untrusted to the fullest extent possible.
You can get that with ordinary cryptography. The thing you can't get from ordinary cryptography is disintermediated payment processing. Which you do actually want, but that's something else.
Email providers can send email to each other, making them all as equally useful. Different blockchains wouldn't be compatible with each other by default, by definition, so it's more of a winner-takes-all situation.
Its possible in the future we will develop a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother. I assume there would have to be either an intermediate chain specific to this purpose or both chains would need to follow a similar implementation. So far we started with Proof Of Work, we now have Proof of Stake and Proof of History. There may be more mechanisms in the future.
Is a cryptocurrency exchange more like a bank or a currency?
Atomic swaps already exist.
I still have no idea what that has to do with the nonsensical metaphor "a blockchain is a bank"
I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.
I don’t think anyone is proposing to use blockchain for email? (I’m prepared to be wrong here but it’s certainly not a common position to hold). They don’t eschew all the old protocols for every task.
I trying to figure out the problem you want to solve here and how blockchain is better - but it falls apart. For one, most people don’t buy things with crypto and there are also many different coins on top of that. So even if tie an email to a particular crypto address, it’s not likely the average person can prove they have economic activity.
Then the motives are wrong on both sides anyway - I don’t want services I use to have a copy of my spending history, and they want a way to deanonymize me to discourage abuse, or charge me for their services. Neither of which sounds like it is part of what you are suggesting.
Fun fact: bitcoin's pow algorithm was invented to prevent spam.
The major exception was high bandwidth communication, where it remains cost prohibitive to do without scale - video has come a long way, to be sure, but large image, audio, video processing have remained difficult to do at scale and right, at least without the correct hardware and supporting algorithms.
There are solutions, most of the ones I can think of involve paying money versus using some "free" service - this is why you don't see a lot of private fileshares with random videostreams between friends, not so much technical reasons.
While protocols may exist that "work fine", it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.
Email being a notable still-popular exception, when it comes to internet communications.
> proprietary network
> it seems clear that for "chat, video conferencing, file sharing" (as well as social media), proprietary networks [protocols] are more much much more popular than standardized protocols.
HTTP is used for communication and social media. So is HTTPS. Want to use an SSD for your operating system to load programs off-of for your games and communication? That requires SATA or NVMe. Want to play games that require non-trivial graphics? That requires PCIe.
Want to use Discord or Zoom or Slack Huddle or your own in-browser (or "desktop" [really a browser] app variant of those)? That's WebRTC which uses TLS and SCTP.
Where is the proprietary here? Where are you pulling this information from?
I can't say for sure what vishnugupta meant, but what I thought when I read their comment are:
* Most people's chat goes over things like Slack or MS Teams -- proprietary protocols. Not the open protocols that do exist like IRC.
* Most people's "instant messaging" goes over things like Signal, Whatsapp, or Facebook Messenger, all proprietary protocols. Even if open protocols like XMPP exist, they are less popular.
* Most people's video conferencing goes over things like Zoom, MS Teams, Apple Facetime -- proprietary protocols.
* I am not familiar with the "file sharing" protocols popular, but I assume the same.
HOWEVER, most people's email goes over open protocols. It's an outlier when it comes to these higher-level interpersonal communications.
(Do you disagree? I'm not sure if you do, or if you're just talking about something else!)
But yes, of course, there are other open protocols that are still very much in use. Including things like TCP/IP and UDP (which almost all of the protocols we are talking about function on top of) and HTTP (which some may as well). Most of these popular infrastructural protocols are also older, where vishnugupta suggested "since then", new protocols that become popular tend to be proprietary. An example of a newer network protocol that was open and standardized and also had a lot of uptake would be good to hear!
You are proposing an explanation for why most of these things run on proprietary protocols, an explanation I agree is a component of what's going on, I didn't say anythign to the contrary -- I'm still stuck on trying to demonstrate that proprietary protocols for these things are more popular than open standard ones -- which is being disputed -- before we can even get to talking about what explains this state of affairs!
FTP is the closest file sharing protocol I could think of when I wrote my comment above.
Moxie touched on this topic in his article about web3, where he compared and contrasted protocols Vs platform. He explains why he believes platforms, once they gain a big enough distribution, are inherently at an advantage because they can change and adopt fast.
HTTPS, HTTP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, ACME, DNS, NVMe, PCIe, SATA, WS.
WebRTC (used for communication) uses SCTP and TLS. SMTP (email) came out in 1981. SCTP in 2000. There are _many_ _many_ _many_ more examples, but that beats your statement by a solid 19 years.
I could keep going but I think you get the picture.
You need centralization for that. And in fact, you can already do it.
Just register a domain name and use it for your email address. Most registrars offer a mail redirection service. And if you don't like your registrar, there is an official procedure to transfer your domain name, and therefore you email address. There are also official procedures regarding getting back a stolen domain name, and ways to avoid losing it by accident (grace periods, etc...), made possible because it is centralized.
> Who owns the ENS rootnode? What powers does that grant them?
> The root node is presently owned by a multisig contract, with keys held by trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community...
I didn't look it up too much but it looks like a key difference is that once you register a domain, it is yours for as long as you have paid for and no one can change that (or maybe it isn't, in this case, it is exactly like DNS). It is a good and a bad thing. It is good against censorship, but it also means that if someone registers a domain under your company name (or personal name) and point it to child porn, there is nothing you or anyone else can do.
Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers would rather kill them on purpose and force more people to use them. Which we could fix it if we wanted to.
Everything could work this way, and should. You don't run your own social network instance, but you can, and thousands of independent entities do, and you can take your pick of them and move between them.
And we can learn lessons from the past. Major one from email: Addresses should be portable, or at least have zero-cost permanent forwarding built into the protocol.