Ownership requires decentralization.
In our case, we can't make a "Steam that's owned by game developers" if the listing information (the screenshots, the titles, the descriptions, the game files, and so on) are hosted on AWS.
Ownership means that, if the original creators were to walk away, the asset would still exist without the need for the original creator.
This is (maybe) a new business model: take something that was previously a service, turn it into an asset instead.
In a "service", the original creator operates the product. In an "asset", the original creator does not typically operate or control the product. So to turn a service into an asset, you "decentralize" the operation of the product; typically via a commodity market which drives the price down and disconnects the creator from the original product.
As a real world example, take cars. Imagine if, when you purchased a car, you paid a subscription for your car service. Then someone came along and said "hey, you should just be able to buy a car and own it". Critics argue "but then who would fix it when it breaks? who will fuel it? There's no way anyone could provide you these services better than Ford. This 'car ownership' must be a scam." And sure enough, many people come along selling you a pink slip for a car, claim there's only so many to go around, and people speculate on the pink slips. The critic then argues "see, all this 'ownership' stuff is just a scam! Everyone's just buying the pink slip to sell to the next sucker." In fact, the pink slip sellers never made the car, and disappeared with the money. The speculators and scammers are indeed speculators and scammers; but they don't change the underlying point: it's not unreasonable to try and sell the car. In order to make the car an asset, you must "decentralize the car"; by ensuring anyone can become a mechanic and anyone can sell fuel to the car.
In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.
> In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.
I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.
Wouldn't this goal be equally served by just hosting it in the sellers s3 bucket (or webserver, or torrent, etc)? Someone still has to pay for and be in control of the filecoin "instance" (probably not the right word), what's the difference between that person doing that vs running their own server.
Of course! Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to grab virtual coffee and talk more. I'm evan [at] strangemood [dot] org.
> I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.
Ah! This is what DAOs are for.
A percentage of every sale goes to a community treasury (a wallet). That wallet is collectively controlled by a token. That token is minted to sellers upon purchase, so the sellers control the treasury.
The treasury acts as a "payer of last resort". It pays for Filecoin deals basically. It also can pay maintainers of open source tooling through decentralized Quadratic funding grants (see https://wtfisqf.com/).
Rebase (the company that makes Strangemood) peer's the store's small-file metadata (titles, descriptions, etc) as an additional backup. We don't have to do this, but it costs us about $0.15 per year to do so, and it makes the network faster and safer.
Realistically, DAOs might be a janky solution. I'd love to see payment of file store be included within the protocol itself.
But there's a few quirks of Solana that made this difficult. Specifically, you can't use more than 1024 bytes in a single instruction, which limits the scope of the program. This might be fixed in the future though.
Funny. My usual assumption is that if someone makes an argument that i don't have a comeback to, its that i am wrong. Typically lack of knowledge makes it easier, not harder to respond.
Hell, its things like this that make crypto sound like a cult. I.e. that the primary failure of doubters is that they haven't been suficiently indoctrinated and if they just let our lord and saviour satoshi into their heart they would see the light.
> The critic operates under the assumption of maybe 4/5 items are bad, and the defender is operating under the assumption that 4/100,000,000 are bad.
This isn't a numbers game. To show "crypto" is a good approach, you have to show some generic ideas that are useful in multiple contexts. Nobody cares how many failed projects there are. Its the successes that matter.
Right now you basically have "currencies" if i am being generous. Everything else is stuff that doesn't make sense and would have zero adoption if not for the massive hype train.
> If you assume the space has been fully searched, then its safe to stand back and critique. However, many folks conducting the search see much farther than you do, and see the entirely unexplored space as quite large.
I don't think anyone believes this.
If your position is that the crypto space is currently useless, but its possible that someone at some point may make a breakthrough which changes things, i think most critics would agree.
The breakthroughs that are needed to make things interesting are even pretty obvious. E.g. Efficient (much beyond the current generation) general purpose zero knowledge proofs of computation, efficient fully homomorphic encryption. If these things happen, i would find the space a much more interesting one. However these are hard problems - progress is being made but we are still nowhere close. Until then its not an interesting space.
Its sort of like if someone was doing things that required fast solutions to np complete problems, and countered criticism by saying we dont know that np!=p, maybe someone will find an algorithm. They are not wrong, but they aren't compelling either.
> a bunch of examples
Seem mostly about doing things you could just as easily do without blockchain. Except maybe helium which does sound like it has a story for why it needs to use these technologies.
> It's also worth noting that we _can't_ use S3, or traditional cloud hosting, which therefore adds a new metric for us to judge storage on: decentralization.
Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you?