The Internet Computer[0] hosts whatever kind of service you can cram in a smart contract form-factor. In exchange for having to deal with things like oracles to retrieve information from the outside world, it costs absolute peanuts[1]. I tend to use it whenever I want to PoC a web app because it's usually lower-friction than a VM. Unfortunately there aren't that many things to show as an example that aren't just NFT silliness, but one big one is OpenChat[2], which also shows off the basically zero-friction single-sign-on[3] that can't be tracked across services.

Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try.

[0]: https://internetcomputer.org

[1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep...

[2]: https://oc.app

[3]: https://identity.ic0.app

(unfortunately obligatory: I am not a bot. please do not downvote singularly because of linking to a blockchain service, in response to a question about them.)

Those "peanuts" look more expensive that traditional hosting to me. It does help that they blatantly try to lie about their service being "more energy efficient than traditional IT".

> The idea of... not having people login using Facebook/Google sounds great to a lot of us, but that needs to be predicated on system which would actually get normal people to switch by being cheaper, safer, etc. Appeals to ideological purity don't tend to get traction

But it's quite the opposite of an appeal to ideological purity. If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services. Yes, they're doing so because they want to play in a giant on-chain casino. But the same ECDSA key that secures your Ethereum wallet can also serve as your decentralized cryptographic identity.

It's hard to overstate how much of a miracle this is compared to what anyone expected 15 years ago. Hardcore cryptography engineers would joke about how even their small, highly committed community couldn't build a decentralized a web of trust with decent opsec. Now even dentists are self-custodying their crypto keys with decentralized identity powered by ENS.

Quite the opposite the only reason to dismiss this achievement is an appeal to ideological purity. The cryptography infrastructure may have been built for the "wrong reason", to gamble in the world's largest casino, but a once undreamt of decentralized infrastructure now exists.

Why would I care about building widespread “truly” decentralised cryptography?

This also sounds like idealism. And I speak as someone that works in cryptography-related spaces including PKI.

How many of those millions of people get compromised in some way, lose their ‘money’ and are then chided for poor opsec? How many don’t even bother with self-custody and just use centralised services like exchanges?

Honestly it all seems ideological.

You don't see any value to people owning their own crypto keys and identity instead of relying on a centralized party like Facebook?

I'm not even talking about digital assets. I'm purely talking about the ability of someone to sign their own emails without being dependent on a monopoly like Gmail to do it for them.

I don’t see that for most people this any sort of enabling technology, no. In fact I think for average humans that delegation is a very worthwhile service.

> I'm purely talking about the ability of someone to sign their own emails without being dependent on a monopoly like Gmail to do it for them.

What is blockchain adding for this usecase that's beyond what PGP [1] offers?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

No.

The centralized platforms and social networks you reference have tens of millions to billions of users.

I would not be surprised at all if between all of them they do millions of password resets daily.

No matter how much the crypto community tries to force it people forget stuff and mess things up.

The concept of average users managing their own keys is DOA.

My personal project is a working case study proving the practicality of the idea. It’s not ideological and enables things you would dare do with prior existing server/client models.

> If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services.

You mean the exchanges the vast majority of cryptocurrency users rely on have control, right?

I mention that because a greater number of people already have cryptographic keys to use to assert their identity (every iOS user, most Android, and Windows Hello users) in the form of WebAuthn passkeys. Unlike Ethereum, that system does not cost money to use, is free for anyone to implement, and does not depend on a slow centralized data store being available.

One important note: ENS doesn’t in any way solve the question of identity, any more than DNS does. In both cases, they link a name to a machine id without solving the much harder problems of verifying identity or disambiguating people with the same name.

Most importantly, not conflating money with identity makes attacks harder (if I get your keys, I can compromise your brokerage account but I still have to convince them to transfer your assets) and lowers the costs of errors because I’m not pushed into having to decide whether I’m more concerned about losing access to my money if I don’t make a backup and having my money stolen because I did. That’s going to matter to their next of kin if our hypothetical dentist is run over by some SUV driver on their next bike ride.

That last part gets to back to the question of goals. Self-hosting cryptographic keys isn’t a goal anyone has for non-ideological reasons. People care about things like communicating privately and not being impersonated, and will gravitate to the systems which make that safe and easy. Cryptocurrency projects haven’t delivered on either of those so far and since they inevitably depend on real-world systems to handle identity or resolve disputes, it’s hard to offer a compelling reason to pay the extra cost to use them.

Going back to my hypothetical person at a non-crypto business, he goes to his boss and says “we should have our customers login using self-managed private keys”. When she says “how does that make us more money?”, what’s the answer?

My project datalisp.is about making something useful.

Can you explain more about what it does? The website is a bit vague but it looks like you're encoding S-expressions on a blockchain, so my first question would be what this gives us that traditional PKI would not.

> Can you offer pointers to the things you think are delivering real benefits to anyone whose primary goal isn't finding buyers for random hashes?

I prepared this post summarizing the real world usage of Bitcoin just for people like you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

Another news from the last couple of days: https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/nyic/project-cedar [submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33479015]

Let’s go with those. Truly beneficial for the parties referenced.

At the risk of sounding somewhat cold and calculating:

Is that worth the carbon emissions of the entire country of Argentina? How many people are dying from the resulting climate impact?

How many lives have been ruined from the gambling related to bitcoin? How many times have bitcoin forums had to post suicide hotline numbers?

How many criminal enterprises, oppressive governments (like North Korea), etc have been enabled by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from ransomware and countless, endless scams?

While I do acknowledge the use cases you’ve provided and truly do sympathize with the (relatively few - tiny) people who benefit I cannot see how it could possibly be net positive.

Okay, let's go with those — and we'll even assume that they're fully accurate and representative. Money laundering wasn't exactly impossible before so the two questions here are whether it was cost-effective for the users (someone in Nigeria has less capacity to soak up one of those speculative swings, after all) and safe to use.

That last part is significant because while the Bitcoin marketing team likes to talk about it being anonymous or “censorship resistant”, it's extremely risky for anyone to use when their threat model includes the government they live under. Yes, I'm sure someone has been able to transfer money to a Russian or Chinese dissident but once that becomes at all significant, consider the incredible risk that poses to the recipient. They can't make a transaction without making highly-distinctive network traffic, they can't use the funds locally without finding someone willing to take them which is risky to both parties since you're betting that the other party isn't compromised, and unlike regular currency transactions you're leaving an immutable public audit trail. If any party involved ever has records which the police obtain, they now have hard evidence to go after everyone they've ever transacted with rather than just the ones they observed after learning of that blackmarket activity. Better hope that you and everyone you ever do business with has perfect opsec…

This isn't some idle speculation, either — there have been a number of cases where Bitcoin provided key evidence linking people's activity and allowing the police to wrap up an entire group rather than the one guy they caught. Here's an example of where that was used for good:

https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...

Now, I personally would not like to see political dissidents in China or Russia meet the same fate so I would not want to tell them Bitcoin is suitable for this task.

What do you think about NY Fed's project I linked, which demonstrated that "blockchain-enabled cross-border payments can be faster, simultaneous, and safer" (their words, not mine).

Speaking of dissidents subverting their governments, I personally know people who are using cryptocurrencies to assist their families stuck under the said governments. There might be some risks, but when they don't have any other way to exchange value, crypto is a lifeline.

It’s a prototype but also not how most cryptocurrency people use blockchain. It’s a shared ledger between a couple of banks, organized by a central bank. It’s no surprise that this works because it doesn’t drag in all of the notorious drawbacks trying to do the pseudo-anonymous permission-less stuff, or trying to be a separate currency.

What is the specific drawback of pseudo-anonymous permission-less stuff?

> trying to be a separate currency.

None of the serious crypto projects I am aware of (which are Bitcoin, Ethererum and its L2's basically) claim to be a currency. Bitcoin is an asset. ETH is a currency only for the ETH ecosystem and does not claim to be something along the lines of a popular definition of currency.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-the-crypto-story/ is the best general overview of the space I've ever read. Covers most of what makes sense and what sucks.