I believe that decentralized movements need to be named properly. If Stallman named it “Liberating Software” instead of “Free Software”, his movement could have attracted a lot more devotees from the wider open source movement.
Similarly, I believe (my personal viewe) thay if BLM had simply called themselves BLAM (Black Lives Also Matter) their message would have been crystal clear and would have attracted far less controversy and much more support across the political spectrum, avoiding such rejoinders as “All Lives Matter.” In fact it rolls off the tongue better and stronger: BLAM!
When starting a decentralized movement, the naming is crucial as it affects positioning long after it has become bigger than those who began it.
Like your Qbix? https://qbix.com
I started Intercoin and Intercloud later. Our apps are named Groups and Calendars.
Also Meta these days is open sourcing more ML tools than any other corp, so I'm not sure the claim that "killing ... all open-source tendencies" is supportable.
People naturally tend to give things away in a gift economy when the marginal cost of making a copy is zero. Dan Pink explains it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Consider science: it is a privilege in most scientific disciplines to publish one’s discoveries openly for everyone to build on. Except in the bio and pharma departments — there, the intellectual property system has made generically engineered crops trap farmers and has made drugs extremely expensive in the very country that enforces this system. I wrote about Open Source Drugs a whopping 12 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93
Newton said, “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. He didn’t pay rent to the giants for those shoulders.
Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Albert Wenger, a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist, general partner at Union Square Ventures here in NY and who raised their climate fund, wrote an entire book called World After Capital about this very thing, and is giving it away: https://worldaftercapital.org
Back then, USV and other VCs were really bullish on Utility Tokens as a way for the participants to own the network, and to incentivize open source voluntarily, without government force:
https://avc.com/category/blockchain/
I also mentioned Meta open sourcing ML, and said you should be thankful to Zuck’s tendencies, which he can exercise in an area that isn’t a core business proposition of facebook. The capitalists have stranged Mark Z’s tendencies in every area where Facebook could extract rents and profits from its ecosystem. And in this, it could have easily gone another way had an IP-loving Steve Jobs type been at the helm. Had FB chosen to branch out into it, like Apple did into, say, banking or cars, then you would see FAR LESS open source competition in AI. Maybe Bloom model?
> ... you should be thanking [Zuckerberg’s] open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI [would] belong to only a select few ...
You’re right that such sympathies weren’t exactly “killed” (instead “discouraged”) by advisors but pressing this mistake in phrasing is certainly a bit of a straw man argument.
There are obviously some specifics there, like if the camera on my phone has a firmware blob, does that need to be able to have the firmware updated? A lot of little caveats like that make such a law difficult, but I think with hardware access the open source community can flourish on devices like smart TVs, etc.
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THe thing that gets me is that people seem pretty much content with things. E.g. they'll complain about Amazon and then in the next breath admit that they still shop there. Etc.
Some of it is complacency. (A friend of mine, an academic, was talking about "the pain" of switching from Twitter to Mastodon. I had to stop him. You just click some buttons? You don't even have to get out of your chair.)
A lot of it seems to be apathy.
And then there's contentment with ignorance.
People say that this is just "human nature" but I feel that's a cop out.
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FWIW I think of Capitalism as a kind of economic API. It's very useful, but you have to run it within certain resource limits and policies. (E.g. don't "eat the rich", just tax them at the rate that we did fifty years ago, eh?)
Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth, we won history. We just haven't really noticed yet.
We have to stop fighting each other and take care of each other.
That's why Twitter software engineers were making fun of people wanting to release the Twitter algorithm... They were well aware of what a complex mess it was and how unrealistic that was. People have the right intuition though; it doesn't need to be so complex. It is complex by design.
The only thing shitcoin made "better" was how to pay the ransomware industry.
Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy — every other decentralized system does not.
Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin so your own diatribe is incoherent.
Most people on HN are techbros
Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do it!
For instance, I am. I think we can do better than BlockChain. That’s why I designed InterCloud, and putting together a team to build it.
I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore. IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of them fit anything you’re bitching about.
In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free, permissionless alternatives. You’d do better by doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation happen. You seem to have no solution.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
> Where did anyone mention climate-destroying proof-of-work? Last I checked, only Bitcoin uses that amount of energy — every other decentralized system does not.
All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing. Bitcoin chews through massive amounts of power. Ethereum chews through GPUs and lowers expected lifetimes. CHIA chews through SSDs in weeks of massive amounts of writes.
> Shitcoin is a term bitcoiners use for every other coin so your own diatribe is incoherent.
I include all of them. But how quaint that you invalidate me as some round-about defense of your own shitcoin.
> Most people on HN are techbros
Most != all. Some of us are actual socialists. You know, "know thy enemy" and all that.
> Blockchains are not the most efficient distributed systems architecture. But if you think you can do better, please do it!
Its already been made. Its called Hawala ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala ). And its an easy way to send money across areas and even currency changes. And its based on reputation, not some silly climate-destroying math, so you shitcoiners cant make money pre-mining the chain before opening it up to the public.
> For instance, I am. I think we can do better than BlockChain. That’s why I designed InterCloud, and putting together a team to build it.
I repeat: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
> I care about open and free technologies. Dat/Hypercore. IPFS. Maidsafe/Safenet. Matrix. Nostr. Literally none of them fit anything you’re bitching about....In every case, people like you prefer bitching while the frog is being boiled, and actively spreading FUD about any open, free, permissionless alternatives. You’d do better by doing nothing, getting out of the way and let innovation happen. You seem to have no solution.
And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible. And the other scam here is that all these with shitcoins attached have been heavily pre-mined to "pay the upfront investment cost". But again, with you being a shitcoin founder, you're well aware how this grift works.
I used to run the blockchain meetup here locally. Some of my contributions are still used by a lot of folks. But after a hard deep dive into dozens of blockchain systems, the only real benefit is to the ransomware industry. Well, that, and a whole bunch more decomissioned power plants being spun back up for shitcoin of various types. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
But again, I know what I'm arguing against. And frankly, you're wrong and deluded that anti-government hyper-capitalism money is the way to accomplish this. It aint.
I know that Upton Sinclair quote. Who pays my salary?
I could say the same about you. I realize who pays the salary of many of the startups that go through YC. The venture CAPITALISTS do. The Web2 ecosystem that banks at the same bank (Silicon Valley) and had a bank run on that bank kicked off by Peter “build a monopoly” Thiel. You support that ecosystem, and therefore are against any decentralized alternatives. Do you support Palantir and precrime as well?
Perhaps the above doesn’t describe you, only a bunch of tech bros like you in the very shareholder-based ecosystem that has led to the Big Tech oligopoly and is the subject of “boiling the frog” we are talking about. But then again, you are doing the same to me, assuming things based on whatever “Web3” means to you.
First you trot out incoherent strawmen about proof of work and shitcoins. Then, when I point out the issues with what you say, you do an adhominem.
You continue to be deluded. I just got through criticizinf hyper-capitalism like Thiel’s that would make many capitalists blush. Then I proceeded to advocate alternatives that fit the dictionary definition of “libertarian socialism”. You turn around and call that hyper-capitalism.
Well, how about this… in your system, you have monopolies and hardly any competition. It’s digital Feudalism. You are like the slaves supporting the system because the slavemasters were kinda good to you. In the system I advocate, everyone is competing to provide better infrastructure (hosting, security, storage etc) and you are not locked in. There is redundancy, no single point of failure. And no one can usurp power easily.
>All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing.
Sigh. You sound like you’re in 2013. Are you talking about Bitcoin? Because I had the same criticisms of it since before you were in crypto. I made them publicly in ArsTechnica and was covered in the BBC, Newsweek, etc back in 2018. We actually experimented with allowing people to do Monero mining as a way to pay for our apps, and the whole thing went bad pretty quickly and we removed it for precisely this reason. I called out the incentives publicly 5 years ago:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there...
You seem to ignore that every other coin besides Bitcoin and Monero doesnt fit your description, let alone the other distributed systems…
> And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible.
Really? “The whole network” of Dat/Hypercore and Bittorrent and IPFS and safenet are run “by a quorum”? You should read up a bit more on what distributed hash tables are before spouting such nonsense.
Your response is to throw shade and FUD it without engaging in anything approaching substantive, intellectually honest discussion. I back up everything I say with myriad examples that illustrate general patterns. I have arrived at this position by battle-testing my ideas and being open to changing my mind. Are you?
Saying “you’re wrong and deluded” and declaring “it aint” unilaterally isn’t actual substantive argument. It’s just asserting bias.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update... 2. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
If you don’t have access to the source code, you can’t fork it. And ALL the Web 2.0 platforms of today (on which we have our public forums) won’t give you their back-end software. Not even HN. Nor Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram or even Signal. They need to retain control because of the capitalism system in which they were conceived (Facebook, LinkedIn) or sold (WhatsApp, Instagram), and the shareholder class which the corporations must serve and extract rents from their ecosystem forever. It starts with venture capitalists and it ends with wall street ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
If you look at my posts for the last decade, I have been openly saying this. Those of you who saw the movie iRobot back in 2004 may remember the tagline: “One Man Saw it Coming”. I feel like Will Smith’s character. Except that I have been doing something about it.
1. From Digital Feudalism to a Free Market
We are living in Digital Feudalism, and like serfs, we have very little say. And all of this is because we don’t have a viable open source alternative. The first step is to have this software be available to everyone.
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
There were attempts with diaspora* and Mastodon has so far been the most successful. We’ve quietly been building something far, far beyond Mastodon and attracted 10 million people in over 100+ countries. But you probably haven‘t heard of it. It’s a web-based, open source, general-purpose Community Operating System, on which anyone is free to develop just as they are on Linux or Wordpress.
While an app like Telegram or Signal could be easily banned from app stores by governments, something like this is much harder to censor. If millions of websites use https and some may be hosting Qbix widgets, then how will governments and corporations ban it? They may have to insist on having a backdoor to the https certificates, which means enough people would have to fork Chromium / Blink (open source on the front end). But until then, it’s a way for We the People to continue building an innovating in the face of corporate and government crackdowns.
Back in 2019 I wrote this: https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
Ans just two days ago LA Weekly wrote about the project and the difference it can make: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
2. From a Free Market to Autonomous Networks
In a free market you have a choice of landlord (eg who will host your Wordpress or Qbix instance). But you still have a landlord.
This is the part that some on HN are allergic to. I’m going to extol the virtues of automomous networks, because they’re the most benign “Landlords”, who can be trusted to uphold the rules and never change them (if enough of the community doesn’t like the changes, they can fork and continue the old rules).
Blockchains and smart contracts are JUST THE MOST POPULAR VERSION of this at the moment. There are many other architectures, including Hashgraph, IOTA DAG, and more generally, networks based around Distributed Hash Tables / Kademlia, such as BitTorrent, IPFS, and the ultimate in safety, safenet (I am not affiliated with them, but am a big admirer, see https://safenetforum.org if you want to participate, they have been active since 2004 and are still going strong.. that’s dedication!!)
I don’t just build things, but I seek out and connect with people who design, administer and build all these open source platforms and distributed systems. Back in 2014 I met Tim Berners-Lee. I corresponded with Leslie Lamport over the years. In 2018 I met up with the inventor of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, who went to my school (NYU). I also hung out with Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame) although I didn’t keep in touch w him. I also try to invite them onto our community forum and publicly interview them on our YouTube channel. Here is my discussion with Ian Clarke, inventor of arguably the first decentralized autonomous file sharing network, FreeNet.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
If you want to understand why Web3 is important, or at least the type of distributed software it represents, here is my rebuttal to Moxie Marlinspike, as he had the most substantive critique of it:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
3. Economics
Closed software and intellectual property is a product of a private ownership without limit embedded within a capitalist system. “I built it, I own it”. You end up with Zuck controlling Facebook and no one can vote him out. Or Elon controlling Twitter. Oh, I mean “Meta” and “X”. And if they want to, they’ll gradually boil the frogs until they all spend their lives in the virtual reality metaverse, or inside X.com’s “everything app”.
On the other hand, open source software is either a pure gift economy, or since 2014 can be a socialist economy where people collectively own the means of production and eliminate the shareholder class (just as they do in various cooperatives, credit unions, etc). Software produced in this way doesn’t end up with central control (Linux, MySQL, PHP, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE
To me, utility tokens represent a “libertarian socialist” alternative to the “capitalist” system in which our current infrastructure has been developed. Stallman’s Free Software Movement is more like a gift economy, or perhaps “distributism” (a 19th-century Christian economic system). Those are actually really good, but to pay for resource use in the ecosystem we need an accounting system, and that’s utility tokens.
Utility tokens represent a way to monetize it in a way that happens to fit the dictionary definition of libertarian socialism: “collective ownership of the means of production.” Note that it doesn’t require a central government, but collective ownership.
When you sell utility tokens to finance your startup, the buyers only have a claim to the goods and services of your eventual network. They don’t start to demand that your company extract rents forever (eg Uber taking 50% of all the money that goes from riders to drivers). Instead it becomes a giant socialist cooperative (like eg a driver’s cooperative, or FileCoin for IPFS). Vitalik Buterin and Juan Benet simply don’t exercise the kind of total control over their platforms as Zuck and Elon do.
When you sell shares to finance your startup, you introduce an ever-growing shareholder class which will exercise more and more control over the ecosystem you build, and at every steps will insist that you retain control and extract rents so they can profit.
It can sometimes be as overt as Peter Thiel saying “competition is for losers, build a monopoly” and together with Sean Parker killing all Mark Zuckerberg’s open source tendencies (such as when he eventually gave away Synapse as open source instead of giving it to Microsoft for $1 million https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artific...) and dreams of decentralized file sharing software: (https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/amp/) but he always retained a soft spot for open source when he personally funded diaspora* (a decentralized facebook competitor) and now, you should be thanking his open source sympathies as he is literally having his company give away open source LLaMa and other AI which his company spends a ton of money training. Without someone stepping up and doing this, the AI woukd belong to only a select few, just as Web2 and all our public forums do today.
When a few at the top of a corporate ladder hold all the power, then they can boil any frog. And if they don’t want to, they’ll be replaced by those who will. That’s how the system works.
Opt out. Embrace open source and distributed systems. Take a few hours a week. It’s out there, it’s free to try. Contribute, get certified, serve your local communities, and make money doing it!