This is “uncensorable” in the same way that “sovereign citizens” are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something which is actually illegal, they’ll learn how useful blockchains are for prosecutors.
The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths:
1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.
2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.
The readme does explain that you could censor it by blocking access the chain entirely, it's not pretending otherwise.
But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since you can do all that offline.
I guess this is addressed to whoever lives in the crypto bubble. I don't understand what a handshake is, why it passes dns records and if it can be used to publish twitter like messages who is going to read them and how.
Also from the little i know about this current fad:
If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?
Handshake is a blockchain which wants to replace existing DNS registration system. So when you want to look up example.com, instead of consulting IANA's database for "who owns .com", you consult the Handshake's blockchain.
The zooko system uses a "hack": since, this is blockchain, there is entire past history on the chain. So you can keep repeatedly updating a random field (like a TXT entry for some domain) and use equivalent of "git log" to read the entire timeline.
This will need a special client, which will parse blockchain for such updates, but everything on blockchain needs a special client, so not a big deal.
Re "5 million users" -- this is a very good point, and yes, if this takes off this will be significant problem for Handshake blockchain. I suspect this is the core of disagreement between Zooko's author and designers of the Handshake blockchain ([0]).
From the point of Handshake authors, Zooko system uses blockchain resources, but does not help with main mission (make Handshake team super rich by taking over existing DNS system).
From the point of "publiush", there is this Handshake blockchain which has authentication solved, and it can be used for all sorts of fun stuff. The fact that this was not original intent just makes it more fun and exciting.
Handshake is a blockchain based alternative for ICANN. DNS resolvers still work the same, and HNS could play nice with ICANN, but largely seem to want to replace it rather than be peers with it.
The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and verification.
Since it isn't really clear, Handshake protocol is an attempt to create an alternative DNS without authoritative root name servers, where instead users auction names priced in Handshake coins, the initial bulk of which were gifted to various FOSS developers and organizations to try and keep rich people from hoarding everything. Instead of querying root servers for TLDs, you query a blockchain to get the records.
This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records, and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed, the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you can now never delete or edit a Tweet.
I'm excited to try this out, I was toying with the idea of creating something similar.
I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko goes farther in the right direction.
Every technology has pros and cons. The pro here is that some blog about corruption can't be knocked offline by some government authority lest they block the entire network, which would be a problem if any businesses use such a decentralized network for their own means. The con is that everything is immutable and unchangeable, and that has consequences - for reference, despite that the story about CP being on Bitcoin is false[0], it's definitely possible if anyone ever wanted to spend a few hundred thousands in gas fees to store an arbitrary jpeg on ethereum.
Maybe all these projects that have typical Discord chats talking about blockchains, DAOs, NFTs, etc are full of kids given that some users can get easily upset and hate your pet project and they don't give any reasons other than character attacks. I always see this when someone attaches their own identity to a technology or project that once someone criticises the project (but not you directly) they feel 'personally attacked'.
Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this project. I don't see any character attacks on the user from the project devs.
In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to have 'won'.
> These children remind of me of Lord of the Flies.
I think most people in blockchain Discord "servers" are actually children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the same palpable feeling that I'm talking to teenagers. It's odd.
A lot of dopey young people who have medium-sized inheritances/trust funds that they're gambling with in the hope that they'll never have to work, mixed with overpaid tech workers fresh out of college hoping to buy Bay Area homes.
People keep using immutable like it’s a good thing. Any of y’all who still want to fully stand by the things you said, did, and thought 20 years ago might need to reflect a bit.
I understand the very basics of blockchain technology, but I guess I'm missing some context or background that would allow me to make the mental connection between "blockchain" and "unblockable microblog". Does anyone have a good pointer to something that would explain this more in-depth/like I'm 5?
Eventually a company providing a UI layer will be the central access point for all the content coming from the block chain. The central point will then be able to censor posts. This is no different from OpenSea, or Coinbase.
My guess is that because blockchain is decentralized, in theory nobody could censor or block it, because nobody “controls” the blockchain.
Compared with any modern social media site which is mutable and controlled by an organization who gets to police content
Edit: a good example of this is that folks have put malicious content into the various blockchains (ascii images of child harm material, or strings of data that trigger antivirus). You can’t stop it being added, and once it’s there you cannot remove it.
I think it's embedding posts directly into the chain, so if you can sync the chain then you can access everyone's posts. Since these posts are cryptographically embedded in the chain you can't block any of them without blocking access to the entire chain, or attacking the chain and rewriting history.
[+] [-] acdha|4 years ago|reply
The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths:
1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.
2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for describing that error so clearly and succinctly. It's one of those fundamental misconceptions that's depressingly common.
Don't assume you've defeated the them because they haven't cared enough to come after you.
[+] [-] roywiggins|4 years ago|reply
But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since you can do all that offline.
[+] [-] verdverm|4 years ago|reply
I feel for this dev, I had a similarly unpleasant experience with the Aragon team and decided the community was not for me.
[+] [-] publiush|4 years ago|reply
However, the admins on their discord, were less than encouraging.
EDIT: As per the same person's advice, I'm going to start a new discord community without the toxicity.
[+] [-] vannevar|4 years ago|reply
https://freenetproject.org/
[+] [-] akvadrako|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/publiusfederalist/why-i-quit-handshake
[+] [-] publiush|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nottorp|4 years ago|reply
Also from the little i know about this current fad:
If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?
[+] [-] theamk|4 years ago|reply
The zooko system uses a "hack": since, this is blockchain, there is entire past history on the chain. So you can keep repeatedly updating a random field (like a TXT entry for some domain) and use equivalent of "git log" to read the entire timeline.
This will need a special client, which will parse blockchain for such updates, but everything on blockchain needs a special client, so not a big deal.
Re "5 million users" -- this is a very good point, and yes, if this takes off this will be significant problem for Handshake blockchain. I suspect this is the core of disagreement between Zooko's author and designers of the Handshake blockchain ([0]).
From the point of Handshake authors, Zooko system uses blockchain resources, but does not help with main mission (make Handshake team super rich by taking over existing DNS system).
From the point of "publiush", there is this Handshake blockchain which has authentication solved, and it can be used for all sorts of fun stuff. The fact that this was not original intent just makes it more fun and exciting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29912944
[+] [-] verdverm|4 years ago|reply
The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and verification.
[+] [-] an-allen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebean11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
Must be the solution to some important problem, then! Let's try to apply it everywhere and strongly insist that it's the future.
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
It's super weird to name a project after someone who's not dead, and in this case not even that old (Wikipedia says he's 47).
[+] [-] SomeCallMeTim|4 years ago|reply
Clicked on this to see if it was something he'd done.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
This guy figured out you can stuff Tweets into DNS TXT records, and chose to do it on Handshake DNS instead of regular DNS, since this one is on a blockchain, which I guess means even when a name record is sold to someone else and the current record is changed, the old record is still there in the blockchain history, so you can now never delete or edit a Tweet.
[+] [-] KETpXDDzR|4 years ago|reply
"Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them."
The claim that Handshake isn't easy to abuse lacks proof.
[+] [-] YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513547 - Dec 2021 (186 comments)
[+] [-] codespin|4 years ago|reply
I see a strong need for a microblogging framework where users have control of their data. Mastadon is great, but I think Zooko goes farther in the right direction.
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
What if someone posts naked photos of their girlfriend on this?
Furthermore it says you can block access to the chain completely do it doesn’t even do what it claims.
[+] [-] judge2020|4 years ago|reply
0: https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockcha...
[+] [-] dannyw|4 years ago|reply
There's am argument to be made that the drawbacks of revenge porn are outweighed by the benefits of free access to information.
[+] [-] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately they gave reasons and that is somehow toxic? At the end of the day, if you cannot prove them wrong with a counter argument, then it is difficult to side with the merits of this project. I don't see any character attacks on the user from the project devs.
In fact it is the other way round, and by quitting they seem to have 'won'.
[+] [-] dqpb|4 years ago|reply
I think most people in blockchain Discord "servers" are actually children. There are no other forums that I go to, where I get the same palpable feeling that I'm talking to teenagers. It's odd.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnord77|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roughly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flubflub|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] webmaven|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] navbaker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wepple|4 years ago|reply
Compared with any modern social media site which is mutable and controlled by an organization who gets to police content
Edit: a good example of this is that folks have put malicious content into the various blockchains (ascii images of child harm material, or strings of data that trigger antivirus). You can’t stop it being added, and once it’s there you cannot remove it.
[+] [-] roywiggins|4 years ago|reply