Daniel Fernandes
@dfern.eth
Signal has moved the ball on e2e for the masses, but it's centralized arch makes it a honeypot for metadata collection & timing correlation attacks. p2p networks w/ plausible deniability bloom filters like @waku & mixnets like @nymproject make attacks like this harder w/ the tradeoff of higher bandwidth & latency.
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Henry
@hlau
Feels like UX is usually the biggest trade off right? The fact that our industry runs on top of TG continues to baffle me but I’ve accepted the network effect
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Daniel Fernandes
@dfern.eth
Yep, but I think UX needs to be more expansive than just in-app animation candy. UX could be a big tent that includes user metadata privacy, data sovereignty, the uptime that only a decentralized network can provide, etc. The problem is that the tradeoffs & shortcuts taken are not salient to users, and once you make it clear, they often do understand & care about it. (my bet is that this will continue & it's why crypto will win)
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Henry
@hlau
Users don’t care about decentralization any more than they do about privacy the moment they have to inconvenience themselves. I tried to make privacy easier to preserve by fighting back against dark patterns when I helped write the CCPA. Unfortunately decentralization tends to be clunkier and more expensive than centralization and in any case I think trustlessness is a much more achievable property for way less cost and inconvenience
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Daniel Fernandes
@dfern.eth
hmm interesting. at first I thought (centralization, trustlessness) cannot go together, but you can certainly build a centralized, but trustless L2 on top of a decentralized L1 base layer. It's similar to the argument for light clients: random verification can act as it's own check & balance. Perhaps you can do this for a messaging server too? I have one idea at least...
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Henry
@hlau
A lot of ETH has already embraced this idea. Block building is highly concentrated but we don’t have to trust them. It’s important though that there are ppl there to keep them honest and to keep their power in check.
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