Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Right. Part two of #143 - how blockchain fixes all this.

Here, we have to bow to the genius of Satoshi. Something very clever
was done.

Three basic technologies:

* distributed hash tables (DHTs)
* hashcash
* public key cryptography 

I'll explain each in order, starting with the DHT.

The DHT is the unsung hero of bittorrent etc. It's a simple enough
idea - after somebody else has it! Also the devil is in the
(implementation) details.

So let's break that down.

A hash table is a super common data structure in most modern
computer languages. It's a way of storing *whatever you want* in an
easy to access way. Pseudocode:

store_data (key, value) -> stuff gets stored in the hash table.
get_data (key) -> stuff is pulled out of the hash table and given
back to you

the key ("dogfood") and the value ("2 pounds of kibble and a nice
little piece of fish") can be semantic. But they can also be
programmatic. Hash functions are complicated, particularly
cryptographic hash functions, and I do recommend doing some reading
about them - they're going to show up again when we get to bitcoin
mining.

so more psudocode

store_data( hash (value), value)

so now the object being stored is *named* as the hash of its value.
So you take a 6mb JPEG, and you have an automatically generated name
like a30934b7d3ca70d482745c3a7c6b9e289f73d127. Looks random, but the
same file will always generate the same hash.

So now in your "little" storage system, you store
a30934b7d3ca70d482745c3a7c6b9e289f73d127 - that's going in memory.
But the 6mb JPEG could now be stored on disk - or on the network.

Key concept here: the hash function lets you store a unique name for
a piece of data. Anybody who has that data can recognize your
request for that data by the unique name, and if you change the data
by even one bit, the name breaks and no confusion can occur (except
for hash collisions, which we'll come back to when we get to bitcoin
mining.)

So the distributed hash table is a networked implementation of a
hash table.

Imagine 16 computers in a perfectly reliable network. A file comes
in to the cluster for storage:
a30934b7d3ca70d482745c3a7c6b9e289f73d127. It starts with an A, so
the data is sent to machine A to store. Next file comes in, and it's
e2968a25409736660cf2e638cadbf234259fda63 - send that to machine E,
and so on.

If you need 256 computers, it's now "store on machine A3" or "store
on machine E2" and so on. You can get as big an array of machines as
necessary working together to store files, without a ton of
administrative messing around about what goes where. Load balancing
is fairly automatic, and so on. 

Machines can be arranged redundantly - A4 stores some stuff from A3
and A5, and so if one box fails, the data is safe. You can add as
much redundancy as you like.

So this is how we make a distributed database: millions of machines
all interconnected, with a single naming scheme for incoming data
(the hash function which generates the names). This is a major
achievement.

But now, the hard question: "who gets to store data in this network,
and how do they pay for it?" If all those machines are owned by
Google, then this is easy: they set policy and pricing. But *surely*
we could take all those laptops and desktops at home, put DHT
storage systems on them, and all collaborate to store all the
world's content.

That raises some problems. I'll discuss hashcash, the solution to
most of those problems, in the next piece (in a few hours or
tomorrow).
  

    
Craig, as far as I know, Gavin Wood came up with "Web 3.0" around
2014/5/6?
  

    
Rats. I forgot one detail.

In a DHT system, if I want a specific 6MB JPEG of Stonehenge, and I
know the hash, I can ask any computer running the right software for
a30934b7d3ca70d482745c3a7c6b9e289f73d127 and the only file it will
ever hand me is the JPEG.

This property is called "content addressability"
a30934b7d3ca70d482745c3a7c6b9e289f73d127 is the *hash of the
content* and is enough to find that file anywhere on the internet
that it may exist. It's a unique* general name for the item.

The web paradigm is

http://my.site.com/folder/subfolder/stonehenge_4.jpg

http://[DNS system goes here]/[arbitrary folder structure goes
here]/[arbitrary file name goes here]

So now we can't find the damn file because the folder structure and
the file name are just arbitrary human creations - people name
things whatever they like, or wind up with 1.jpg 2.png 3.gif in a
huge folder.

And to find the *machine* with the picture on it, we have to consult
the Domain Name System which is - yes - a pay-for-play cartel which
makes you spend $20 a year to give your machine a public name
(mycompany.com) so that people on the internet can find it. And if
they don't like what they have to say, they can kick you off the
internet. There is a huge international and national bureaucracy
with tens of thousands of human workers just managing the *names*
that we give things to find them.

And this entire paradigm? That's Web 1.0. A huge database cartel of
Domain Name Registrars who charge you fees to get your content where
the world can see it.

Distributed Hash Tables are *extremely* disruptive. They provide the
potential for annihilating the entire domain name system, the
registrars, the fees, the censorship - EVERYTHING. Simply by fixing
this core problem: "what do I name files online?"

Domain names suck. But we are so used to them we don't even
understand how weird and malign that content addressing system is.
  

    
I don't have much to offer personally on the topic, but I'm quite
glad our State of the World is getting into the tall weeds of the
blockchain thing.  If we have to spend this whole decade dodging
variants of Covid-19 while living behind our screens, then
blockchains and DAOS and NFTs and web3s and metaverses, they're
preetty much bound to flourish like crabgrass.  Not because they're
efficient technologies, or good and clean and fair and just, or
because they can solve any of our actual problems, but just because
they're something engrossing, and maybe enriching, to do all day,
which doesn't feel like playing endless solitaire in a prison cell.

On Twitter, NFT devotees greet each other with the ritual salutation
"gm" ("good morning").  It took me a while to figure out that they
meant that they were gonna sit there chasing NFT phantoms all day. 
Every day. Until they Make It or they Get Rekt.

 It's not an arcane high-tech hobby, such as logging on to the Whole
Earth 'Lectronic Link after you've read an issue of "Whole Earth." 
It wants to be a way of life.
  

    
Re. <152>: Web 3.0 was another name for the "semantic web" concept
that originated with Tim Berners-Lee in the 90s. My understanding is
that the term came from John Markoff in 2006. It was the idea of a
machine-readable web; I suppose syndication via RSS or Atom was an
example. Web3 would also be machine-readable, so seems to me it's
the same concept, but with blockchain factored in.
  

    
Ah yeah. As far as I know the Gavin Wood Web 3.0 doesn't owe much to
Markoff and the semantic web - I think I'm almost the only person in
the blockchain space who has any particular interest in unifying the
semantic web concepts with the distribute web concepts.
  

    
what i know for certain is that i'd like to have a drink with
fruitbatpangolin
  

    
> Stephen Diehl: I know him well :) He's an old friend of mine.
>
> A world class cryptographer whose company did not choose to
> issue a token.

This looks like a snide attempt to dismiss Diehl's arguments as sour
grapes, without addressing them.
  

    
Certainly not snide: he's a friend who's watched people with less
skill, less talent, and less worthy objectives become billionaires
because they were willing to ruthlessly exploit the technology and
people to concentrate wealth without creating any wealth.

To then argue that what has been done is immoral is reasonable.

But the framing of the problem matters: Stephen's mostly attacking
the ponzi scheme level of the blockchain narrative (which is huge)
rather than looking at the more fundamental issues the blockchain is
trying to address:

* governments printing money leading to currency collapses, debt
bubbles and possibly wars

* censorship

We do not have good candidate technical solutions for these problems
other than *maybe* next gen (or generation after that) blockchain
systems.

Whether those problems are fixable with technology is an entirely
different question. But having some candidate technological
solutions around is not a bad thing, I think you will agree.
  

    
Like a lot of journalists and literary people of my generational
cohort, I used to spend amazing amounts of time immersed in
newspapers and magazines.  I preferred books of imaginative fiction,
but I could see that zines and papers were more dynamic enterprises
than books.   Like the "first drafts of history," reporters were out
there slapping some shoe-leather chasing current events.

 I saw the merits of that activity, although I was too lazy and
introspective to ever be a pro journalist.  Still, I wanted to see
how it worked.  I wrote some journalism.   I edited stuff on
occasion. 

I still sympathize with what's left of the paper-printing industry,
and journalism clearly still has deep meaning for people, because
otherwise journalists wouldn't be getting vilified, spied-on and
killed all the time.   However, it's in a state of ruination.  Why
is that?
  

    
Historically, there were many situations where free presses were
extinguished --sometimes for a generation or longer.  Commonly,
newspapers would spring back to life as soon as a regime fell.  Even
efficient police states were much-pestered by emigre presses and
underground presses -- they were visibly afraid of them.   Normal
people thirsted for these paper published products. 

Newspapers that looked and acted like the newspapers of our recent
past -- (they were cheap, they spread by post, they appeared every
day, you could throw them away like trash) -- they didn't come from
"presses."  Printing presses existed for decades before newspapers
arose.  

Instead, newspapers emerged from coffee houses.  Big-city European
coffee houses were large, well-attended, raucous social spots where
influencers, mostly businessmen but sometimes courtiers, congregated
to swap gossip and do insider-trading.  So coffee-shops resembled
modern social media. But they had no way to extend their influence
beyond their coffee-shop walls, unless somebody, standing there with
a pen and paper, heard,  summarized, edited, and distributed their
goings-on.
  

    
The original coffee-house newspapers had gossipy names like "Tatler"
and "Spectator."  They weren't yet sober "Guardians" or "Chronicles"
because there was no such thing as a Fourth Estate.  Instead, there
was a limited technical ability to communicate any news through any
mass population.  News gathering and distribution needed almost a
parliamentary structure, with reporters resembling representatives
of beats, and editors mimicking house-whips and house speakers.

However, if all the other coffeehouses can just swap their lies and
hot rumors with other coffee-houses, then all this stately
gatekeeping becomes farfetched and archaic.  Even journalists don't
like it.  I see thousands of journalists on Twitter.  I never saw
one say, "You know what?  We journalists need an editor to
fact-check, summarize and compile our  personal Twitter musings, so
that they're more reliable, and have more dignity, and will be of
more public benefit!" 

I gave up on printed paper traditions, too.  I used to subscribe to
fifty magazines.  Nowadays, I'm a steady reader of maybe three.  On
occasion I'll read a newspaper.  It feels like watching an
eighteenth-century opera.
  

    
A post-truth situation  ensues where nobody much cares about what's
actually happening in objective reality. Strong-man demagogues with
vast audiences of indignant, fired-up core zealots have to vie with
radical movements that are little more than clusters of memes.   
Leaders who lie all the time can't deliver the lies; their fans
adore 'em, but they're incompetent to the point of international
contempt.  Social-media unpsurges are not political parties or
interest groups.  They can't negotiate and they have no victory
condition.

That's what Kazakhstan looks like today -- it's got this
one-party-state guy who has the Xi Jinping seal-of-approval, though
he's not well-informed as Xi-- he just concentrates on his palace
intrigue.  Civil society has spontaneous violent upheavals rather
than reformers.  It's a news desert, or maybe a "news steppe," in
their case.

I wouldn't claim that "news" is any panacea for Kazakhstan, but it's
quite strange that our world is infested with trillions of dollars
of communications gadgetry and we have no idea what's going on in
Kazakhstan.  I'm sure they're anxious to tell us about their
suffering, but they themselves don't know.  They've got no method to
know.
  

    

So, to have a "Fourth Estate" of print-media professionals with some
vested interest in an informed populace and political stability --
that's not a natural end-state for a civilization.  You can't even
legislate it into being, or underwrite it with tax breaks.   It's
more of a historic techno-social accident.  It's like a national
irrigation system where you have convenient spots to dam rivers,
form reservoirs and measure and dispense water flow.

 If you live in a swamp, it wouldn't occur to you that there might
be some advantages to that.
  

    
Professions are funny that way: the sharp lines and massive cultural
divides between nurses, doctors, surgeons, midwives and
psychiatrists, for example.

Those professions arose in these forms through accidents of history,
of path dependency. What medical procedures can a doctor do that a
nurse can't? Where that line is varies country to country, decade to
decade. Midwives almost went extinct in America (in the 1950s?) and
the profession was largely rescued by the folks on Ina May Gaskin's
Farm.

Which is to say: I get what you are saying about journalism. A lot
of our best institutions are path-dependent historical accidents. 

What works well is to be treasured and preserved. Whenever possible.
  

    
I suppose through journalism's greatest era, it was seen as a public
service. Creating channels for delivering the news was expensive, so
there weren't many of 'em, and they existed for prestige, not
profit. So anyone interested in exposure to news got a fairly
coherent picture of the world through those few channels, which were
somewhat aligned in what they intended and what they delivered.

Back then, professional journalism appeared and evolved with the
kinds of standards and practices we were taught in journalism school
fifty years ago - and I suspect those are still part of the
curriculum, but do they mean as much in an era where news is
for-profit, where it's characterized not as information but as
infotainment. 
  

    
(Oh, wow! I'm in another timezone... much slippage)

Vinay, re: <152>, and using today's version of the Memex....

I googled: "web 3.0"   [with the quote marks] then filtered the results
to dates between 1990 and 2014 and see results that appear to match my
memory traces -- namely that O'Reilly Media was hosting conferences
(and reporting about them) aimed at shaping the tech community's
thinking about 'The Web' -- in particular, that it was still evolving.

Here's a hit that gives "Web 3.0" so called 'buzzword' status as of 2010:

<https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/web3.html>

IMO, this helps make clear the transient nature of meaning --

   "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither
    more, nor less."

and, in today's version of the looking glass world, Humpty Dumpty
speaks for the highest bidder. Meaning itself has become a kind of
'currency' -- a cryptic sort of currency. Dare I say, a cryptocurrency?

The arguments we usually have about the blockchain tend to be arguments
about 'meaning' that go unrecognized.  Perhaps WIRED could help us with
that.
  

    
I've been hearing a distinction between "Web 3.0" and "Web3." Maybe
Web3 is seen as a reboot.
  

    
Or an ongoing shift in meaning. I don't see a reason this will stop.

> ... Creating channels for delivering the news was expensive, so
> there weren't many of 'em, and they existed for prestige, not
> profit.

Not to disagree, but may I point out that we need not think of prestige
vs profit as simply a binary choice. This concepts are often deeply
entangled.
  

    
Meant to say "These concepts..."

But further, this may be the the wrong level at which to think about
'The News' -- whose more substantial purpose may be something along
the lines of 'shaping consensus.'
  

    
xlnt disentangling by a computer scientist of web3.0

https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/
  

    
Here's an argument that word definitions are often a topic of social
media conflict:

Scissor Labels
<https://j.mirror.xyz/RUeJfZEZxr-hkuzUCakQyUuf2kOJVMPPiAWBaQFhhqc>

> Hyperpop is an example of what I'm calling a "scissor label,"
loosely based on Scott Alexander's "scissor statement." While his
original term, scissor statements, are truth claims engineered to
create dissent, scissor labels are categorical terms that happen to
be maximally divisive.

> A scissor label is a word or phrase that, for the first time,
establishes a widely embraced name for a trend without
simultaneously establishing a canonical definition. It is a vague
term masquerading as a specific one, where the missing definition is
still up for grabs. Scissor labels aren't coined or engineered, nor
formally initiated by an institution. Rather, they're discovered by
accident, suddenly adopted en masse amidst a trend that's already in
motion.

> Once a scissor label is established, controlling its definition
means controlling whatever the trend represents. A scissor label
therefore represents the battleground for a power struggle. By
nature, scissor labels have a peculiar divisive power, building
energy and momentum around a trend while simultaneously bringing
about controversy and debate.

[...]

These unending arguments become tedious once you recognize them for
what they are. Words are flexible and that's great! They aren't
load-bearing, though. If a word isn't doing the trick, use another.
Route around it. Paraphrase. Give examples of what you mean.

(Another good example would be the dispute over what "mild" means
for Omicron. The word is a problem, but the experts don't argue
about how to define it.)
  

    
The commercial linked in <146> begins with the statement that
"Applications built on Ethereum run exactly as programmed without
any possibility of downtime, censorship, or third-party
interference." I think this means that Ethereum makes sure that
programs run in conformance with their contracts, which reasonable
people might not hear as being synonymous with "as programmed"
  

    
IN the lecture <hexayurt> posted in <143> he set a goal of making
Ethereum transactions as fast as present-day database transactions.
My feeble understanding suggests that this would mean that
cryptographic operations would have to become faster by three or
four orders of magnitude. What impact would this have on other uses
of cryptography, which rely on decryption to be difficult enough
that they remain slow compared to encryption? Decryption on Ethereum
might become much faster than encryption is when done elsewhere.
Using Ethereum to solve this problem would make Ethereum a common
point of possible failure for many security architectures.
  

    
Blockchain, crypto, DAO's etc.
I had a paradigm shift when I read two things, the book "Artists
Re:Thinking the Blockchain", and a recent article in Forbes where
the writer was looking at coins as software aoolications and
platforms - economics as engineering problems - that got my
attention.

In the arts, when I was in Cyprus, everyone was talking about NFTs.
I operate primarily on Foundation and Hic Et Nunc lately, although I
have a collection on openSea. 

A few anecdotes:
A young cypriot painter was minding the gallery where my curatorial
project is at Neme.org in Limassol (Sorry for the shameless plug -
you should check it out, the interviews start tomorrow)
https://www.neme.org/blog/through-the-mesh-press

(I'll likely refer to a few of the artists in these weeks)
BUT, this young lady was minding the gallery, and the co-director
Yiannis Colkaides and I were chatting, and her (apparent) brother
came in who was a computer engineer (my first degree)>

He said he was interested in NFT's, as a performance I had just been
to was a video meant for repackaging for NFT, and that seemed the
meme. Anyhow, as these things go, he asked me "What software do you
use to make NFT's?" as if anyone with a lack of imagination and MS
paint can;t do them. 

I smiled and said, as I do to anyone who thinks the computer is
going to do it for them, all they have to do is buy the right
modules from Ono-Sendai and there you have your Cyberdeck... I said,
"There's a really great hardware platform you can use to start
making NFTs..."
The young woman almost violently got out her notebook and began
scribbling frantically at my Buddhic wisdom to come.

"It's called a set of good Derwent pencils and some nice rag paper.
make some fantastic drawings of Elon Musk or something , scan them,
and then mint them on Hic et Nunc,,.,"

The scribbling was furious, then slowed...."What? You mean you can
sell drawings? Why can't we just throw together a bunch of pixels or
3D models like Beeple?" 

"Well, then, you have your model, but you know what you really have
to do is get a product together and live on twitter and Discord  and
MARKET." As Baudrillard once said, "Contemporary Art are often empty
gestures to status" (Conspiracy of Art) - And in the case of the
endless Billionaire Monkeys, I agree.

NFTs are a marketing exercise on the Warholian sense, it isn;t so
much about the art - it's the idea of selling a value proposition
that you wont lose cash when you pop $300,000 into the ape. Seems
like Yves Klein or Duchamp to me, but who am I to judge... 

But the Christies auction that had Claudia Hart, Tamiko Thiel,
Auriea Harvey, that was the real deal. I get that. Bravo on my
colleagues for netting at least $10k reserves. good on em. They
deserve it.

But Hic Et Nu=nc getting abandoned then rebuilt got my attention. A
with all these breathless speculative paces, a lot isn;t being
thought through. The NFT platforms are basically repositories that
link to the contracts, and if someone takes the platform down, all
hell breaks loose. I fully expect an NFT meltdown SOMEWHERE, and HEN
was nearly that,.

I also love the NFT Bay, where you can torrent all kinds of lifted
NFTs - of course the value is in the contract, but it points a
critical finger that;s spot on. You're buying baseball cards and
Wacky Packages. They are merely indices for fashion as frozen
capital. Fair enough.

Also, I also respect that the forbes article also speculated that
the economic chains that will power W3 probably don't exist yet.
Galt's Gulch will likely get regulated, and many of the platforms
are problematic - Bitcoin is getting old, Ethereum is too damned
slow (Sorry Vinay), and things like Polkadot are making incremental
advances. Also, interoperability is going to be key, and I like that
the Metamask Wallet allows for Eth and Polkadot.

However, with all of this being a fight for more first-world
extraction, I'm having a Don't Look Up moment in thinking we should
really be fighting to chain the Musks and Gateses and have a good
look at the great crypto money laundry.  It's almost blasphemous to
think of ripping the trillions out of the Stacks and out of the
hands of the Tecnoligarchs and placing it back into programs that
matter more to our survival.

Oh, by the way, is anyone seriously going to start talking about
population control and necropolitics before it comes to wars and
hands-off strategies re: Covid in regions that "don;t matter" to the
rich?

Bravo if you got the end of this.