this is just silly. do you have any specific issues? or are you just prejudicial against the whole crypto space? highly recommend you visit https://siasky.net and see for yourself
The "scam" is using payment systems that allow their owners, controllers, or just hackers to spy on every single transaction on earth, accessing all your past present and future economical activity on demand. Not even the worst dictatorships of centuries past ever dreamt of such awareness and control.
The promotion of pseudonymous and anonymous digital payment systems such as cryptocurrencies is vital to a healthy and functioning society.
I can't really see how a craptocurrency attached to a messenger provides any sort of pseudonymity. If I can send money to you, I can later identify you in a ledger, which simply means I need to find some reason to converse with you and it's game over. If the ledger isn't public, you're back under corporate or Government control.
Signal does not require KYC, so there is no direct link there. As far as public ledgers are concerned, pseudonymous activity offers reasonable privacy controls as long as you know what you are doing.
There are also entirely anonymous cryptocurrencies with no readable public ledgers. Everything is still decentralised, no centralised control of any kind, but you can't see what people are doing (Monero and Zcash being good examples. Signal uses Mobilecoin, which still needs to stand the test of time).
There is still a long road to go before there is a fool proof anonymous, liquid, consumer friendly, usable cryptocurrency, but it is the last bastion of defense against complete total state and corporate surveillance. - One of the greatest threats to human life, on par with climate change.
Your use of the word "craptocurrency" is rather childish and naive. Eventually you will take a closer look at the situation and reconsider. Good luck
Among other things, the blockchain/crypto part ensures hosts and portals have a monetary incentive to host data, making their service scalable and sustainable.
You claim Sia issues too many coins. That is a myth. Inflation in 2021 will be no higher than 7%, declining every year after that. In case you are referring to the total supply, would it make you feel better to move the decimal to the left?
Hosts have been saving and serving content since the launch of the Sia network years ago. It is profitable if done at scale. For more information, https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
Cost. If this abuser was running his own Portal node to do so, he would simply be paying hosts to host his junk data. Hosts would be very happy to do so, as they set their own prices.
If this abuser was trying to use a public Skynet portal, the same abuse prevention measures apply as for any other data storage service out there. IP banning, filtering, etc
That is incorrect. Only files on the basic Sia client are all stored encrypted. Skynet stores all files by default in cleartext. It is up to Skynet users or app developers to ensure files that are uploaded are encrypted client side.
On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and portal operators aggressively censor such content and report it to authorities.
Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability and composability.
It's not really correct to say that Skynet stores all files 'by default in cleartext'. Skynet is a platform for building applications. Whether data is encrypted or cleartext is up to the app developer.
Portal and renter nodes pay hosts for the data in Siacoin. These payments are managed by file contracts that renters and hosts agree on and sign cryptographically. These contracts involve periodic verification that the data is being hosted. Failure to verify involves an automatic financial loss for hosts.
Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of course responsible for the content they serve.
People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly via the distributed network.
It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal. Same goes for hosts.
The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as someone wants to make sure it stays up.
Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any single host going offline.
> It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down links and stop serving that content, for example after accepting copyright infringement requests.
I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the portal to keep my interest in mind?
As a user you have the ability to control what apps you use, what feeds you use, who you follow, etc. Decentralization doesn't mean it's completely free of moderation, it means users have the ability to pick their moderators and the ability to decide what is allowed on their feed and what is not.
I was assuming that if I run a node serving content, I do not deal with curating that content at all. I just offer my bandwidth/storage for compensation, like a CDN.
I don't want to be involved in curation or moderation at all, I just don't want to be held liable in case I inadvertently serve something that is illegal in my jurisdiction.
Nodes don't serve content. They serve blocks of encrypted data to other nodes. Portals run a node AND piece together content from blocks received from many nodes THEN serve the content.
You could also piece together content yourself by being your own portal. But running a node does not necessitate running a portal.
Portals and hosts manage abuse reports. It is their responsibility to filter content. Of course, anyone can spin up their own portal and pin content that is being censored. However, that is their private business.
No low size limitation on files is a feature, not a bug. Files on public portals are currently kept for 90 days on a best effort basis. If you want to make sure your files stay pinned, you will soon be able to sign up for a paid account.
That's the crazy thing about Skynet. You can do both "easy and decentralized".
For example, let's say you go to https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net/ and you make an account (SkyFeed is a decentralized alternative to Twitter built on Skynet). You make some posts, follow some people, then siasky goes down.
So now you go to https://skyfeed.hns.skyportal.xyz/ - skyportal is another Skynet portal run by an independent party. When you log into Skyfeed, all of your previous activity is still visible. Your account and all of its information is hosted on the Sia network, which means siasky is nothing more than an access point, and you don't get any penalties as a user for switching access points.
Sorry, but this is not decentralized at all, as you are at mercy of siasky.net serving you the right code. If siasky.net is compromised it will serve you code which steals the account. This is strictly inferior to normal web, as you need to trust both the app developer and the portal code is served from.
Having multiple mirrors is NOT decentralization.
My criteria for "decentralized web" candidates are:
* credentials are managed by a trusted component outside of controls of apps, let alone mirrors
* content integrity is checked before it is used
* switching between nodes happens automatically in
background, there should be no SPoF (i.e. if download
through node 1 fails client should automatically retry
from node 2 and so on).
I don't think you can achieve this without integrating with a browser.
We're closer than I think you give us credit. The only major component we're missing is that normal browsers don't have the ability to verify that the portal is serving you the right code - which is of course super important.
Once you have that though, the rest can be done within the webapp itself. Credentials are managed by a separate webapp like https://sky-id.hns.siasky.net/, and some apps already have built in failover to try other portals if one is not responding.
With the advent of utreexo, it's even possible to run full blockchain nodes inside of a webapp. Again you need an integrity check on the code served by the portal, but if you have that you can independently do everything else.
The only missing piece is a browser plugin or a dedicated browser that verifies that each piece of content you are served corresponds to the hash you are requesting. This is on the global roadmap, as well as automatic portal switching. The philosophy of the project is absolutely in line with your thinking.
That's fine, you can switch if necessary. Like a backup, you don't need decentralization 99.9% of the time, but the 0.1% of time when you need it, it can save your ass.
