> The same key, in every app, for every recipient. Not assignable to anyone else, not revocable, not subject to suspension. Yours forever.
This is impractical and the opposite of what we want. It's a required ID to use the internet, monitored by governments, tracked by corporations, and forever unchanging.
What we need is a system that allows people to easily create new IDs, that updates contacts that people choose. Think of a contact book that sends new keys to all contacts on every change. (Contacts would need to be always online.) It could update the key used on a website or not, depending on the users choice.
Breaking tracking and required IDs means flux and churn.
> It's a required ID to use the internet, monitored by governments, tracked by corporations, and forever unchanging.
There are clearly two opposing requirements.
One for anonymity, where people who need to be anonymous can create an identity that is verifiably the same person each time, but not a specific, identifiable, individual. The classic example is journalistic sources.
One for trust and verification, where the identity needs to be absolutely, permanently, associated with a specific individual. Online banking is the classic example here.
I don't think the same system can be used for both.
- If we can create multiple identities without verifying the human each time, as you say "flux and churn", then the second requirement is broken - there is no link between the identity and a verifiable person so the identity can't be trusted.
- If we can't create multiple identities without verifying the human each time, then the first requirement is broken - every identity can be associated with a specific human and there's no anonymity.
We could try some hybrid system where some identities are known people, and others are pseudonymns. But that feels like two systems wedged into the same box. The hard problems of absolutely correctly identifying a human so the second system works is still not solved, and irrelevant to the first system.
You are absolutely correct that the system that identifies individuals is incredibly attractive for states and large corporations, and so incredibly dangerous for actual humans. We need to be very, very, careful with this.
> What we need is a system that allows people to easily create new IDs, that updates contacts that people choose.
> Contacts would need to be always online.
That also sounds impractical.
> It's a required ID to use the internet
How does any of that follow? Having a reusable self-sovereign ID format for those scenarios where people want to share it is very different from having an authority-issued ID format that's mandatory for some interaction.
As a concrete example: I have an iMessage (CKV), Signal, WhatsApp, and GPG identity key, but I don't need to provide any of them when ordering pizza online. But what I can't do is choosing to use the same key for my same number on both e.g. Signal and iMessage to make it easier for people to switch between messengers without having to re-verify me.
A hypothetical shared key format would fix that, but would (hopefully!) still allow me to create multiple keys/identities for multiple contexts, and to not provide any persistent identity when it's not necessary.
If the ID is permanent then governments will require it, because they can. If it has attestations or endorsements, governments will require a government endorsement. Think about what China, Iran or Russia would do with a permanent ID being a standard. The US, England and the EU are not immune to the same impulses.
Always online is no different than an email account or website, and the rate of change would be, at least, minutes not seconds.
If governments want to do these things, they already can. Phone numbers are KYCed in many countries, for example, and many messengers mandatorily require them.
The lack of an interoperable key standard isn’t stopping them. (In fact, it’s even helping a bit by providing cover for MITM snooping)
look into "sealed sender" schemes, they allow the recipient to verify the sender identity without allowing anyone else to verify the sender identity. So making use of such a scheme allows you to prevent governments or corporations from intercepting even the metadata of communications (and of course E2EE prevents intercepting the contents).
I can foresee there will be valid use cases to re-assign a number (e.g. stolen, mistyped, wrongly assigned etc). One thing I learned about a real-world database for human information -- there will be a valid use case to do _anything_.
> The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.
That's to power a single data center though, how would that scale?
If I'm doing the math right, Minnesota used 65.7 TWh of power last year so to store 3 days worth of power just for that one city we would need a battery 18x larger than the one mentioned here.
I can't imagine we could ever scale such storage capacity for all energy use, let alone all the wind and solar required to fill it.
> Google, for example, is internally championing a process where the engineer has a dialog with the LLM to generate a design doc ...
Smart. They'll be able to regenerate code in the future, with better LLMs. It also lets them redo the architecture combined with other parts of the system as context grows.
> I suspect this is how we wound up with NFTs, the metaverse, and the clunky VR/AR headsets.
VR/AR is because new tech allows us to do something... that we haven't figured out yet. It's not driven by visions of the future but by hardware advances.
The metaverse was an old idea that Zuckerberg hyped because Facebook became un-cool. It was meant to keep the company relevant and let it change the name away from Facebook.
NFTs was an attempt to copy moneys move to the digital world like bitcoin. Whether idealistic or crass opportunism is debatable, but broken tech ideas are nothing new.
NFTs had no valid reasons to exist, other than to provide money laundering opportunities and to con rubes out of their cash. There's plenty to not like about crypto and at the top of that list is NFTs.
Some artists right at the beginning liked the idea that an NFT contract could let them keep some fraction of the rights. That way, if the work later sold for a large sum, they could earn some money off of it.
But they were quickly disillusioned. The space instantly filled with crap art sold by scammers. Developers, of course, knew that would happen, but artists don't always have that same instinct for the way the worst possible use of a technology will overwhelm all others.
So... you agree? Because last time I checked we punish and sentence people for using guns to kill and not the guns themselves. Same applies to any other non human "thing", unless you are maybe Amish or part of some other type of dogmatic religious group.
I was previously a long term dev contractor for a stock photography company. NFTs have function in the ownership of digital assets, though I do not personally advocate for them (the company or the use of NFTs).
Per a cursory question on the Goog I got: 95% of collections are now considered worthless.
I worked at a blockchain startup back in the day and despite the PTSD of working with insane people, I appreciate the concept of the blockchain. I've yet to see any mainstream value in it. Sure bitcoin is worth a lot but it's not because of the inherent value of blockchain finance, it's because there's too much money out there and everybody loves a fat bubble asset.
I never got what would blockchain do better except maybe distribution. And even there raise questions of efficiency of having data copied in a lot of places.
Correcting data is also always fun question. Your keys are stolen, now your house is not yours anymore as record is immutable. Oh it is not actually immutable if someone says it is not (replace it with new record )? What was the point again...
The appeal to me is that it is effectively a "serverless" shared immutable ledger. By "serverless" I mean that not a service behind someone's API that one just has to trust the data emitted.
I think it could be useful for contracts and governance but the whole crypto thing is just pointless (except ostensibly for cases of transferring money), which is helpful as a tool but as an investment just strikes me as nuts. Which is why I prudently said hell no to buying bitcoin at $20 because it was a stupid fad. Sigh.
gova: build failed: exit status 1
# counter
./main.go:20:16: cannot use Counter{} (value of struct type Counter) as gova.View value in return statement: Counter does not implement gova.View (missing method viewNode)
Not encouraging. You can't add 'viewNode' since it's not exported...
I guess they changed the API and didn't update the code or picture.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/782/win-place-and-show
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