Idea: Owning Artworks On GNUnet using Non-Fungible Hashes

[carlo von lynX]

As much as I notoriously doubt that the end-to-end
encryption Whatsapp actually stops agencies from
having any insight, I appreciate Moxie's recent dive
into the world of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs):

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

I heard similar doubts from CCC people last summer,
but it is good for someone to put it in strong and
clear terms, combining it with the critique against
federation and open standards which the secushare.org
website has been carrying for a decade now.

The following implies you read that blog post first.
It's an interesting worthwhile read.

The "Web3" is a joke, as much as the people that claim
to be into "crypto", then even fail to put a hash of
a piece of art into the blockchain rather than just
somebody else's URL.

Obviously while I read all of that, I thought how on
the basis of GNUnet instead it could all work out for
real.

1. GNUnet is *meant* to run on all devices, including
smartphones. The phone companies may have to adapt!
There must not arise any "platform" web services that
run the GNUnet node for you. We switched to AGPL
license because of this and should pressure any
alternative implementation of GNUnet to also be
released under Affero GPL or stricter! As soon as
we allow nodes to be run elsewhere than on the device
of the owner, several of our design goals are gone -
and the article illustrates how people do not care.

2. We already have consensus protocols on top of
GNUnet. If we add a ledger we can store the ownership
of hashes of artworks which AFAIR also happen to be
the handles for retrieval on gnunet-fs.

3. If we implement the social graph in secushare.org
we can avoid using dirty proof-of-work but rather
provide a blockchain by proof-of-having-a-life. The
proof that you exist and have a life is the fact
that you have a social surrounding which isn't just
avatars you created yourself.

So, whoopa, we have a new Internet with a new
distributed Facebook/Skype replacement, a way to
do blockchain apps without ruining the environment
and a way to prove ownership of digital artworks.