Re: Idea: Owning Artworks On GNUnet using Non-Fungible Hashes

[Jeff Burdges]

Moxie loves talking about platforms vs protocols, but really only legacy cruft 
like Bitcoin and Ethereum adopted this non-upgradeable protocol bullshit fairy 
tails, and even Ethereum wants to upgrade despite not being able to do so.  
Almost everything modern winds up a platform by his definition..
- Tor Browser auto-upgrades, jut like Signal.  I donno if Tor routers 
auto-upgrade but the Tor project achieves upgrades via good community 
management. 
- Advanced industry blockchains do upgrades:  Polkadot ships new block 
validation functions via WASM, which kills your node if you do not upgrade the 
host properly.  Cosmos auto-builds new host.  etc.  I donno or care if the 
professor coins do upgrades.  ZCash does upgrades via good community management.


NFTs are simply the simplest dumbest possible game.  Ethereum needed NFTs 
because Ethereum is so unbelievably inefficient.

NFTs deployments wound up insecure because Ethereum has a diverse ecosystem of 
idiots, which happened because Ethereum optimized for accessibility, like by 
picking JS.  Just fyi, you pick PHP or VB if you really want to optimize for 
low skill cheap developers, but you pick JS to optimize for accessibility and 
number of possible devs. 

Asynchronous open world games with collaborative governance are an applications 
that fit blockchains well, and entertains users, so expect hoards of betters 
games running on newer more efficient blockchains.  Asynchronous games are less 
flashy than real time games, but they’re commonplace, so not really a problem.

We know Vitalik started Ethereum because Blizard nerfed his WoW character, so 
arguably open world games with collaborative governance games represent the 
canonical problem in the space.  It’s possible collaborative governance does 
not make games as fun as authoritarian play testers.  It’s possible this does 
not matter because humans suck at judging games' entertainment value anyways.  

It’s possible games' lesser threat model shall eventually make them work with 
protocols more efficent than blockchains, ala certificate transparency logs.  
It’ likely this wont matter anytime soon because like scripting vs compiled 
languages so many more resources get spent making the blockchains usable.  


Anyways..

Imho GNUnet has more important things to worry about than games.  It’s a 
crowded well funded space, so do something that matters.

Matrix, Wire, and the MLS WG are the people doing interesting work in messaging 
right now, but they’re all moving slowly, and not so decentralized.  Moxie has 
repeatedly and definitively rejected necessary complexity, in favour of 
insecure but cheap options like TEEs.  As a comparison, Matrix, Wire, and MLS 
folk would happily discuss these topics, which informs you.  Nym wants to do a 
mixnet too, but that’s another conversation.

There remains a question of what should the data transported look like?  Aside 
from simple messages, I think pijul looks most promising, but again I donno 
this aspect of the problem space nearly as well.

If otoh you want to write blockchain games in rust, and be paid for doing so, 
then yes ask me to explain how VRFs and ring VRF give rise to card-like games 
sometime. 

Best,
Jeff