On Tue, Dec 24, 2013 at 11:03:31PM -0500, Benjamin Kreuter wrote: > > I mostly lurk and I strongly prefer a mailing list solution. > > > > I'm in the Bitcoin community and we keep on talking about fully > > decentralized backends to mailing lists/usenet replacements, > > Out of curiosity, where do you see centralization in Usenet? The only > thing that comes to my mind are moderated newsgroups.
Moderation and spam control - both involve trusting centralized humans. Keep in mind, this is Bitcoin we're talking about: we have very high standards for what we call "decentralized". Equally we have very suductive solutions to such distastful brushes with humanity in the form of throwing proof-of-work, or better yet transferrable proof-of-work(1), at the problem. Previously known as hashcash of course, but much more usable this time around because there's actually a market for the stuff in the form of Bitcoins so attackers don't have an advantage. Of course, such pure solutions have real world drawbacks - like rich wankers flooding your forums with junk because they can afford too - but they've also never been tried in real-life so there's a lot of interest in doing just that. Who knows if it'll actually work in practice, but all the more reason to try. In the meantime mailing lists are an excellent compromise. 1) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fidelity_bonds - Disclaimer: I invented them. Also "Just use fidelity bonds!" is a standard joke in the Bitcoin developer community, and for good reason. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0000000000000001ad53a6068118d04c32179c10e6a8717406158eba2433679a
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