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Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: monsterer on November 11, 2014, 06:37:13 pm

Title: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 11, 2014, 06:37:13 pm
It seems to me the crypto world is in absolute desperate need of a decentralised forum. Every single crypto-currency is currently using centralised forum software running on centralised servers which are subject to all kinds of attacks and take downs.

It would take the form of a client software wallet, in the same vein as any other cryptocurrency, which would be open source.

A decentralised forum DAC would cover so many bases. It would require its own blockchain, of course, with its own specific set of requirements. With DPOS, you could have moderators be delegates, voted in or out by stake holders based on their performance. Posts would require a transaction fee of course, but delegates could use some proportion of collected fees to reward good content via tipping.

Has anyone considered building this?
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: bytemaster on November 11, 2014, 08:25:12 pm
How much data does this forum use?
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 12, 2014, 09:37:59 am
Any way we can move this thread into the main Discussion sub-forum? It deserves to get more eyes on, really.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: arhag on November 15, 2014, 10:38:59 pm
How about we first create a generalized voting framework and a decentralized hosting platform, which would be the critical infrastructure on top of which a decentralized forum / social network could be built.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 18, 2014, 03:26:14 pm
How about we first create a generalized voting framework and a decentralized hosting platform, which would be the critical infrastructure on top of which a decentralized forum / social network could be built.

Blockchain based internet is much harder to achieve than blockchain based forum. Yes you could host the forum on the 'blockernet', but wow it's a lot of work :)
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: sschechter on November 18, 2014, 03:48:53 pm
Who will build it and at what cost?
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 18, 2014, 03:59:13 pm
Who will build it and at what cost?

Blockchain based forum?

Who: well funded developer team, somewhere, say 5 hero developers, 1 year
Cost: ballpark $2M USD

For the blockchain based internet, you can probably scale that by a factor of 10.

Both of these will be developed eventually, its just a question of when really.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: sschechter on November 18, 2014, 05:23:35 pm
Let us know if you find them.  Personally, I don't see the value proposition.  If a forum is taken offline, its users can easily congregate in a backup channel.  Certainly there may be a need for a very limited niche, but for wholesale adoption, who gives a shit? You are essentially taking a free product (to the end user) which is easy move off from, and suggesting that people now pay for it.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 18, 2014, 07:02:18 pm
Let us know if you find them.  Personally, I don't see the value proposition.  If a forum is taken offline, its users can easily congregate in a backup channel.  Certainly there may be a need for a very limited niche, but for wholesale adoption, who gives a shit? You are essentially taking a free product (to the end user) which is easy move off from, and suggesting that people now pay for it.

Anonymity is something which isn't covered by the existing system.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: sschechter on November 18, 2014, 09:17:43 pm
Let us know if you find them.  Personally, I don't see the value proposition.  If a forum is taken offline, its users can easily congregate in a backup channel.  Certainly there may be a need for a very limited niche, but for wholesale adoption, who gives a shit? You are essentially taking a free product (to the end user) which is easy move off from, and suggesting that people now pay for it.

Anonymity is something which isn't covered by the existing system.

Can't the user just use Tor?
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 18, 2014, 10:12:12 pm
Can't the user just use Tor?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Onymous
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: bytemaster on November 25, 2014, 07:41:44 pm
The next release of the blockchain will support everything necessary to implement a forum at the blockchain level.

It will just cost you $0.02 to post ;)
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: arhag on November 25, 2014, 10:24:20 pm
The next release of the blockchain will support everything necessary to implement a forum at the blockchain level.

It will just cost you $0.02 to post ;)

I would imagine a per byte (per character) fee on top of a small fixed fee would make more sense. Then again, having only fixed fee would filter out the more trivial posts, but there is a risk of people abusing it to host data for cheap.

Moderation would be interesting to implement. Can posts ever be deleted to save space? Can they only be marked as removed by moderators so that user clients simply filter out those posts (assuming they trust that moderator)?

I wonder what the ideal fee would be. If people posted just as often as they do now even with a $0.02 fee per post, which is highly unlikely, that would be a revenue of approximately $240/month to run the DAC and the forum hosting. If we ignoring the costs of paying the delegates a basic block producing salary, then that budget would be sufficient if it was just paying the server costs of a single provider. But decentralization means it needs to be distributed to many different hosting providers. If you even have 10 different hosting providers (perhaps the delegates) to provided decentralization, the budget has already been knocked down to $24/month for each provider. Add in the fact that the average posts per day will drop because of the 2 cent fee and it doesn't look good.

In my opinion there has to be a different incentive structure to provide decentralization. There must be some profit incentive to motivate many people to backup the data and have it available in case of emergency situations (for a price). But under normal operation, I think it would be fine to just trust a single provider (or maybe two) to host the public forum data. Then there is the question of how to charge for the service. Is it a one time fixed fee per post? Is it a one time variable (based on size) fee per post? Is it a reoccurring variable fee to keep the post data available or else it is freed to save space? In which case perhaps the person who wants the data back needs to either have a local saved copy or make a bid on an open market for someone who has a copy in long-term storage to get it out and repost it into the decentralized cloud to claim the reward. Do the post readers need to also pay a fee to cover the bandwidth costs of the host delivering the post contents to them?

This is not a trivial DAC to build. I think the first step is rebuilding a centralized forum to follow some standard protocol so that a local client can locally reconstruct any part of the forum by simply requesting the content-addressable blobs of data from the host (or anyone else on the internet) that are necessary to reconstruct that part of the forum. I then think a Maidsafe/storj like system is necessary for hosting and providing these blobs of data (with the right economic incentives to make it sustainable and difficult to abuse). Then, a market for hosting and search indexing providers could open up who use these tools as the foundation to provide forum access to users. The user's local client would still follow the same standard protocol so that their posts are accessible to other users even if they use a different host/search provider. The host/search providers can compete on their fees and would likely be paid through some micropayment channel set up between the user and the provider.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: bytemaster on November 25, 2014, 10:26:37 pm
Posts are limited to the maximum transaction size. 
We charge a fixed-fee-per-transaction which should price in the "maximum transaction size" so that we can have simple pricing (like iTunes). 

So if $0.02 isn't enough for the maximum transaction size then we should increase fees.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: toast on November 25, 2014, 10:27:24 pm
Or just charge well in excess of the "true" cost and don't make it complicated.

ack, bm beat me to it.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: arhag on November 25, 2014, 10:43:25 pm
Posts are limited to the maximum transaction size. 
We charge a fixed-fee-per-transaction which should price in the "maximum transaction size" so that we can have simple pricing (like iTunes). 

So if $0.02 isn't enough for the maximum transaction size then we should increase fees.

How many bytes would $0.02 get you? This seems like a totally useless feature for anything other than time-stamping a hash of some data into the blockchain. That is useful to prove you were the first to post some important piece of data or to prove to someone that some data (whatever the data may be) is being censored. But this is only a tiny part of a decentralized forum.

It won't cover hosting the actual post in a decentralized way. As I mentioned, with 2 cents per post and the current average daily post count, the revenue is only $240/month. And that's assuming the daily post count doesn't drop with a 2 cent per post fee (let's not even get into the ghost town this forum would be if you increased the fee to much higher than 2 cents). If you want to do this on the blockchain with DPOS, that means each delegate only gets approximately $2.40/month for the burden of hosting all of the data on this forum. At that point it is just altruism. It makes more sense to just hire a 100% paid BTS delegate to fund the current bitsharestalk.org forum. That doesn't make the forum decentralized though nor does the model scale to other forums that have nothing to do with BTS.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: bytemaster on November 25, 2014, 11:06:00 pm
How much does it cost to store a full block?

Maximum Block Size = 51200 bytes or about 160 GB per year. 

You are right, we will have to increase transaction fees to cover storage / bandwidth costs if we end up maxing out every single block.

If the average transaction is 1KB in size, that means we have about 50 trx per block or $1 per block or $31,000 per year in transaction fees per delegate to cover the costs.
If someone posts transactions that are 50KB each revenue would fall to just $624 per year per delegate.   Or $624 per year to store 1.6 GB of data, much cheaper to use free services rather that spam blockchain.

That is a fairly large discrepancy in revenue, but I suspect increasing the fees slightly if this was abused.



Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: toast on November 25, 2014, 11:08:07 pm
Also I was thinking more like $0.25 - $1 to post.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: arhag on November 25, 2014, 11:13:51 pm
Also I was thinking more like $0.25 - $1 to post.

 :o

P.S. This post would have never happened if it would have cost me $1.  :)
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: bytemaster on November 25, 2014, 11:15:04 pm
The real question is this, how much revenue does this bitsharestalk.org have to earn to handle all of our posts + DOS etc?

Who would use a forum that cost money every time they made a post?   

There are so many completely free forums out there.

If you look at it another way, Bitcoin Foundation forum is "closed" except to those who have purchased a yearly member ship.   What is the cost-to-post on their forum? 

I suspect that if the core developers and support staff moved to the internal forum for all communication, then people would pay to post just to get their attention.   
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: bytemaster on November 25, 2014, 11:15:57 pm
I think getting $0.02 out of someone every time they post is making a killing as forums go.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: islandking on November 25, 2014, 11:53:59 pm
Here is an idea:

Set it up like yahoo answers. So if someone has a technical question, or trading question or whatever about BTS then it would cost them a certain amount. Then what the OP could do is they could select a best answer and the person who is awarded this would receive a % of the post fee. This would work really well for a technical question as people could be rewarded for helping.

I hope that makes sense.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 26, 2014, 03:27:22 pm
This is not a trivial DAC to build. I think the first step is rebuilding a centralized forum to follow some standard protocol so that a local client can locally reconstruct any part of the forum by simply requesting the content-addressable blobs of data from the host (or anyone else on the internet) that are necessary to reconstruct that part of the forum.

You might argue that these exact same set of requirements are true of any current blockchain implementation; there is a lot of irrelevant data which everyone is forced to download.

Advancements in the core technology ought to allow this intelligent pruning to 'just happen' as long as the new chain is designed sympathetically.

In my vision for this idea, it would actually have a separate blockchain to store its data rather than using features from the BTS chain as I suspect there might be a lot of compromises due to the mismatch of the different 'entities' required between both designs.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: joele on November 27, 2014, 02:01:12 pm
If there is decentralize forum, there should be a centralize moderators.
Otherwise it should be like reddit style with up or down vote.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: monsterer on November 27, 2014, 03:00:41 pm
If there is decentralize forum, there should be a centralize moderators.
Otherwise it should be like reddit style with up or down vote.

Moderators could be voted in.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: kenCode on March 17, 2015, 09:14:48 am
Aether.
http://getaether.net
 
That is a decentralized forum app. It's new, simplistic, but I imagine it could be expanded quite a bit to look more like Discourse or something (Maidsafe.org uses Discourse).
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: kenCode on March 17, 2015, 09:25:36 am
Who will build it and at what cost?
Blockchain based forum?
Who: well funded developer team, somewhere, say 5 hero developers, 1 year
Cost: ballpark $2M USD
For the blockchain based internet, you can probably scale that by a factor of 10.
Both of these will be developed eventually, its just a question of when really.

Screw that, I can get you reliable coders out of Latvia and Ukraine for a 20th of USD prices and they'll usually get the job done twice as fast too.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: Troglodactyl on March 17, 2015, 10:54:03 pm
Aether.
http://getaether.net
 
That is a decentralized forum app. It's new, simplistic, but I imagine it could be expanded quite a bit to look more like Discourse or something (Maidsafe.org uses Discourse).

Do you know how Aether compares to RetroShare?

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/index.html

EDIT: To clarify, is it just forums, and are they fully copied to each node?  How does discovery work?  The website is pretty short on details.  RetroShare uses PGP public keys as identifiers with DHT for discovery and supports forums, IM, and mail through the network of connected friends.
Title: Re: [DAC proposal] Decentralised Forum Software
Post by: kenCode on March 18, 2015, 07:30:32 am
Not sure, never heard of retroshare.
I've used Aether tho, still have it installed, but not too many people are using it so not many threads appear yet.
It looks like a good start tho, I'm a big fan of minimalism.
It does need color tho for some ui ease, I love Discourse, would love to see a decentralzed version of Discourse, in my ideal world of course ;)