Agreed, infact that’s what I said in another comment
If the US government can just send a few mails to node providers and influence the network then its not the token holders that decide but a centralized entity.
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That’s not an issue of the governance structure though, that’s just an issue of the number of nodes in the network and how dispersed around the world they are.
Yes and no. Even if a dApp is run on many nodes spread across the world as long as they are run in data centers there will be issues. That is because US has jurisdiction over a lot of countries so once they find out the nodes running a dApp they’ll subpoena each one of them at that point 3 things can happen:
- the dApp is removed by the NNS or owner
- the node shuts down or is shut down by data center to comply with the subpoena
- NNS decides to move the node to another subnet, so it can keep running and still comply with the demand.
So as you can see no matter what an external centralized entity can influence the protocol. Now the 3rd case would be the most common and preferrable one imo, but it still has downsides: if all nodes under US jurisdiction have to be moved to other subnets, that subnet will less have nodes overall and in fewer countries which reduces the level of decentralization and by having less nodes in usually not very populated countries the UX will suffer due to higher latency.
The only way to solve this issue is having subnets with permissionless nodes, this is one of the cool aspect of IC, with subnets the devs can choose based on their needs, but this perk is barely being used by Dfinity.
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A lot of countries but not all of them. US does not have control over every single data center in the world.
What do you mean it’s barley being used? AFAIK a badlands type subnet has not been developed and available for use yet.
Still they have authority in the majority of countries we label as 1st world, biggest exceptions are Russia and China, which also don’t shine when it comes to freedom of speech and blockchain support.
Yeah thats exactly what I mean, despite this theoretical possibility of having many types of subnets with varying level of performance and decentralization, we only have 2 types: app and system with the only difference being node count. We don’t even know if and how the protocol would work under different performance and security assumptions, e.g permissionless nodes run on home connections with no uptime guarantees and its a topic that barely gets talked about despite being one of the original selling points of Dfinity’s chain. Years ago they even talked about letting devs choose the amount of desired replication.
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Those things will have to be developed, they cant just flip a switch and turn it on. It would be great if they could develop and deliver every single feature they want within months but that’s not reality. The platform will take years to get fully developed.
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Sure but considering they are barely talked about by both Dfinity and the community and Badlands reception wasn’t the best due to how it was presented (a separate chain with a different token), it’s hard to understand where such upgrades sit on Dfinity’s roadmap and whether they are still planned or not.
A few years ago Dfinity talked a lot about orthogonal persistance and how on the IC you wouldn’t have to care about storing data or subnets and stuff like that, now we found out thats not a thing and all the jesus tech like Big Map is nowhere to be seen and isn’t even being worked on. Plus some of the proposed short term tasks seem to go against the vision Dom sold of “subnets being transparent to the dev”.
Obviously big features take time to build, but if core protocol stuff crucial for DX and decentralization seems to have been forgotten then I feel the need to remind the community, which isn’t made only by devs but also non tech people who believe IC runs on “Alien tech”, that it’s not all sunshine and roses and we are still missing fundamental features needed to make the IC an unmatched rival in the web 3 space.
If this stuff doesn’t get prioritized we are in for a rude awakening once BTC integration comes online, with Tornado cash down Spinner might be under the spot light and then I’m afraid of what could happen.
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I think you are being rather harsh on the team building these things. It took ETH four or five years to move from proof of work to proof of stake. And it’s a huge institution being backed by people with much more resources than Dfinity. And I’m still not even confident they’re going to get it done next month.
My point is it’s only been a year. I like to see them working on immediate issues and core protocol features that is needed right now. However, I am not opposed you lightning a little fire under their butts to get things moving.
I’m not harsh just being realistic, Dfinity hyped the project promising certain features before launch that are nowhere to be seen and often boast about the chains TPS and speed, but what is that good for if it can be influenced by powerful entities? Anyone can achieve high TPS, the challenge is doing it while solving the trilemma. ETH is slow but at least its decentralized enough the US government can’t change the protocol.
Well guess what better vertical scalability and improvements to data management were the most requested features in the “scalability” WG, better DX and more decentralization are core protocol features needed asap.
I know this stuff takes time to build, but you might understand that if Dfinity extensively talked about how great their chain was going to be due to all these features nowhere to be seen 1 year after launch and the DX that was initially promised seems to contraddicted by features that are being actively worked on, I can’t just watch and wait. I don’t want to light a fire under their butts for the sake of it, I’d just like to know whats going on and if their plans have changed over the years and at the same time make sure newcomers know what IC is missing.
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Interesting. So in Ethereum’s case they could not take down tornado cash because it is so censorship resistant. They instead had to resort to telling folks not to use it.
In the IC’s case, if they come after the data centers or nodes then we might not have the same luxury… I would assume only Badlands can solve that. Right?
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Correct, badlands and other features like node rotation, homomorphic encryption and multi party computation are the only way to solve the issue. Otherwise dApps which are illegal in all 1st world countries (possibly due to being against US laws) won’t be able to run in data centers hosted there and only nodes in minor countries will be able to host those dApps, resulting in reduced decentralization and worse UX as I said above.
Dfinity plans to solve the issue in the short term by allowing boundary nodes to blacklist controversial canisters, this is a stopgap to protect node operators but doesn’t solve the issue cause:
- Atm all boundary nodes are run by Dfinity, so they’ll probably share the same policy
- Dfinity stated this:
Since boundary nodes generally serve specific geographies and jurisdictions, this makes it possible that canisters will be accessible in some places, but not others, depending upon where legal action occurs.
So if you live in the US and all boundary nodes there don’t serve a canister it won’t be accessible to all US users. I made a post about this months ago if you are interested in the topic: Decentralization on the IC moving forward
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The US does not have jurisdiction over other countries. It is powerful, of course, and can influence other governments to take actions it wants, but its jurisdiction does not extend beyond its borders.
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US users would just then be served by BNs in other countries.
CLOUD act gives US authorities lots of power n this field, add political leverage with many countries and regulatory influence using the IMF and FATF and the end result is if the US wants to ban something its just a matter of time.
Have you read Dfinity’s official statement? It’s literally above the statement you quoted, as they currently intend to implement the system, unless you use a VPN, if there aren’t nodes serving the canister in your proximity you won’t be able to access it.
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Apparently there are ways to do it if you needed to, they just havent abstracted away regional node fallback for some reason. It’s probably just a configuration they can change anytime if they wanted or is necessary. Kind of a non issue to me.
It will be interesting to see how far the US government will actually go in terms of enforcing such a blanket sanction - especially since they’ll most likely end up playing Whack-A-Mole as mixers become more prevalent.
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Once a law is in place authorities can use their discretion on prosecution. They’ll simply go after people who put a lot of money into Tornado. Those sending money out to celebrities will get the pleasure of a few likes on their Twitter and that’s all they will achieve with the move.
The components are coming…we just need to build the software. T-ecdsa plus outgoing http will be incredibly powerful. Imagine a set of canisters that can not only sign things exclusively but also tell the internet about things.
You could theoretically create a piece of software that listens for a ping and if it stops, updates dns to a random domain and broadcasts it to a registry. It will even update the trusted domains so your II will keep working.
We are going to get there.
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True. Crypto and web3 has anti-corruption, transparency, accountability properties. We will get it inside governments and corporations to remove corruption. It doesnt matter how regulated it gets, it will always be able to do this.