@x_cli how would a consensus protocol help with moderation? 🧐 What was your idea?
@netbroom Centralized denylists (a.k.a. RBL) are subject to arbitrary decisions. We have seen this several times in the past for emails. By using a consensus protocol, that is resistant to byzantine failures, we could reduce the risk of arbitrary decisions. Problem is that most byzantine protocols are distributed but we still have to believe a specific set of "generals" that were chosen by a central authority. Federated Byzantine Agreement might be interesting to explore. This was introduced with the Stellar Consensus Protocol but I believe it could be used for other purposes.
@x_cli But the main part of the blocklist problem is social – what evidence is needed for a server to decide to block? BFT only solves a minor technical subproblem (eventual consistency) of the whole problem, and even that problem is not strictly necessary to be solved in practice – if the evidence (in whatever form) is published openly then usually it's enough for specific servers to attempt acquiring it and make a decision locally based on the evidence they manage to access. The "making a decision" part is hard, the evidence aggregation less so.
So if I'm right (I might have misunderstood your proposal) I am sad to inform you that you committed the Cardinal Sin of Cryptobros – proposing a technical solution for a relatively simple part of a mostly social problem. ;<
// Also, this is probably not even Sybil-resistant, but I don't remember Stellar well enough to be absolutely sure.
@netbroom
@x_cli Huh, I know some of the people involved in that project, cool.
Anyway, this way you are (implicitly) applying a naive majoritarian/democratic solution to the social part of the problem. That's not necessarily wrong (although I suspect it wouldn't be good enough for many minorities), but the BFT itself doesn't bring much to the table – you could just as well have people personally publish signed votes and have instances collect them and process them locally. It's not a huge problem if some instances will disagree on a ban anyway, but even that should happen rarely, due to votes rarely being close to equilibrium.
And there are still Sybil attacks – e.g. Tournesol seems to be mostly banking on people not abusing it, but it's not strictly speaking secure against them, they seem to only require an email? (I haven't read the paper, perhaps they have some nifty abuse detection, but I strongly suspect it's centralized if they have one.) If something (whether Tournesol or this hypothetical moderation system) became popular enough there would be people motivated enough to abuse any such vulnerability. :/
@x_cli Ah, I would prefer not to disclose my precise involvement, suffice to say I have (for silly reasons) strong financial incentives to shill for cryptocurrency, but I am almost exclusively critical of it, I hope that is alright. ">_>
And consensus algorithms are quite fascinating! So are the social problems that they might provide small assistance in solving, but imo they require much more social technology rather than computer science.
@timorl
Oh and the usual disclosure in this kind of conversation: I own about 15 BAT from using Brave and sold some for 20€ in 2021. And that's it. I have no interest in cryptocurrencies but I like studying protocols for the sake of knowledge 😅
@netbroom