shazow

@shazow.eth

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Btw dunno if you saw this post making the rounds, but you may like it as an example of "not using the word decentralized" while talking about important properties/failure modes: https://shazow.net/posts/open-social-2025/

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Networks can absolutely be forked. See netsplits on IRC, see BCH/ETC, see IPv4/IPv6. We can design forkability both in ways that are continuous/discontinuous (eg ETH can fork, but a RWA on Ethereum cannot). I wouldn't claim that SMTP is designed to be decentralized, it is the definition of federated which is different from decentralized. SMTP is the SWIFT of fiat. Honestly we should stop using the word "decentralized", it just makes people talk past each other. Would be happier to talk about specific properties/failure modes instead. Re we can build centralized things on top of decentralized things, I do talk about that in the post:

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Hot take: rebrand "spam" as "noise" (vs "signal") I see y'all spend a lot of time explaining that spam in farcaster is not the same thing as spam on email, real people who post a lot that doesn't result in engagement is noise the same as bots creating noise. Might make it a bit more legible.

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Followup: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje7ledqvyqo

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a lot of scarcity exists by virtue of control or resource imbalance. hard to imagine ai solving imperialism (or individualism at smaller scales) and balancing combinatorial resource contentions (including human population).

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That is an incorrect conception of centralization. Someone being a leader in a decentralized system does not make the system centralized. Gotta consider it through the lens of failure modes: What power does Linus have over you that is not protected by the license? Can he stop you from using Linux? Can he stop you from extending it? Etc.

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I honestly don't think moxie is willing to entertain the differences. It's a false dichotomy as I said in the other thread with @links (centralized vs federated, ignoring decentralization). I am not advocating for federation. Yes, it's sometimes faster to iterate when you're centralized, but here's a strong counterexample: permissive open source is as decentralized as it gets, and it almost always wins in open market conditions against centralized proprietary competitors. Have to build abusive monopolies and walled gardens to keep an edge. It's not my fav post anymore but this 2021 era piece talks about it too: https://shazow.net/posts/decentralization/

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I shared that post mainly because I disagreed with most of it. :) But above all, federation is not decentralization. Fiat is centralized, SWIFT is federated, Ethereum is decentralized.

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Depends which narrative we're pumping today! :P Feels pretty aligned with the "there are like only 6 major smart contracts that matter" narrative. https://x.com/aeyakovenko/status/1875407996764958750

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I've tried every kind of "funding open source" gimmick over the years, wrote many posts and gave talks about it! Here's some: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/how-to-make-your-open-source-project-thrive-with-andrey-petrov https://medium.com/@shazow/urllib3-stripe-and-open-source-grants-edb9c0e46e82 Grants usually work best. We've had grants from governments (thanks Luxembourg), corporations (thanks Stripe, AMEX), DAOs (thanks Optimism). We manage our treasury on OpenCollective (quite expensive!), we have several blog posts where we outline where we get our money and how we're spending it: https://urllib3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/sponsors.html

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urllib3's secret weapon is all the participating maintainers we've had along the way. I literally could not have done this on my own (I don't have a multi-decade attention span for a single project, very few people do). I didn't know this at the time, but creating an environment where other people wanted to participate and felt that they had collective ownership in the project is the key to urllib3's longevity. There was a moment where I had to let go of some ego to level this up (eg move the project from my namespace to its own org, give up some control, let other people make important decisions I may have disagreed with, etc), but in retrospect these were extremely high-value decisions that cost me ~nothing. Everything else (being early to some ideas, having a high bar of standards like code quality and full test coverage, etc) helped too, but a distant second.

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urllib3 gets *over* a billion downloads per month. very demure and mindful number, very cutesy

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Hot take: Onchain slashing make social slashing more viable. Social slashing alone is not enough because there are no induced damages. Consider the scenario where ~19 entities who control 50.1% of the total amount staked decide to do an urgent secret bug fix upgrade, what happens? The network splits, both forks continue to create blocks but each other half starts losing stake from inactivity leaks (or worse, gets slashed for double-signing by participating in both). Without onchain slashing, a majority can upgrade the network without creating direct damages (like Solana did last month). With onchain slashing, it's a hostile coup. A group of doxxed organizations colluding in secret (excluding public access to participate) directly creates massive damages ripe for lawsuits (a form of social slashing?). It's not a "no harm, no foul" situation, even if the upgrade was well-intentioned (urgent bug fix). If I were a major Ethereum validator, I would think twice before participating in secret upgrades.

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if they end up AGPL'ing i might quit farcaster altogether lol

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c h o n k perspective

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Allegedly the client is getting open sourced!

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I believe Toly when he says he wants to improve the status quo around financial instruments ("better NASDAQ" or whatever). Perhaps he doesn't believe in our ability to create something truly collectively owned which competes with nation states. Maybe he's a markets-maximalist? It's frustrating that he's not very charitable to our cause and dismissive of anything inconvenient (excusing it off with "engineering mentality" or whatever), but I don't think he's a scumbag. 💚

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I feel you and relate in many ways, but try not to hate. :) Let's stand for something rather than against things.

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Quick primer on how Solana's fee markets are different from Ethereum, to all the people experiencing "defacto liveness failures" while trying to Warplet Solana things rn.

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this worked once, but now it's not working

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