https://consensus-health.torproject.org/

Looks like the Tor consensus is broken at this moment. Unclear why. It'll take awhile for the network to fail. But if it stays broken it eventually will as the consensus becomes invalid.

Reminder: Tor is centralized. Knocking out a half dozen directory authorities is enough to shut it down.

@pete I2P might gain popularity from this, like mastodon did with the Twitter censorship events... I’m not even sure I2P is still being developed actually, I looked at it a while back. I remember it seemed to have a more distributed architecture than Tor.

@kexkey ...which is kinda scary: what stops MITM attacks? Tor isn't great against that. But at least humans run it, and node operators are a good mix of anonymous and not.

@kexkey sorry, specifically, sybil attacks.

@pete @kexkey we need to bridge meat space and cyber space with distributed trust networks somehow.

Like if we had communities that could determine who was a trusted actor couldn't each community maintain consensus for that community, then those communities form branches to each other based on a different trust model?

That way if one community goes down you can likely still have connections to route around it through trusted parties?

@untappedgrowth @kexkey well, now you're getting into very tricky UI/UX problems. :)

@pete @kexkey humans are used to social congregating into tribes. That is a completely solvable problem

@untappedgrowth @kexkey Implementing tribes well is a very tricky UI/UX problem!

@pete @kexkey *this* I can help with.

What are the current problems that pop up in attempts to address this?

@untappedgrowth @kexkey Not clear really. Hardly anyone has tried lately. Keybase is probably your best example.

@pete @kexkey yeah, that nowhere near resembles a mimicry of the organic into the digital space.

We as humans are used to delegating trust, even in groups. This is doable. It just gets into authority structure & culture creation through incentives... which get screwed up massively by the majority of organizations and businesses once they pass a certain size, but it can be done well.

This is kind of like the digital version of the city state model we all foresee in Bitcoin future. @robingrant

@untappedgrowth @kexkey @robingrant one of the problems of delegating trust is moderation is a lot of work...

@pete @kexkey @robingrant 100% agree

Correct me if I'm wrong in boiling it down this far but-

web 1.0 essentially treated all academic nodes joining as trusted

Web 2.0 uses centralized authorities to say who isn't trusted

But *neither* of these matches how we as humans network irl.

The magic of Bitcoin is POW ostracizing the untrusted outcomes so that moderation happens organically. This can be done socially too where bad actors simply get eliminated and everything just carries on.
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