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Twister: The Fully Decentralized P2P Microblogging Platform
New submitter miguelfreitas writes "I'd like to offer for discussion with Slashdot readers this new proposal: twister is the fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform leveraging from the free software implementations of Bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols. This is not being pushed by any company or organization, it is the work of a single Brazilian researcher (me). The idea is to provide a scalable platform for censor-resistant public posting together with private messaging with end-to-end encryption. The basic concepts are described in FAQ while more in-depth technical details are available from the white paper. The twister network is running already: the client can be compiled for Linux, Mac, and Android. 2500 usernames were registered in the first 6 days."
2500 users is impressive. That's about half the size of all Linux desktop users, right?
Tech bubble anyone?
From the twister FAQ:
The architecture is designed so that other users can’t know if you are online or not, what your IP address is, or which users’ posts you might be reading.
also:
Q: How do you make money out of this? A: I don't.
I like your definition of "Tech bubble" - we can use it as a label to beat down or promote all sorts of extreme views on the internets.
Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
The software is built off the blockchain model of the Bitcoin protocol. A key pair is recognized in the blockchain as being associated with a specific username, and it's there for all nodes to agree upon.
And yes, I know it's for distributing information without the iron heel of an oppressive government digging into you. And in all fairness, it could be used for that. In reality though, the people most likely to use this aren't actual freedom crusaders.
A genuine, bona-fide, copyright cartel internet shill. Bingo - Got one!
Yes people, let's not support this because we all know what sorts of unsavoury activities will be found there! It just kills me that someone might be doing something I don't like on the internet, and there will be no way to stop it!!!
There's no value in any of the other activities that might go on - none whatsoever.
My definition of Tech Bubble: Your business doesn't have to generate revenue in order to grab an investment for a few billion. All you need to do is combine some popular buzzwords ("MicroBlogging", "Scalable" and "BitCoin").
This guy can sell himself as the next generation of Twitter: "We use BitCoin technologies to enable Scalable Microblogging" :)
The blockchain will soon grow disproportionally large. Right now it's probably managable, but you know what? I'm not downloading tens of gigabytes of blockchain just for the plessure of reading lols on decentralized blogs.
Nice idea though...
Apropos of nothing, where are you getting this meme?
I only ask because it doesn't happen to be true, yet it's an oft-repeated meme that everyone seems to put forth as the BitCoin "killer" flaw.
tl;dr Here's the relevant passage from that link:
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. [...] the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.
If one wanted to kill an idea, if one wanted to wage a propaganda war on an extreme viewpoint or tool, here is one way to do it.
It certainly seems plausible given the basics. Every transaction will add to the blockchain, and we process a whopping-big number of financial transactions every day! The blockchain will soon become unmanageable, and BitCoin will fail!
I've seen this in other arenas, including politics. Al Gore invented the internet for instance. He didn't, he never said that he did, but he did say something vaguely similar. It certainly seems plausible that this is what he did say, and boy what a gaff! It makes him look sooooo silly!
We should promote our own agenda this way - the UK spam filter, for instance. What right risible meme can we invent that is close enough to reality that people would find it plausible, repeat it, and use it to label the filter as badly conceived?
Let's use the the same techniques our opponents use. Human psychology, for the win.
then how do you stop some bot taking many usernames every second? (doesn't say in the FAQ, and it could be a real problem if multiple bots try to generate many usernames each)