Principles Seminar - Session 3: Censorship Resistance

In the third session of this 12 part series, join status' core contributors as we discuss and debate to which degree we uphold our principles, how we can improve our performance, and what we're adding to our Wall of Shame.

II. Censorship-resistance

We enable free flow of information. No content is under surveillance. We abide by the cryptoeconomic design principle of censorship resistance. Even stronger, Status is an agnostic platform for information.

Slide Deck:

Seminar Opening presentation

Seminar Index

Censorship Resistance Session Notes (reprinted below)

Youtube:

Wall of shame

1 Obviously, which already exists, cluster

2 Release channels Play store and App store

3 Assumes Ethereum is operational

4 Assumes an internet connection

5 Whisper easy to DDoS (maybe not censorship)

6 Reliance on Infura quite a bit

7 Legal entity provides attack vector

8 We rely on a small number of (fiat) bank accounts to compensate core contributors

9 Organization design is somewhat centralized (not a DAO)

10 We don't have a strong open source community (dependence on CCs)

12 Non-standard ports make ISP blocking super easy

13 NAT traversal isn't implemented for Desktop to be bootnodes

14 GitHub as a single point of failure (node.js)

15 Requires Internet to operate

16 Keeping failure local, right now more system on/off

Oskar - intro - looking at how the principle came into existance
Everyone-adding Wall of Shame thoughts

Michael:
let's start from single points of failure

Ricardo:
platforms and search engines - able to censore at ISP level, dictatorship.
How do you get around something like that?
That's what we are solving at a first level

Corey:
Ned and I talked about onramping people right from your phone - something needs to be done at connection level, P2P

Ricardo:
Mesh network

Michael:
Let's not get too deep into technical implementations

Corey:
the way we use the internet is too centralized, and that's prime terrain for censorship

Ricardo:
Bigger problem than the ISP

Jacek:
Focus on building something that would only fail locally - mesh is cool but use could still be penalized or blocked

Michael:
What can we do?

Ricardo:
Specific swarms working on it - ultra light client

Michael:
Move the conversation to App Store

Jacek:
Economic incentive vs enthusiasm
specialized nodes that do these things
incentivize people to run these services
distribute through something like swarm
users get access that way, doesn't matter where the service is distributed

Ricardo:
Apple doesn't allow downloads outside of their app store

Igor:
Different distributions we can try

Corey:
People who need it will find a way to have it - how much time should we spend building so many options?

Oskar:
How about the social aspect?

Igor:
At this moment we're mostly relying on CC's. It's hard for others to work/build on Status

Ned:
Go and see what others need - what blocks, where to start. Find the bone structure of all these elements, in these places where tech and language are different from what we use. Enable them to use their framework - rethink/reshape these elements

Jazek:
Contributors come when something is useful to them, hard to come into the project unless you're an ETH enthusiast.

Hester:
Some dev switched from looking at Status to develop for Status. Can't recall the exact details but they had more documentation available. Perhaps we need to focus more on that - we have lots more available now, and Studio can also help

Igor:
We have ENS documentation now, we should be pushing more blog content

Barry:
in voting we filtered out poles that were created twice - so every pole, when you create a new one is just sequential

Corey:
We can't give up user data if we don't have the data. If we work to NOT have any power whatsoever, we can't be forced into anything

Michael:
How would people react if at some point we can't have a legal company and can only be paid in crypto?

Corey:
I rely on the legal company to live a normal life

Ricardo:
We shouldn't even have one :)

Jacek:
Hmm classic compromise - same as Slack vs Status, you need to compromise in the sake of efficiency, up to a certain point

Michael:
Can we be honest with ourselves - maybe we need these legal companies and can't exist otherwise

Ricardo:
Maybe we should decentralize that too, and have a lot of legal companies

Barry:
Is the DAO an extention of our legal entity?

Oskar:
Let's table that til tomorrow - we'll have a session on that

Michael:
What are we gonna do if someone turns off our cluster?

Oskar:
we could (very hackey) run stuff locally, Adam and others are relatively close to have a contingency plan if need

Corey:
As soon as we have the option, we should kill the cluster, the same way we're doing with using Status vs Slack. Even if it's cranky at the beginning it will force to improve it faster.

Join the discussion here.