Mini Web3 Q&A

Changes to Odysee & Session

Jun 28, 2024

It has been argued that Substack notes needs more love. I take a glance once in a while and if I’m asked questions I’m always happy to answer.

Michael Ginsburg

is pretty willing to take me up on this so I’m going to share some of the questions I’ve answered here in case others are curious.

If you have your own questions don’t hesitate to tag me or comment here!

Summary

I’m a doomer on web3 but not decentralization.
If this seems like a contradiction to you, you may want to read on.
I’m personally more interested in the technical details, and I have nothing against those who make use of Odysee/Session. Inevitably, we are all going to have to face the root concerns of where our information is stored, how it is shared, and what are the best discovery mechanisms.

Onwards with the Q&A…

Odysee / Cardano

Replied with the following:

Neither of those options scream game-changer to me. If it was down to those two I’d tell them to try looking again. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was them fishing for which ecosystem would profit them the most in the short-term.

You can build what Odysee was with any smart contract platform. Doing it in ETC would probably be cheaper and more robust, and you could entirely avoid having to make a new token.

You know what you can't do with any of those? Seamlessly integrate it with the normal web without compromising decentralization. This is the problem they ran into when they made Odysee to be a front-end for the lbry network, and there is no good solution for it.

I’m not sure what their plan is, but I don’t think they’re working on solving the right problems.

Michael followed up with:

I’m quite familiar with Cardano and I believe they had a partnership with the WEF at some point.
Don’t know much about Arweave. What is their consensus mechanism?

I then replied with:

Self-hosting will always be better than blockchain, ultimately this is no different. As far as I’m concerned, Cardano is a regime system. This looks more like Odysee selling out rather than innovating.

Session Token

I replied with:
I don’t consider a project taking on massive new challenges much of a good sign by itself. Ideally the primary concern should be getting session to be as accessible and secure as possible, and not be too worried about other projects.

These days, I’m more and more skeptical of web3 as a whole because I think it tends to teach the wrong lessons about data security by hiding it behind potentially unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a quote from their upgrade page:

Some things that Session Token is not: it is not needed to use Session — ever. All core features of Session will remain free and available to the people who need it. Notably, Session Token is also not a privacy coin — but that doesn’t mean that Session is less private.
Privacy coins, such as Oxen, are a special kind of cryptocurrency designed to conceal transaction details and wallet identities. However, Oxen encountered significant challenges when it came to adoption, particularly among people less familiar with cryptocurrencies. Its potential for ensuring transaction privacy remained largely untapped, which weakened the practical level of privacy it could offer .
In contrast, while Session Token is not inherently a privacy coin, it maintains a comparable level of practical privacy for its users, mirroring the levels that Oxen achieved (given its low usage). Moreover, the integration with Ethereum opens avenues for leveraging its evolving suite of on-chain, privacy-preserving protocols. These protocols, accessible without special permissions, offer users of Session Token additional options to further enhance their privacy.

Michael asks:

What do you think the financial benefit is for OPTF/Session from integrating with ETH?

My response:

I can only speculate, but as I point out in my other reply making a new token just makes sense from a business point of view. It can be as simple as just running a P&D or defensible if they think they can get more participation without the oxen network.

On the other hand, running on ETH can be an advantage if institutions/money managers are given the green light to purchase them, I know the ETH ETF just launched so I have no idea what options that opens up in the near future.

As we have seen with Bitcoin rising over the last year (not as fast AI mania though 😂) I think we are seeing the early stages of a crypto hype cycle so people start participating for it’s sake to be where the money is.

I replied with:

I’ve written about them in general. I’m generally pessimistic about most implementations because they all started with the EVM but the general idea seems worthwhile. It’s worth pointing out that Bitcoin itself had programmable features and could have supported other novel uses as well.

In my opinion smart contracts are only as useful as the platform they are built on. This is partially why I’m so biased against PoS because if you want an actually robust system you need the consensus mechanism to be based on the goal itself. PoS is just easy to implement and acts as a “scan for cheaters after the fact” strategy.

I once experimented with creating a message board for Ethereum classic that allowed anyone with ETC to make posts and replies, pretty straight forward. If somebody makes a EVM contract that’s used for bad, is the smart contract writer liable? It seems that the justice system believes so.

If you wanted to turn that into your own cash cow you’d then have to wrap the functionality in a new token so you could give it out to people to try, but this puts you in the position where you’re forced to “de-decentralize” your product, nullifying the point of doing it at all. Which is where most of my pessimism about web3 comes from. In most cases you don’t actually need a new token, but the business case does.