gistfile1.md

dappnet update #1

since aug 2022, we raised 25eth from the NFT sale, hit 14M impressions across the web

I want to thank everyone, this was genuinely the best moment out of all of last year and brought me out of a long depression into having some sense of meaning and purpose

my goal has always to build what I think should exist - DeFi is the permissionless, global access for anyone to transact and own their own money.

But what use is sovereign money when you can't even access it? Seriously. And access - means accessibility. It should be technically accessible (meaning, always available from a censorship-resistant P2P network) as well as humanely accessible - as simple to use as your iPhone.

I will be launching this soon. There are a couple of things we've been working on:

• figuring out the project. Dappnet is a public good. It's not a business, it's not a protocol, it's simply a public good.

• getting legal advice. In touch with some lawyers to get some legal clarity / positioning. Once we have advice, then we will be go for launch.

• solving the problem of secure ENS lookups. (issue) while your .eth domain can never be taken away from you, RPC providers censor some domains like tornado from being looked up. I designed (https://hackmd.io/wAfo9dm9S0iMkaXWRIsYUw) and built a solution - a verifiable RPC service. it's open-source and available for the ecosystem here- https://github.com/liamzebedee/eth-verifiable-rpc

• turning the proof-of-concept into a product.

  • automatic updates. we built out automatic updates for dappnet in December. Users won't have to redownload to get the upgraded software. Future updates will be completely trustless - and delivered over IPFS/BitTorrent - meaning not even Dappnet itself can be censored.
  • performance. Dappnet PoC used a very hacky implementation of a proxy server, which was leaking memory. We rewrote this as a Rust-based SOCKS5 proxy which didn't do that.

• a lot of research and development, which are collected in a public repo dappnet-features.

  • developing a way to open dapps inside Dappnet, instead of installing a Chrome/Firefox extension (which is much more brittle, UX-wise).
  • developing a private RPC marketplace for Ethereum nodes, so Dappnet users have full privacy while using DeFi.
  • developing a PoC wallet that's integrated into Dappnet.
  • uncensorable file sharing that's built into the browser - ipfs:// link support

• launch preparation.

  • setting up a Discord.
  • additional items here - dappnetbby/dappnet-features#11

the end goals

• uncensorable dapps. Privacy is a human right. Crypto is free speech.
  • tornadocash
• secure access to DeFi.
  • No more DNS attacks on Curve.fi.
  • No more RPC censorship from Infura.
• you can always access your money
  • removing the unjust and frequently incorrect TPM/Chainanalysis code from dapps
• freedom of speech, experimentation, politics aside.
  • prediction markets
  • distributing datasets P2P
  • distributing new AI models that aren't censored or sanitized
• robust infrastructure, open without bias
  • teleportr
• do it fast.

There is a lot of nuance to my values here:

• We should be responsible about what we put into the world. Setting the tone matters.
• Money laundering is bad.
• Privacy is a human right.
• Regulators suck, it's our job to educate. But also:
• Ideas want to be free.
  • "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself, but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."
  • Since the Internet, no-one has ever censored an idea - not the Sony PS3 private key, not Streisand's house, not even bitcoin.
• Ideas can't be censored. Once you realise it's possible, it will happen eventually - pandora's box. So the only logical action-
• Build what needs to exist - ENS/IPFS already existed, Dappnet was primarily a product innovation in UX. And-
• Talk less. Amplify building the future.

  best thing is just to keep building with a decentralization ethos

  one guy coding something like dappnet is way more valuable than all the oxygen burned with empty words in D.C. https://twitter.com/lex_node/status/1578759530523287553

• Focus on educating people, rather than controlling them. Society is good. Capitalism is the best of the worse. Anarchism is ridiculous.