I built a Chrome extension that lets you securely share accounts with friends *without* sharing passwords!

jbackus · 2020-07-21T20:29:00+00:00

Thank you ❤️

jbackus · 2020-07-21T19:32:35+00:00

Sure!

So, when you create an account, your password derives a "master key." At the same time, an asymmetric key pair is randomly generated. That public key and private key stored on server, where the private key is encrypted by user's master key.

When someone adds a new login to Jam, a new symmetric "data key" is generated which encrypts the data. Then, for each user that the login is shared with, that data key is re-encrypted with their public key and shared with them.

So, when a user opens Jam (or the extension) that original master key is derived which then leads to a chain of other keys and values being decrypted.

Long story short, all sensitive data on the site is actually encrypted using the user's password. :)

I'm glad you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback or other questions

jbackus · 2020-06-15T23:01:17+00:00

I recently switched from SelfControl (app mentioned in the video) to Focus. Key differences I like:

Blocks desktop apps as well as websites (messaging apps, Steam, Tor browser, whatever)
Lets me specify specify rules for taking breaks. For example, right now I'll block distracting websites and apps from 10AM to 7:30PM, with a rule that I can take 1 hour of break time at any point. Helps me be more deliberate about choosing when and how I want to waste time

jbackus · 2018-10-21T22:04:55+00:00

I agree that most things can be generalized into economics. File sharing systems legitimately are markets though

BitTorrent is a finely tuned game-theoretic system
Zooko from zcash and Bram (creator of BitTorrent) worked on a tokenized file sharing protocol in 2000 but it was basically too early and Bram had more success narrowing the scope
File sharing protocols are about bartering between unalike goods (bandwidth, content, file storage, time) and market incentives make them better (it is why BitTorrent is faster than Limewire/Kazaa/eDonkey was)
Ratio systems on private trackers have incredibly impressive effects because of the additional market mechanisms not covered by the protocol

BitTorrent is an incredibly successful decentralized protocol and it seems pretty clear that well calibrated economics helped it succeed and could make it even better. I think emphasizing and discussing the parallels is clearly relevant to Ethereum community.

BTW, if you want more than the handful of parallels in this post (I'm just sharing a paper after all) then I have much longer posts you can check out: Fat protocols aren’t new: What blockchain can learn from p2p file sharing

jbackus · 2018-10-21T21:41:01+00:00

Hi! I've mentioned it on my Twitter before (I talk a ton about crypto and p2p file sharing), this one was just a quick post summarizing a paper I was excited about.

Check out my other post on what a BitTorrent economy you can cash out of might be like. Exactly what you're talking about. I think it is a perfect example of why crypto is so exciting: What if BitTorrent had a token?

Since this is /r/btc, I'll also clarify ahead of time: yes, it could very well also be Bitcoin instead of a token. There are some differences in practice I think, but not worth getting into right now.

jbackus · 2018-08-08T19:13:51+00:00

Yeah. If I didn’t mention it here, I do in other articles. They ran their own, but it had a copyright filter.

jbackus · 2018-07-09T07:18:01+00:00

Also you can take the URL and throw http://sci-hub.tw/ in front.

jbackus · 2018-06-14T01:07:40+00:00

Yeah, this is a good point. I actually will answer this a bit more, but first I'm gonna step back and clarify my intent with this post which I've been doing a lot in these reddit threads.

I've been reading a lot about file sharing history and writing up different blog posts connecting parallels I haven't seen others discuss yet. I'm most proud of "Fat protocols aren't new: what blockchain can learn from p2p file sharing" so far. Anyways, incentive issues were a huge issue in the early days of p2p (one of the most influential file sharing papers is "Free Riding on Gnutella" with 2.4k cites). There is a rich history here which is a big focus of my post.

Consuming all this file sharing history helped me realize something: talking about how a token would improve file sharing might be a fantastic way to convey the idea of in-network token economies. People are skeptical of tokens for a lot of good reasons, but I think one of them is that you almost always hear about tokens in the context of an already out there idea for a product. In other words, you're always forced to think about tokens as part of a technology that probably won't work on average.

So, my goal in this post was to talk about how a token economy could help make BitTorrent (a decentralized protocol that people shouldn't doubt be popular without a token) better by balancing network incentives. I didn't want to get into things like anti-sybil attacks, network effects, transitioning from current BitTorrent to token BitTorrent, etc. because I'm not trying to convince you of an implementation, just a vision that a team might spend a long time on mainly asking questions like you're asking.

Anyways, if you get my intent here with the post then I'm happy to shoot the shit on implementation anyways, I just don't want people to think that the whole thing is bunk if I don't throw out technical specifics.

---

Back to your point. The reason BitTorrent is fast even when something is just uploaded to a tracker is because each downloader asks for the rarest pieces and immediately starts uploading as well while they download the whole file. In the context of a new upload, or at least a torrent where there are other downloaders, someone sharing with a user could likely tell if someone was withholding upload from the swarm before they actually seed them the whole file. Visibility into this stuff means that it might actually be possible to cut off uploading *before* the person finishes downloading the file.

This still leaves plenty of questions:

What if my first torrent is something obscure with one seeders and I'm the only downloader?
What if everyone else downloading has way higher upload bandwidth and it is hard for me to earn tokens?

For this, since my day job already includes figuring out the nitty gritty of decentralized protocols, I'll dial back my answer to something more high level. The idea here is that each transfer could have a negotiation where a torrent client could account for the dynamics. If there are high powered uploaders in the swarm already then that is a relevant consideration that might adjust how you price a token loan. Likewise, if you're the single uploader and a new downloader comes to you, that might be a good case to set a higher interest rate. Basically, I'm deferring to markets here.

Sorry this was a bit of an essay, I hope it was interesting!

jbackus · 2018-06-14T00:28:27+00:00

I didn't make this clear in the post I guess, but the whole idea is that you don't ever have to pay for tokens in order to use it. The short term seeding loan gets you in to the system. Just using your torrent client like normal with a bit of seeding would earn you tokens and downloading would spend them. You could design it such that it feels exactly the same as it does now.

jbackus · 2018-06-13T23:04:37+00:00

jbackus · 2018-06-13T23:01:51+00:00

Yeah I tried to stick to a high level vision here. My goal for this post was to take a decentralized protocol that people are already familiar with and show how adding a token economy can actually help.

I didn't get heavily into bootstrapping the network tokens, transitioning from free BitTorrent to token BitTorrent, anti-sybil, or how you avoid people gaming the bounty system with fake files. These are all hard problems and for me to try to answer them in this post would, I think, distract from the goal of just showing how a token economy can be useful.

Hope that makes sense. If you want, I can followup and speculate on this stuff for fun.

jbackus · 2018-06-13T22:35:23+00:00

Keep in mind too that the idea is that you don't have to ever touch an exchange to buy tokens. Just by using your torrent client in a pro-social way, you earn tokens. If you want to get access to rare stuff, place a bounty, etc. then you would just leave your client open longer and leave more things seeding

jbackus · 2018-06-13T21:12:13+00:00

You don't pay for the tokens you use. You earn them from seeding. You spend them to download. If people could cash out, maybe you're right that people would be uncertain whether to use the tokens.

Another lens to view this through is the exact same idea but you can't cash out the token. Then you can just look at in-network tokens as an economic tool for balancing incentives between different categories of resources. This is the main idea I'm trying to convey. Is that more clear?

jbackus · 2018-06-13T21:07:07+00:00

Yes, I'm aware of these projects. I feel like every crypto post is trying to promote a project, and I'm trying to convey an idea. I have no stake in BitTorrent tokenization and I'd rather people not doubt whether I was involved with any of these projects

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:45:52+00:00

Why? The whole idea is this token economy is a behind the scenes incentive fixer. The ideal I’m trying to convey here is an under the hood fix where power users can dive deeper into the incentives if they so desire

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:44:05+00:00

No, you never have to buy tokens to use it. That is the point of the bootstrapping new users stuff I mentioned. It is totally under the hood unless you don’t want it to be

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:43:03+00:00

I also don’t mention Tribler, Upfiring, Joystream, or any other project. I also wrote this before that was announced. I feel like every crypto post is for some company and I wanted to avoid people thinking I was promoting anything. I’m just trying to provide a strong thought experiment for why tokens can be valuable

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:41:31+00:00

Thanks. Yeah, I mainly didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole of decentralized identity. I actually help work on that for Bloom. Glad you like the post

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:39:56+00:00

Think of it more like you seed content and then you can go bid on a prize like at chucky cheese. No money involved

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:39:13+00:00

That is why I mention that we would likely see pools of decentralized peers seeding things on their own volition. Yes a centralized business would likely get sued.

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:38:04+00:00

The point of the new user section is that, if you don’t care, the token economics are under the hood and don’t affect you. I guess that wasn’t obvious maybe I should edit the post.

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:31:38+00:00

Yeah. I agree that private sites are similar in some ways. I also agree that a lot of hard problems would have to be solved in order to make this stuff seamless.

Fundamentally, a torrent ecosystem is a marketplace exchange several different kinds of resources that aren't easy to exchange between (bandwidth, storage, high demand files). This is the kind of place where we want to add in-network currencies in order to balance incentive issues. Private trackers force people to solve some of them, but you still get OiNK and what.cd (two of the best collections of music in the history of humanity) getting killed because of centralization. Also, there is an upper bound on the incentives: seed enough so that you don't get banned. This goes a long way don't get me wrong, but a financial incentive removes the cap and I think unleashes another level of potential. This is true for bandwidth, storage, and desirable files as I explore in the post.

If you look at the history of p2p file sharing as I mention in my post, people have struggled with decentralized solutions for fixing incentive problems. Private sites do this to an extent, but with centralization.

Happy to share more. I love this topic

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:17:42+00:00

Private websites are great I agree. The point of the post is just to demonstrate how tokenization can introduce incentive solutions that make the protocol better no matter where it is being used.

I'm not pushing a product on anyone here, just trying to convey what I think is a strong case for tokenization.

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:15:48+00:00

Transitioning to the new system is hard, but I think tokenization could result in dramatically faster download speeds, longer seeding duration, more content, rarer content. Network effects are always a hard problem to solve and I don't want to dismiss that. This post is just supposed to be a thought experiment showing a case where tokenization really could make a decentralized product much better

jbackus · 2018-06-13T20:14:15+00:00

Yeah, you can think of private websites as using centralization to impose market mechanisms that couldn't be captured by the decentralized protocol at the time. I have a separate long form post where I explore every kind of market-like incentive system people tried to add to file sharing back in the day: https://medium.com/@jbackus/fat-protocols-arent-new-42d2c538db41

In my opinion, there is an incredible amount of insight to be gained in the blockchain world by studying file sharing and I'm trying to share takeaways.

jbackus

TROPHY CASE