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backus's profile
John Backus
John Backus
John Backus
@backus

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John Backus

@backus

Seeking alternative compression. Hopefully wrong on average. Shameless. Started @getcognito and @bloom

San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2012

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    1. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      BitTorrent won the legal war by being thorough: • Website talked about hosting not downloading • @bramcohen only talked about legal uses. Claimed no profit motive • Prominent free speech defense on website • Redundancy via OSS clients • Outsourced liability to Pirate Baypic.twitter.com/iHEznYJ4Ba

      1 reply 4 retweets 24 likes
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    2. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      Decentralized protocols don't absolve the company of responsibility, it just shifts to the client: • Limewire had a copyright filter, disabled by default. Court reaction: "What? Make it mandatory!" • Kazaa had a NSFW filter. Court reaction: "So you could filter copyright too!"

      1 reply 1 retweet 20 likes
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    3. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      Passing the buck to activists buys room to decentralize. While Hollywood fought Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent community added • Multitracker support (takedown resilience) • DHTs (decentralized torrent metadata storage) • PEX (peer discovery w/o trackers) Helping The Pirate Bay!pic.twitter.com/zB98rEZTzv

      1 reply 1 retweet 14 likes
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    4. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      Some look at the file sharing movement and say "BitTorrent didn't win, Netflix+Spotify did!" Decentralization exploits legal boundaries, exposing rent seeking in anti-competitive industries. BitTorrent created the conditions that allowed Netflix and Spotify to exist We all won!

      2 replies 12 retweets 60 likes
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    5. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      The political framing for decentralization is "censorship resistance." The market framing is "anti-competitive market resistance." P2P file sharing corrected anti-consumer markets for music and movies. Imagine what we can unlock with Bitcoin and Ethereum!

      1 reply 5 retweets 31 likes
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    6. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      The chronology of the "most popular file sharing app" is roughly: Napster Limewire Kazaa eDonkey BitTorrent Reflecting "minimum viable decentralization" over time. Limewire was early, Kazaa more usable. BitTorrent's UX was bad, but won legal long gamehttps://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-d813dcf653fc …

      1 reply 3 retweets 19 likes
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    7. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      When decentralizing, half measures bite you in the ass: 🙈 Aimster obscured searches and user IPs from its protocol 💪 BitTorrent disowned search and left IPs in the clear Courts argued Aimster's conduct was "willful blindness." BitTorrent's choices made its position strongerpic.twitter.com/wAsLArkhWT

      Bram Cohen
      1 reply 1 retweet 16 likes
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    8. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 11

      Boiling down decentralization movements, we build technology to resist governments installing filters: 💿 Copyright (BitTorrent) 💰 Anti-money laundering (Bitcoin) 💌 Content/communication (Tor) Legal battles and tech evolution continues until its too hard to install a filter

      5 replies 12 retweets 45 likes
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    9. BETH ​‏ @beth0widthspace Sep 12
      Replying to @backus

      I'm confused. Why would one want to resist anti-money laundering filters? What rent-seeking is being exposed?

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. John Backus‏ @backus Sep 12
      Replying to @beth0widthspace

      In practice, the effect of a government filter is more than the literal filtering. In the US, you need money transmitter licenses (MTLs) in every state. Expensive and time consuming. Killed centralized currency e-gold in ‘09 taking 1mdc w/ it I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold#Changing_definition_of_a_money_transmitter …

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      John Backus‏ @backus Sep 12
      Replying to @backus @beth0widthspace

      Requiring a license to do business is a hallmark of rent-seeking, big and small. Sometimes it is pure special interest like dentists creating barriers around teeth whitening. Sometimes it is market paralysis: huge cost to enter, uncertainty that gov could cut you off at any time

      5:40 PM - 12 Sep 2018
      0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes

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