As the bear market seems to be relaxing into the new year, many honest people, especially beloved crypto anarchists, are looking for a way to dump away their "shitcash" like USD or EUR. However, if they're not careful, they may find that they've paid for a dystopia they didn't book, except that it might seem like a utopia to some or most of them.
Today we interview the owner of TON SEARCHING, the first search engine for TON sites, which make up The Open Network darkweb. If you’ve never read about any of this, here it is a quick start.
TON SEARCHING is instead available here, and the founder replies to the telegram address: @searching_ton. It must be noted that he is not affiliated to the TON foundation and all opinions are his, and may not reflect the view of the TON developer community at large.
Q: We have Tor, why do we need Ton, what’s so special about garlic routing? Wasn’t onion good enough?
A: Tor relies entirely on volunteers, the absence of a monetization model is why it has failed to create incentives to build a significant bandwidth infrastructure for mass adoption. Hidden services on the onion router have a hard time transferring or streaming big files, and ddos are a plague. TON Proxy 2.0 should address this issue by allowing users to pay TON Proxy Relays to provide bandwidth through Ton Lightening payment channels. Another big problem with Tor is the lack of human readable domains, and this has been fixed by TON DNS. Finally files on Tor Hidden Services can easily be lost forever and TON storage solves this problem, and that is monetized too.
Q: Can’t we use IPFS or BIttorrent to immortalize darkweb files?
A: if you like to expose your IP address or the IP address of Tor exit nodes (making them target of law enforced censorship in case of illegal content) you’re welcome. When TON Proxy 2.0 will be online TON storage will be totally anonymous by default.
Q: Ok, so basically we have the darkweb with high speed streaming and unlimited file sharing. Doesn’t that allow a malicious developer to code browser extensions that redirect paywall pages to pirated archive copies of the same content abolishing de facto DMCA? Isn’t that going to be the ultimate copyright infringement paradise?
A: I guess that’s technically possible.
Q: A darkweb mass adoption does not allow for a situation where accessing child porn is as easy as streaming any other adult content from Pornhub, and buying cocaine is as easy as it is to ship a book from Amazon?
A: Maybe, but if there's mass adoption of this kind of thing, it means that society has made it legal too.
Q: OK, but as long as they're not legal, doesn't TON SEARCHING help normal people find and access them? Will you apply some sort of censorship?
A: I don't think it's a search engine's responsibility to hide the content available on a given domain outside the search engine itself. Traditionally corporate-owned search engines are seen as heinous when they do this sort of thing.
Q: Is it possible to shut down domains on The Open Network?
A: Well yes, but it’s not easy, in this official document you can read:
“For exceptional cases, it is possible to change the owner or delete the domain by means of network-wide voting. Note that most of the network can change not only DNS, but also any configuration of the blockchain, but since there are several hundred independent validators on the network, then such changes need an exceptionally good reason.”
Q: As a validator would you ever vote to steal a domain?
A: No, never, under any circumstances. Code is law.
Q: What if the domain is involved in cybercrime?
A: That’s responsibility of law enforcement.
Q: Ok, but isn’t garlic routing making harder for law enforcement to carry out an investigation?
A: That’s okay, as it protects dissidents from dictators and democracies from electoral manipulation with data mining by “deep state” alphabet agencies.
Q: Thank you, we’re done
A: You’re welcome.
