The Breakdown - YouTube, Tron and the Pipedream of Decentralized Social Networks

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

The past few weeks have seen multiple instances of large, centralized tech giants censoring crypto related content and activity. Noticed in the context of the Coinbase Wallet, Apple is pushing back against apps that have anything to do with Dapps. YouTube caused even more of a stir when it took down hundreds of crypto-related videos from prominent influencers without any warning. It later reversed the action, claiming an error, but it was enough to get many to ask: are decentralized alternatives possible?  As if on cue, Justin Sun popped up to announce that TRON had struck a deal through which decentralized Twitch competitor and streaming service DLive would be moving to the TRON Blockchain and integrating with BitTorrent’s BLive streaming service. For many, however, TRON’s involvement makes DLive more likely to end up a centralized tool than a disruptive decentralized social network alternative. 

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDisc. Welcome back to The Breakdown. Happy New Year's, everyone. It is Friday, January 3rd. And today, we're going to be talking about some of the news from the holiday break, some important events that happened. But in the context of what I see as an overarching underlying narrative that connects. them. And so the first story that I wanted to highlight was Apple basically blacklisting apps that

interacted with DAPS at all. So we saw this in terms of Coinbase wallet. Coinbase wallet was pressured to drop its DAP browser or be pushed off of the Apple platform. It's clear that the Apple App Store doesn't want users to have anything to do with DAPs, right? Decentralized apps. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, commented on a Reddit thread about this, and he says, Coinbase CEO here, this is really unfortunate to see. Apple seems to be eliminating usage of DAPs from the App Store. If Apple customers want to be able to use DAPS, we may need to make this request known to Apple in some way. This is an important area of innovation and finance, and many developers and early adopters of this technology

have millions of dollars worth of crypto tied up in these financial applications, which they will no longer be able to use on Apple mobile devices if this App Store policy continues. Now, many folks pointed out that this is not a surprise. Brandon Niles wrote, The news that Apple is removing DAP browsers like Coinbase wallet from the App Store while disappointing shouldn't surprise anyone. Terms of service have been clear since the beginning and I'm mostly surprised it took this long. Not saying it's a good decision, though. Another commentator, Omar Bam, wrote,

Coinbase is removing decentralized application interaction from their mobile wallet due to pressure from Apple. Web3 is in direct competition with Google and Apple. we should expect continued censorship on MetaMas, Coinbase, and other DAP browsers. Disruption ain't easy. So, okay, news story one, Apple putting pressure to remove interaction with DAPs. Story two, which was a bigger bit of news, I think, and a lot of people caught wind of, was YouTube just completely purging a huge number of videos from some prominent crypto video influencers, Ivan on tech, for example.

And basically what happened is over the break, all of a sudden, hundreds of YouTube videos were gone. People were getting notifications that they had been flagged for harmful or dangerous content and sale of regulated goods. And these are the exact terms that YouTube was using. And obviously they were really frustrated, right? So Chris Dunn says, YouTube just removed most of my crypto videos citing harmful or dangerous content and sale of regulated goods. It's been 10 years of making videos, 200,000 plus subs and 7 million plus views.

WTF, are you guys doing Team YouTube? This was not unique to Chris. It happened, again, like I said, to Ivan on Tech. It happened to a huge number of different people. And for a little while, it seemed like YouTube and their Google Overlords were just basically declaring war on crypto. Now, a few days later, they came out and they said that it was an error, that they had erroneously purged cryptocurrency education videos. Basically, they said, oops, meaacolpa, and they promised to restore them. Now, after a couple days, they hadn't all been restored, but it seems like most things have returned to normal now.

But the interesting question is, how did this really happen? Was it A, a coordinated attack where, for some reason, someone just got a bunch of bots to trigger and flag a bunch of content? Was it YouTube testing? And this is what I saw a number of people speculating about. Was it YouTube testing the response, right, to basically censoring this type of content? It's not really clear. However, what it did is, especially in combination with the Apple News, was bring up this larger question of the platforms that underlie how much of where we communicate. If you go back to 2017, early 2018, Eric Torrenberg, who's an investor, wrote about the difference between money crypto and tech crypto. So in his estimation, money crypto was that set of folks who were trying to disrupt the financial system, who were interested in sound money. The Bitcoiners, obviously are chief among them. And that's that money application of blockchains and decentralized ledger

technologies is really what they were about. On the other hand was tech crypto. And tech crypto were the, you know, Silicon Valley style folks who are coming in, who are looking at the massive amount of power that these centralized platforms had and looking to decentralize those platforms to take away some of that power, right, to remove the ability for decentralized players to censor on the basis of politics or something else. In a lot of ways, I think that in the wake of the ICO boom kind of imploding and there being just continued regulatory scrutiny around quote unquote utility tokens, that tech crypto side has never really been able to get off the ground. It's never really been able to actually have a go in some ways at seeing

if there's there's an opportunity, if there's a place for a product market fit here. But this whole thing around YouTube and Apple brought up renewed calls for exactly that. So CZ from Binance said it may be time the crypto community take a stab at its own blockchain-enabled censorship-resistant social media platform. Lots of challenges, though. Spam, scam, trolls, incentives, copyright, token economics, governance, stickiness, privacy, but it's about time. And he had 3,000 people like that, 500-plus people retweeted it. Bologi said, and he retweeted it with an addition. He says, let's try an experiment. $200 BTC bounty for the best review of decentralized social media. The ideal piece covers not just crypto efforts like Voice Akasha, but Allied tech like Macedon,

CRDT, BitT, Git, reply to this tweet with your post. And he specifically framed it around this YouTube issue. And also talking about Google taking a metamask down from the Android store. Obviously, some people responded very positively. This was kind of renewed their determination to see something different. Others had a slightly different response. So Sarah Jamie Lewis, who's a privacy researcher basically, she runs open privacy, which is a nonprofit that's attempting to make sure that privacy as a human right is embedded in the technology we build. Use this as a chance to basically remind us that, as she has put it, decentralization is not a synonym for censorship resistance and that we actually have to look at these terms and really work to understand

what they mean. And to the extent that we're trying to design systems that are censorship resistant, just kind of slapping this idea of decentralization on them, effectively amounts more to theater than to actual change. So in some ways, all of this amounted to prelude to an announcement from Tron around D-Live. So D-Live is a decentralized competitor to Twitch. It's a decentralized live streaming platform. And it has built a meaningful community. They cite somewhere between 3 and 5 million users. Notably, PewDiePie, who's one of the biggest YouTubers in the world, famously moved all of his live streaming off of Twitch and 2D Live last year. You know, the terms of that deal and why were never made public, but still, it's a big deal, obviously, in terms of that

name. And there was a small but passionate community of Delivers, or there is a small but passionate community of Deliver's who are really trying to push this community and grow this community. they announced that they would be moving and migrating to the Tron blockchain. It's not exactly clear to what extent this is a full-on acquisition or whether this is just some deal that happens to include this. I'll get a little bit more into that in a second. But here's from Justin's son on December 30th. Starting today, D-Live will begin the migration to the Tron blockchain. B-Live, the live streaming platform introduced by BitTorrent in early 2019, will be merged into the D-Live platform.

We're excited about the great future that lies ahead for the Tron ecosystem. So basically, this is D-Live and the BitTorrent Live platform coming together and doing it under the guise of Tron. This is obviously interesting for a number of different reasons. One has to do just with the mechanics of the deal as I was kind of intimating. So Michael Nov wrote about this. He says, we all like to criticize Justin Sun, but he pulled off the first large-scale token M&A. This deal is unique as it includes a migration of a D-Live from the Lino network to Tron and the carve-out of B-Live from BitTorrent and integration with the new D-Live product.

Lino blockchain is still in TestNet, so the impact there should be minimal. I would assume full equity deal or buying out future tokens. The carve-out integration of B-Live is interesting as it impacts a live token BTT and its incentive structure. I have been looking for such a deal for a while, exciting to see non-traditional MNA in crypto picking up. So that was one side of it. Now, D-Liver's obviously had maybe a different perspective. So this is from Crypto, Utah, who says,

I watch the D-Live AMA today and the community is very skeptical of Tron. Normal for a change of blockchain, but once they realize they're actually benefiting, it's going to be a killer combo. So pro, but it's showing that there's kind of a community nervousness, right? And perhaps there's a community nervousness because Tron doesn't exactly have the best track record. So just a week earlier, Valerian Ben from the Pop Network wrote this medium post called Banned from the Blockchain, an Ethereum developer's tale of migrating to Tron. And basically, it's all about how this project, the Pop Network, was moving from Ethereum to Tron, spurred by basically Justin Sun and Tron trying to recruit Ethereum developers to move

into it, and how they were effectively removed from the entire Tron ecosystem hostily because their product was too close to things that they were building at Tron and BitTorrent. I'll obviously link this article. It's worth a read to get a whole sense of it. And again, this is one person's take. It's from their project. They have an incentive to tell the story their way. So I present it less as definitive, but more as a reminder that this point that Sarah

Jamie Lewis was making about decentralization and decentralization theater and being clear about what we are actually trying to get at when we speak of decentralization seems to me to be extra important in the context of something like an acquisition from Tron. What we have seen over and over again from Justin Sun and from Tron is that they are extremely aggressive about building this next generation of infrastructure on their protocol, on their platform, on their blockchain, and they're willing to spend money aggressively, to advertise aggressively to do that. It stands to reason that they're also willing to exert their centralized power in ways that benefit them primarily versus the people behind them. And so all of this is to point out, I guess, the continued challenge of trying to actually change the power structures that underlie the platforms that have so much influence on our lives.

it's very difficult to see how we're going to get a meaningful change from the centralized control of a YouTube, of a Facebook, of a Google, to something different, particularly in the context of what can only be called sometimes a lack of clear consumer demand. The folks who are the most upset and the most nervous about centralized control tend to be the very small handful of people whose livelihoods are potentially materially impacted by changes in policy. Again, going back to Sarah Lewis, she put this really, really poignantly here. I've been working on these problems with communities who could really use awesome censorship resistance stacks for years. And the honest state is that the groups doing the actual work are

chronically underfunded because no one gets rich decentralizing power. So today, what I wanted to do is look through some of the news, catch up everyone on some key things that have happened in the crypto space over the last few weeks, while also tying it back to this theme that I think is underlying and important and going to be a consistent conversation throughout 2020. So there it is. First breakdown of 2020. I'm excited to hang out with you guys more. I'm excited to hear what you're interested in hearing about and talking about. But for now, again, happy New Year, and I will catch you tomorrow.