Blockstack addresses Zooko's triangle in their original whitepaper: https://blockstack.org/tokenpaper.pdf

and their concept of gaia hubs is the association of immutable identities with user owned storage without the need for IPFS pinning or otherwise data duplication: docs.blockstack.org

You can see the most recent conversation about it here: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147 in which I convinced someone looking at IPFs to use gaia instead

full disclosure, I am an Engineer at Blockstack.

There happens to be a great solution for this known as gaia hubs: https://docs.blockstack.org/ which you can learn about in these docs in conjunction with the immutable identities associated with them.

I have also in more context spoken recently with someone and convinced them why they should use gaia over IPFS: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/cannot-find-ipfs-driver/6147

and they brought up some other usability issues not mentioned in this critique, particularly about file pinning to keep files alive, and in general the waste behind the idea of data duplication by not separating out the auth of the user owned data with the duplication of the data itself in the DHT network, for which Blockstack has "Atlas".

I don't think you understand. Congestion pricing explicitly exposes the costs of the streets. Price spikes due to congestion create market signals for competition to come in and make it cheaper.

Right now, you have no clue where your taxes go, nor do you get a cent by cent breakdown of how much went to each cost.

There is an enormous amount of economic waste in state and federal budgets before considering 10yr government contracts where incumbents almost always win because of the exorbitant amount of one off acomodations made during the previous decade, but most u.s. government contract bids by law require to entertain 3 bidders before most of the time choosing the same one.

Also, by the way, uber works this way. The price will go up for 5 drivers when 100 people need the same 5 drivers as opposed to if 3 or 5 people need them. Alot of economic incentives are made here:

1. More drivers will come to the space because the pay is good.

2. People who can't afford it arent going to pay this congestion price making it possible for drivers to even attempt to prioritise etc. It also helps drivers prioritise. Do they really need to drive. It also helps competition come in and make up this economic gap if there is one.

Also, NY energy pricing market, as well as California, Texas and MISO region all operate on real time energy markets using "congestion costs" as one of the frameworks to expose pricing based on demand.

The only difference is:

1. You actually get to see an objective algorithmic breakdown of WHY the cost is what is. Try asking the government for that now for street costs....ha

2. The transparent pricing exposes market signals for competition to come compete, for a lower price, making a more economic system

both which over time

1. lower prices for consumers (in this case people who use the streets)

2. Create a more efficient system (if a road system is inefficient, and that is the root cause) as a result of 1.

In the long run, this is a positive move in the right direction towards governments being more transparent about where costs are allocated. It's a far cry from being able to vote by knowing where your tax money actually goes, but it's a step in the right direction and it doesnt completely divorce government from competition to keep exorbitant costs in check on the government side.

"the average user doesn't want to be empowered when it comes to data harvesting"

I think this is an extremely presumptuous statement that writes off how little empowerement the average user has by conflating the ignorance about data privacy and ownership, and the lack of user friendly options they have around understanding their data and how it can be owned/migrated and who has access to what, with carelessness or otherwise now in tech known as "consent" or "accept and agree with the fineprint or don't use this platform required for work, modern day life, etc" or "allow this app that is in no way shape or form related to pictures, social networks or social communication access to your pictures, phonecalls, all stored data on your phone and access to your contact otherwise don't download"

I think the news shows it's pretty clear most people are not happy about how companies like facebook and others are using it, now that they know. They have not known for a while, and furthermore what alternatives do they have?

This idea is very similar to telling a person because they never knew this was being done to them, and that because also in addition they have no other options currently if they do know about it, that this equates to consent or carelessness/lack of wanting to be empowered. This is just false, and furthermore, a dangerous trajectory of thought to apply to any situation.

Drobo looks cool. That is the idea with gaia. Right now our master branch allows you to docker-compose-up and use the admin api calls to configure "disk" to however you want.

The main motivation here was regardless of what images were deployed on optional cloud host providers, the default was set to local disk to support users actually owning this data locally.

Additionally, we support a variety of other drivers, like azure blobs, etc.

It is nice that the hubs are set up to interact with an API where developers by default are storing data in this decentralized way.

I will check out Drobo more.

"Slowly, but it worked!" making things work is important! haha