Qortal: The Next Generation of the Internet That Has The Same Problems as the Previous
Those of you who have kept up with previous articles here, might remember I mentioned the Qortal project as being a possible alternative for freedom of speech on the internet. Alas, this is not the article I was hoping to write about this project. Of course, people make decisions, and once those decisions are made courses are set. Since I joined the project as a kind of experimental reporter with few expectations other than what was experientially so, I am better able to give the practical version of the ideological slop that is presented as being indicative about this “community”. The short version of this after eight months of being more involved in the Qortal sphere is that Qortal talks a good game, and has a technological stack that has the potential to offer freedom. The reality, though, is that the leadership has a lack of focus and vision, cannot handle feedback, and refuses to truly relinquish control to the people using the system. This causes a person to focus on what good a system is that promises to give users freedom if there is no one around who can see what it is you produce as a result of that freedom? If you remember the trailer to the movie Alien, the tagline “In space no one can hear you scream,” applies. Why is this the fatal flaw in the Qortal System? Well, for that you will have to wade through the rest of this text. No pain, no pain, err…gain? Gain.
First, Let’s Examine Qortal
If you pop on over to the Qortal wiki you will find what Qortal is/does in their own words:
The Qortal wiki is an ever-evolving repository of information related to the Qortal blockchain Project.
Qortal is a completely unique, community-driven and developed blockchain platform that provides an alternative to the digital infrastructure of the world. Qortal provides a system that is:
Truly P2P in every way - no middlemen of any kind
Not able to be ‘stopped’ or ‘die’ like other projects, as trading is built into the network’s tools.
Able to publish data, applications, and websites on ‘Registered Names’ on the platform.
Able to provide feeless hosting for applications, websites, and data.
Able to provide means to create a truly individually sovereign digital future for the world.
Combined economic platform and digital infrastructure for communications, hosting, and blockchain-based security and authentication.Unmatched by any other platform in the world. No other exists that can do what Qortal can, and no other exists that can provide what Qortal does.
Any user can create anything on Qortal, limited only by their imagination and intention.
These are heavy promises, indeed. Of course, we can make a certain allowance for bullshit in the name of marketing. The biggest potentially inflated claim is that Qortal is unmatched by any other platform in the world. A basic examination of the technology might shed light on why this is a grandiose statement.
Firstly, and perhaps most relevant, Qortal is programmed on clunky old Java–the very self-same Java that had everyone downloading applets back in the day to run things like Yahoo chat. Naturally, this “clunkiness” is present as it is with any Java app, but the gain is portability, so we might give it a pass except to note that Java is not the most efficient language in the world being that it is interpreted. What the “unique” feature of Qortal is that the above alludes to is that all users, when they run their own “Java Qortal Node” serve as a kind of encrypted CDN between them (they share data in other words). While you might think this means the CDN itself is on a blockchain, this is not the case. Rather, the hash of the data is stored on the blockchain instead, which is what makes the CDN “secured by the blockchain”. All the blockchain is storing is, effectively, a bunch of hashes. This kind of technology, hashes as correlated to storage/data, can be found in both IPFS and Linux distros like Nix. Likewise, the calculation of unique hashes applies to various secure boot schemes. Hashes are being calculated on a blockchain anyway independent of Qortal implementations.
Likewise, Ian Clark, in the original Freenet, made a kind of shared hard drive that encrypted communication among users of the network that worked similarly to the CDN. Users had their own secure key, and their own website, mail, and so forth. Another project that does this is I2P and of course Zeronet also did something not entirely dissimilar. Zeronet propagates user content by means of a torrent type of protocol, and it also shares this trait in common with Qortal. Likewise, Peergos encapsulates many similar characteristics. What none of these platforms do, by design, is incorporate a kind of crypto-blockchain for commerce into themselves as Qortal does. Communities like Utopia, however, do. In fact, Utopia is, in many ways, far ahead of Qortal and so the “unique in the world claim” is more like bluster. Of course, the Wiki is out of date, and is not regularly updated as far as I can ascertain for reasons that will be made apparent later. (Spoilers: It concerns people trying to keep control of the project) Whether this is unique ego-stroking or simple negligence, the bombastic speech does not add to the value of the platform.
First Impressions
When you fire up Qortal, you are contending with two components. One of those is the actual Java file for the blockchain to synchronize, and the other is the user interface. The user interface has recently changed to something called the “hub” which is supposed to be better, but appears to be missing certain functions that the “legacy” UI had. One of those features is the ability to upload your personal website. This could be signaling a kind of pivot toward the community moving in the direction of using Qortal’s blogging system, but of course this lacks a lot of granular control in presentation that being able to upload your own website naturally possesses. The upgrade to the hub is “forced” in the sense that the legacy UI isn’t working with many aspects of Qortal since Hub came out, and Hub of course is missing functionality of legacy as noted. Anyway, once you succeed in making your own key and getting everything synchronized, you are going to need some Qort if you want a unique username that is not some long, unwieldy crypto-key. This means, at least when I joined, that you have to go into the chat room and ask for some. I do not recall who gave me mine in part because you cannot speak quickly until you have a name and a certain amount of Qort, but when I logged back in someone had given me some and I was able to procure a name. That was cool.
Where Signaling and Qortal Meet
The biggest problem Qortal has, though, is that the content you put on there cannot be easily found. Generally, the only way you are going to let anyone know it exists is by using the Chat feature. Chat has many different groups, like General and so on, and these become your main ways to let people in the community know what you are up to. This proves to be a problem in several predictable ways. However, before we delve into that, an example easily makes the point. When I first joined, there was a developer who was very upset with the core team of people who make Qortal and claimed that they had used his work and then more or less began to “freeze him out” of the project and not take any of his further suggestions. It was clear he had devoted a lot of time to the project, and felt like the power structures present within the personalities of the dev team had been misused. Some of the devs would show up and answer some of his concerns, on occasion, and at other times they would mock and deride him. This created a negative impression, to say the least. While personality conflicts can happen, this was, without a doubt, a dumpster fire. It went on a steady blaze for probably four months, until the developer in question decided to make his own fork. He claimed he was being censored by the platform in certain ways which are up for discussion in this article later. He likewise suggested the platform was not all that interested in returning power back to the users and was more interested in keeping a small cadre in power within the system being developed. Most of his assertions, in my experience, proved to be true. While there are a small handful of people in the Qortal universe who actually understand what freedom of speech means, the vast majority do not. While this in and of itself would not be a problem, what is a problem concerns the signaling aspect of the chat being interwoven into the discovery of the platform. Simply put, if you can be messed with in chat, then your message is limited in possible reach. It turns out that, due to how Qortal is being utilized at the moment, this is a possible limitation that is used in a most peculiar way.
Pointing Out Some Odds and Ends
When I first got on Qortal, I intended to market my book along with the platform. The first post discussed this. However, I had an encounter with a dev in the chat that accused me of, among other things, “not doing anything to market the platform while having criticisms of it”. This, of course, was flatly wrong. However, not being in the business of correcting idiocy on the internet as an occupation, I did not bother to mention to this person what it was I had been doing. This accusation sprang from the fact that I had pointed out that the freedom of speech aspect of Qortal needed to be safeguarded in certain ways if Qortal truly hoped to be the “next generation of the internet”. I soon learned, however, that suggestions of this nature were not welcome. Not only were they not welcome, they were perceived as being an attack. Not only were they being perceived as an attack when I said them, but also they were being perceived as an attack when ANYONE said them. A big piece of safeguarded free speech is to protect the ability for the user to decide what and who they want to talk to. This implicitly means you cannot then, as an administrator of the network, barring illegal content, make some unilateral decision on behalf of everyone else and still say it is about free speech. Qortal however, had reportedly made the decision to allow some illegal content in the form of bestiality and seemed to be rather ambivalent about the prospect of the platform potentially hosting objectionable content like child porn. Users had the ability, however, to turn the “relay mode” to off, so that the only kinds of content a user would be participating in sharing would be the kinds they had all ready visited. This was a major problem in early Freenet and Ian Clark wound up leaving the country and going to Ireland over the potential problem of being accused of being a child pornography network since Freenet could not censor any content on its nodes. This absolute conception of free speech overlooks existing Supreme Court decisions that state that one’s free speech extends as far as their nose. In other words, you are not free to yell out the word “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Speech has consequences, and not everything that can be said should be said unless a person also wants the consequences of having said the thing in question.
In his opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. […] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
Schenck vs the United States
Not far behind the free speech absolutists existed another camp that believed an individual user should not block or censor anyone if they themselves did not want to be blocked–for the case under consideration–at a network level. This is a little like saying, “You should have let those people in your house if you didn’t want the President to ban you from the country.” This was exactly what happened with regard to quartering British soldiers which became the basis of The Third Amendment–except leaving the country was replaced with “jail”. A lack of familiarity with these issues and decisions and then speaking about the network supporting free speech is, at best, foolish. At worst, it is foolish and a rehashing of the same mistakes that were all ready made on the “first generation” of the internet. (What was the American Revolution? Generation 0.1?)
The Rejoinder
The common rejoinder to this discussion about free speech and consequence and being careful at a network level about blocking people usually generated a chorus of “run your own node! Nobody can censor your own node!” Of course, on Qortal, sometimes it also became about what you had done for the network. In the time I’ve spent there I uploaded videos, uploaded some content to the file sharing side called Q-Share, participated in submitting some issues to the onboard ticket system, Q-Support, placed my book up for sale at the Q-bookshop, uploaded my website, made a blog using the system itself, tried the trading platform out, used Q-mail, refined how my specific node booted, and submitted an App, eventually went through the process which resulted in my becoming, for awhile anyway, a minter, frequented some other Q-Shops on the network, and was working with another person to try to ensure the network was able to carry out its free speech aspect in a sensible way. That last part, particularly, was blocked heavily by one of the network admins. So, the idea of “run your own node” did not solve my problem, and no amount of doing “anything for the network” was enough to be able to say that it had issues. (Come to a thinktank meeting is another common one. Did that. Wasn’t impressed) I also saw this mentality present for people who had heavily donated to the original dev team–where other devs would come in saying that the person had “done nothing for the network” and also blocking those who had similar views to my own where free speech was involved. The blocking was accomplished technologically by limiting the reach of given people to speak in General chat.
Thing About Blockchains
The thing about blockchains and encrypted p2p information exchange, like in Qortal, is that it sucks, generally, for putting on a cell phone. A cell phone has a limited battery life, and so running a node on it slurps the battery down to nothing. What can you do? Well, the solution Qortal has evolved is to make a system of nodes that a user is not running themselves. That way, you can use the “public nodes” but not have a battery drain on your phone. You can also use them if you don’t want to run a node yourself. The problem is, though, they are under the control of one person who sees all of those nodes as his personal possessions. This is how the limit in reach, that I indicated, is accomplished. So, if the person who owns these nodes decides, as he did in my case, that the content you are posting in General chat “makes the project look bad” he might undertake to ban you so you cannot be seen by all the users that have to rely on these public nodes. This person had also said that should someone else be willing to take on the nodes he’d have been happy to outsource them out of his control–but he only said that AFTER blocking a person who was going to do that very thing and then had the temerity to suggest most people were only “all talk”. What the dev failed to take into account, though, is that for a person to want to take a risk on a network like Qortal, they have to believe it has a future. Otherwise, they are going to go spend their time and resources somewhere else where those efforts are more likely to be appreciated and yield fruit. For some reason, Qortal seems to think its users are its enemies and that if they are not showing the right kind of deference and gratitude for what has been made, they should probably just shut up or else build their own project from the ground up. To say that this attitude is toxic is a massive understatement. Eventually, when people ask you why you are still at the project if you have so many issues with it, the answer becomes obvious–well, I shouldn’t be. At least, not with the expectation of this being a truly free speech platform in a way that doesn’t partake of the mistakes that caused the rest of the net to fall into the abyss it occupies now. This dev’s reply, to me, when pointing these things out? “You sure talk a lot”.
What Does Not Make the Platform Look Bad
What is NOT blocked at the public node level, tellingly, is voluminous anti-Israel, anti-Jewish conspiracy material. It is one thing to try to expose hidden agendas, but this kind of material goes beyond doing that. The whole of General chat is, on a given day, literally, swimming in antisemitic bile which seems to forget that the Messiah was of the tribe of Judah and is therefore, Jewish. While not all Jews are good, it is certainly the case that not all of ANY ethnic group is. Qortal users often seem to be afraid of Biblical concepts like digital ID leading to some manner of economic impediment that is the Beast system–without believing in the Bible or the Beast system. There are several efforts, indeed, to bring AI into Qortal, which is amusing, since AI is the prime suspect for causing such a system to flourish. The app I uploaded to the place was a copy of the King James Bible since I looked around and did not see one. The entire network begins to take on the character of a clownish-quasi-Nazi-tin-foil-hat group that thinks it can somehow prepare for the end of the world without recourse to the very strikingly Jewish Messiah. It is truly a spectacle to see, but, for whatever reason, that does not make the Qortal network “look bad”. At least not bad enough to block those folks at a public node level. Nevermind the ideals of free speech and the “next generation of the internet” that is a “super special snowflake never seen before”. Please. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”
Being a Minter
I did undertake submitting a card to become a “minter” on the Qortal network. This allows you to mine a certain amount of Qort a day since your node is then participating in the tasks the Qortal network requires in terms of the blockchain. You make a card, and the existing minters and admins vote on whether you should get in or not. This was done to prevent people from coming in from places like China and farming all the Qort out. The Qort was just a bonus to me, since the crypto aspect in terms of the Qort coin is more a novelty since its value remains consistently rather low. The draw is and should be the freedom of speech and not the coin anyway. Once you are approved as a minter, you are plunked into a chat group full of minters. When I first started, there was no encrypted key on the convo, but later it was added and often this made that minter chat inaccessible as the key rotation caused some problems. Recently, however, I decided I did not really like the company of the minter chat nor did I wish to rub shoulders with everyone there, so I left. This, predictably, means you can no longer mine Qort. Of course, it also means you do not have to rub shoulders with people in a given group who are showing themselves to be your bitter enemies. Guess which one is worth more?
Qortal The Tech
The technology of Qortal sometimes hangs–meaning the blockchain freezes for some reason or another. Recently, an admin had called General Chat a cesspit of communication, but it was a primary place for helping troubleshoot why the node was hanging and how to get through it. By the time everything was stabilized, you would expect that the admins would have learned a very valuable lesson in how communication in a time of crisis affects everyone and it requires a team effort through many different channels to pull through, right? Wrong. Instead, everything returned right back to how people should not question the Qortal development team unless they have given a kidney to it so it can be hooked up to the network and used to mint Qort.
Despite All That…
Despite all of the above issues, Qortal is not a bad piece of technology if you adjust your expectations and ignore all the crap about it being free speech and empowering. Qortal is, at its core, a dirty whore that tells you it loves you and wants to marry you, but when you get it home you discover it is in bed with half the town. As long as you do not mistake the whore for the housewife, though, well, there are some things Qortal can do. It works quite well at being a backup P2P version of something like the Internet Archive. It is pretty okay to keep a backup of a website. Don’t bother spending much time in the chat channels, and do not think your input as a user is wanted or necessary. Oh, and don’t worry about Qort or mining, or adminning, or joining the development team. Remember, a whore is very good at lying. That is why they get paid to make you believe they enjoy what you are doing.
Slight Chance
There is always, however, the slight chance that the whore finds a Church and has a transformation or marries someone that actually has some real truth in the relationship. It is quite slim, but it does happen. In Qortal’s case, it is possible that some other technologies, like Reticulum, might take the decision making out of the hands of those that are trying to keep their fingers on the power levers. While that would be a very nice thing to see, one would still have the problem that unless the character of the community of Qortal changes, do you really want to spend a lot of time with the caliber of people that seem to flood it? Nah. Not really. That kind of company has a tendency to make a person “look bad”. We know that Qortal administration understands what has to be done should that be the case. I wonder how this article makes the project look? Oh right. I forgot. True free speech allows criticism to exist. A clown variety closes it down, and blames the speaker. That–is really all you need to understand about Qortal. What else is there to say?