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HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

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Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#91

Post by carolc »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #82
blurbleblurble wrote: post #74

I need to comment because people are missing the point... there's nothing in this text that says the web won't need servers. Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses? Between that and also seeding it from your laptops, the site should have d…

Distributed systems are suited to static content or "append-only" mutable data - canonical examples include Magnet links, distributed hashtables, git, and the Bitcoin blockchain - they're all reliant on content-addressable storage. Not all web-applications can support this model, for example a banking app or online shopping cart site, which depend, respectively, on secrecy instead of complete transparency and mutable…

See the comment below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376665. It is not true that distributed systems are only good for static content or "append-only" data. "Mutable systems" can be built on top of immutable systems.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#92

Post by vog »

carolc wrote: post #91
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributed systems are suited to static content or "append-only" mutable data - canonical examples include Magnet links, distributed hashtables, git, and the Bitcoin blockchain - they're all reliant on content-addressable storage. Not all web-applications can support this model, for example a banking app or online shopping cart site, which depend, respectively, on secrecy instead of complete transparency and mutable…

See the comment below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376665 . It is not true that distributed systems are only good for static content or "append-only" data. "Mutable systems" can be built on top of immutable systems.

I agree with you, but your argument is deeply flawed. There's quite a far stretch between "Y can be built on top of X" and "X is good for Y".

To provide an argument that might fill this gap:

Most systems don't actually have a huge amount of data. Look at the data size and data growth of CRMs, special-purpose wikis, and so on: These are mostly smaller than 500 MB (excluding static content like images), and grow by less than 1MB even on a busy day. And that's the uncompressed size.

Also, most systems, despite being mutable, actually want (or need) an audit trail. So these are really append-only systems which merely have a "mutable look and feel" to the user.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#93

Post by lgierth »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #82
blurbleblurble wrote: post #74

I need to comment because people are missing the point... there's nothing in this text that says the web won't need servers. Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses? Between that and also seeding it from your laptops, the site should have d…

Distributed systems are suited to static content or "append-only" mutable data - canonical examples include Magnet links, distributed hashtables, git, and the Bitcoin blockchain - they're all reliant on content-addressable storage. Not all web-applications can support this model, for example a banking app or online shopping cart site, which depend, respectively, on secrecy instead of complete transparency and mutable…

You're right - you can model any data as append-only though. Granted, in many cases it will require you to seriously sit down and remodel your data. Nobody's claiming it's going to be SQL and ACID transactions :) It's more likely going to be collaborative append-only logs based on CRDTs.

There are examples of the use cases you mention being built with decentralized technologies. [1][2]

[1] The various cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges

[2] https://openbazaar.org

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#94

Post by lgierth »

carolc wrote: post #61
projectant wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's like, Woah, hold your horses there. "Obsolete"? I don't think so. To what extent can this IPFS serve an API or a dynamic database at this point? To what extent will it ever be able to do that? I think HTTP/websockets is very good for these things. Static data is one thing, dynamic is a whole other story. It seems IPFS is just a new distributed way to archive data. So what? It doesn't help serve somethin…

Databases, and dynamic content in general, can be done with/on IPFS. Take look at OrbitDB ( https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db ) - "Distributed peer-to-peer database for the decentralized web" or their blog post "Decentralized Real-Time Collaborative Documents - Conflict-free editing in the browser using js-ipfs and CRDTs" ( https://blog.ipfs.io/30-js-ipfs-crdts.md ). And all that works in the browser without runnin…

Noms is also a great example of a peer-to-peer database: https://noms.io

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#95

Post by Houshalter »

vog wrote: post #85
jwfxpr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it would work, and the cost benefit ratio were there, people would adopt it quickly. That's what happens with just about everything else. Great point! Just like: * Betamax * HD DVD * Minidisc * Hoverboards * IPV6 * DNSSEC * PGP & PKI * Linux desktops * Dvorak keyboards * The metric system * Decimal time * [flavour-of-the-month programming language] * [flavour-of-the-month database] * [flavour-of-the-month cypher…

> The metric system While I agree with your sentiment, this one is a bad example. I grew up with the metric system, as did the vast majority of the world. I have an intuition for "meter", "kilograms", "seconds", and so on. I need to convert to cumbersome stuff like "miles", "inches" or "pounds" only when reading articles written by, you know, inhabitants of that strange, large country over there.

It's still a good example because the government in your country probably mandated it. People didn't just switch on their own accord.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#96

Post by apatters »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #74

I need to comment because people are missing the point... there's nothing in this text that says the web won't need servers. Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses? Between that and also seeding it from your laptops, the site should have d…

> Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses?

Setup, updates, maintenance, tech support, and uptime guarantees, just to name a few reasons that "the cloud" is better. A service like Wordpress.com or Wix beats the self-hosted Pi on all of these counts.

I interact with a lot of non-technical small business owners and am "that tech guy" in their minds. A question I'm hearing more and more frequently is _why even bother with a website when a Facebook page is much easier and they can see people interacting with it._

Their reasons are not all that different from why many tech savvy HN readers are using a Mac instead of Linux: convenience; less shit to worry about.

Hosting anything on a Pi plugged into the wall goes in the exact opposite direction from what these people want. The centralized services are winning because they pay attention to what the market wants, they build it, and they make it easy to sign up.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#97

Post by lgierth »

yeukhon wrote: post #46

So a couple questions even reading this... 1. The availability depends on the number of peers like BitTorrent? If so, and if no seed is available, how does one access the content, esp in the context of an intranet? 2. Any change to how we run infrastructure except not serving HTTP?

The one huge advantage of content-addressing over location-addressing (= URL with domain name and path) is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working.

Anyone can help out by keeping a copy. With location-addressing additional copies of the content aren't just largely hidden, they also get into a weird mode of competition with the original URL. With content-addressing, additional copies instead forge stronger resilience.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#98

Post by blurbleblurble »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #82
blurbleblurble wrote: post #74

I need to comment because people are missing the point... there's nothing in this text that says the web won't need servers. Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses? Between that and also seeding it from your laptops, the site should have d…

Distributed systems are suited to static content or "append-only" mutable data - canonical examples include Magnet links, distributed hashtables, git, and the Bitcoin blockchain - they're all reliant on content-addressable storage. Not all web-applications can support this model, for example a banking app or online shopping cart site, which depend, respectively, on secrecy instead of complete transparency and mutable…

Well of course it depends a lot on your specific application.

Applications like Tox or Matrix (which uses servers, but not necessarily "centralized" servers) are great examples of dynamic p2p applications.

Or for example applications that use statically distributed javascript to facilitate dynamic p2p communications. Stuff like together.js, gun.js, freedom.js, etc.

Syncthing and Resilio Sync are also wonderful examples, and Resilio Sync has amazing encryption features: you can give out seed-only links to your data. People who use these links won't have permission to decrypt the content. They will only have permission to echo it. That's a "raspberry pi plugged into the wall at the coffee shop" solution to private, mutable content distribution.

As for the shopping cart example, this is something that could be conducive to a more centralized approach, especially if your physical distribution model is centralized and your payment system is centralized (traditional banks). In that of case, you'd want to have a more direct connection with the physical distributor. If you want a direct, instantaneous connection with the shopping cart company's servers, then that's what you need.

But it's possible to have a situation where your product is not physical (like music or video), and you are using a decentralized currency (like bitcoin). There's absolutely no reason you couldn't facilitate that in a completely distributed way.

By the way, Bitcoin is a banking app... Have you ever used a browser based cryptocurrency wallet? Imagine a browser based cryptocurrency wallet that's hosted on IPFS. That's a pretty distributed banking app. If you want privacy too, use zcash or monero.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#99

Post by lgierth »

hyperpape wrote: post #21

Does HTTP have to lose for IPFS to win? Except the cost argument, none of the points in this article prevent sites from serving things via HTTP with IPFS metadata for the long term (though I don't know how that would play with advertising).

I agree that HTTP doesn't have to die -- for many use cases it has serious flaws though, the most important being its coupling to location-addressing. You always need a domain name and path to construct a URL. If the host decides to change the path, or loses control over the domain, you're out of luck.

Fun fact: when URLs were being defined, some people expressed the opinion that location-addressing is a huge mistake to begin with. Almost all of the links and references in the respective mailing list archives are now: broken.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#100

Post by lgierth »

tscs37 wrote: post #58
noam87 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Even assuming all this, a hybrid approach of HTTP + IPFS (or DAT) is still better than what we have now, since IPFS is essentially a worldwide CDN for static files.(Sorry: an inter-planetary one.) - The content-addressing aspect makes it perfect for distributing commonly used libraries. - We already cache all this content locally. What a waste! Why do I have to fetch jQuery from fricking California when it's sittin…

>since IPFS is essentially a worldwide CDN for static files.(Sorry: an inter-planetary one.) Sorry but IPFS is interplanetary in the same way a Boeing 747 is capable of orbital flight. Last I checked IPFS will not tolerate minute long latencies and requires a bandwidth above several kilobits per second which would immediately disqualify it for anything farther than the moon. And I'm not sure it would work on the moon…

> Last I checked IPFS will not tolerate minute long latencies and requires a bandwidth above several kilobits per second which would immediately disqualify it for anything farther than the moon. > >And I'm not sure it would work on the moon since that is a 2 second latency and I had issues with it when I used it on a mobile phone network with 800ms latency.

Fair points :) We'll be addressing this in the coming months with increased work on the network stack (libp2p).

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