Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#2Is decentralization cheaper or more expensive than centralization?
I cannot come to a conclusion on that question.
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#3Is decentralization cheaper or more expensive than centralization? I cannot come to a conclusion on that question.
I guess that question gets answered when the last email was sent and all communication happens through WhatsApp or similar.
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#4Is decentralization cheaper or more expensive than centralization? I cannot come to a conclusion on that question.
I guess that question gets answered when the last email was sent and all communication happens through WhatsApp or similar.
> I guess that question gets answered when the last email was sent and all communication happens through WhatsApp or similar.
Not so easy: There are lots of other factors than cost which decide what wins in a market, such as
- trends/hypes
- convenience
- being available at the right time (in the right place)
- ...
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#5Is decentralization cheaper or more expensive than centralization? I cannot come to a conclusion on that question.
Depends on your metric. But typically, there's quite a bit of overhead in most decentralized systems, that's one of the reasons they don't gain widespread adoption.
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#6Is decentralization cheaper or more expensive than centralization? I cannot come to a conclusion on that question.
Decentralization smears the cost over time and space as constant cost to everyone and constant small failures everywhere. Centralization concentrates it into smaller spaces and larger but rarer failures.
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#7I feel like the next frontier for decentralisation is the need for decentralised websites. If a website just contains read-only static text then it can perhaps be replaced by a PDF shared over bittorrent, but I don't think there's yet a very good technology that can be built into mainstream web browsers and that allows complex web apps to run (including functionality like searching and posting comments) in a domain-agnostic way. Hosting the website as a Tor hidden service probably achieves something similar to decentralisation, but support for the Tor network is unlikely to be included as standard on most operating systems.
One set of technologies that might get us closer, though, is allowing offline signing of websites. This would mean you could trust the public key for a webapp once, and then run that webapp from any domain that serves it correctly. Any data sent or received by users of the webapp (like comments or likes or bids, etc.) would have to be signed by the keys of individual users, meaning a malicious server could only filter messages you send and receive, but not spoof them. For persistence of data across sessions, and synchronisation between the mirrors, the back-end data store could be a web-API database accessed over Tor by the servers hosting these mirrors of the web app.
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#8I feel like the next frontier for decentralisation is the need for decentralised websites. If a website just contains read-only static text then it can perhaps be replaced by a PDF shared over bittorrent, but I don't think there's yet a very good technology that can be built into mainstream web browsers and that allows complex web apps to run (including functionality like searching and posting comments) in a domain-a…
The IPFS [1] is close to this. Websites (and all other resources) are P2P hosted with a distributed hash table. For example, there's an reasonably uncensorable Wikipedia mirror [2].
I don't know what the state of web apps on IPFS is, but believe some people are working toward a pubsub-based system.
[1] https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#9I feel like the next frontier for decentralisation is the need for decentralised websites. If a website just contains read-only static text then it can perhaps be replaced by a PDF shared over bittorrent, but I don't think there's yet a very good technology that can be built into mainstream web browsers and that allows complex web apps to run (including functionality like searching and posting comments) in a domain-a…
Sounds a lot like you’re describing the work being done with Dat and Beaker Browser. Here’s a recent talk by Tara of the Beaker team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_WvfF3FN8
Re: Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves
#10I feel like the next frontier for decentralisation is the need for decentralised websites. If a website just contains read-only static text then it can perhaps be replaced by a PDF shared over bittorrent, but I don't think there's yet a very good technology that can be built into mainstream web browsers and that allows complex web apps to run (including functionality like searching and posting comments) in a domain-a…
The IPFS [1] is close to this. Websites (and all other resources) are P2P hosted with a distributed hash table. For example, there's an reasonably uncensorable Wikipedia mirror [2]. I don't know what the state of web apps on IPFS is, but believe some people are working toward a pubsub-based system. [1] https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
Decentralized web apps already exist, built with our tool ( https://github.com/amark/gun ). For instance:
- Decentralized Reddit ( https://notabug.io/ ) can push terabytes of daily P2P traffic.
- Decentralized YouTube ( https://d.tube/ ) gets millions of uniques every month, built with IPFS/Steem/GUN (upcoming release will have end-to-end encrypted private messaging).
There are plenty of other dApps being built. This isn't an Ethereum pipedream, you can build them today! We'll even be releasing an IPFS storage adapter for GUN coming up soon, too!