Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web • Hacker News Board

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#151

Post by lrem » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 8:23 AM UTC

antpls wrote: post #39

When we think about decentralization, we sometime think about uncontrolled extreme decentralization. That's the ideal : no single point of failure, with everyone hosting their data where they want, and deciding who access what about them. Practically, as pointed in the article, there are laws to comply with and those are IMHO the biggest lock to decentralization. The fair middle ground between extreme centralization…

So, you're essentially advocating rewinding the Internet to pre-Facebook time and continuing from there? I'm all for that. Damn, every time I stumble upon the Google Talk page, with its explanation how participating in an open decentralised world is good for everyone involved, I feel tremendously sad for how things worked out.

Unfortunately, the world decided to go the centralised way. At some point I had to re-work my outstanding papers, because any mention of peer-to-peer or even decentralisation meant immediate rejection. Internet service providers went more greedy, so if you don't build your own global backbone to have some leverage, you need to pay someone who does or you're hosed. Even the laws in place start to strongly reflect an expectation of overpowered centralised platform beneath any communication.

Then, finally, what we ultimately need is to figure out the money flow. People want polished products and that costs money. The centralised platforms we have today have succeeded because they figured some funding. Achieving that in a decentralised world is the main problem we should be looking at. I'm afraid "just slap blockchain on it" is a highly detrimental approach, but I haven't seen anything more serious (not that I looked seriously).

Dislaimer: I'm in Google now, but this comment actually reflects my personal post-INRIA sentiments.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#152

Post by catwell » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 8:27 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #137

sixdimensional wrote: post #48

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…

On a related note, I'm wondering how distributed systems that rely on atomic clocks (e.g. Google Spanner) would work in the space era, given that relativity says that there's no such thing as a global clock.

They can still work, with a few changes and worse performance.

The clock is not used to say that the time is exactly the same on all nodes, it is used to guarantee that if two events have timestamps whose difference is larger than some threshold they can be ordered reliably. You don't need an atomic clock to do it, for instance CockroachDB only requires NTP, but of course, the smaller the error margin, the faster the system is.

That being said, given that speed will be limited by the distance traveled by information and the speed of light, I suppose those systems won't have much edge over purely causality-based ones. In other words, CRDTs will rule Space :)

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#153

Post by gsich » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

r_c_a_d wrote: post #141

gsich wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was never the case.

I presume you mean "never the case for many people". As in "most people never left their PC on 24/7". That may well be true. I used to run a couple of minecraft servers for my kids. Judging by how amazing their friends thought that was... I don't think there were many other people in the town doing that. On the other hand, I still have a raspberry pi running 24/7 to this day.

Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#154

Post by gsich » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #134

gsich wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was never the case.

Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them. If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?

Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#155

Post by heavenlyblue » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 8:54 AM UTC

codeka wrote: post #124

vlovich123 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each TCP packet does not require an ack, at least not as a "receive TCP packet send out ACK". They're returned collectively as a bitset for the last N packets instead based on your transmission window (which TCP stacks already tune based on your RTT). Can't see how you'd get rid of that if you're looking for reliable real-time transport medium. Additionally you can layer in forward error-correction above TCP to reduc…

None of that really matters if Mars is on the other side of sun from Earth. You'd need relay satellites to direct the signal around the sun, and even at the speed of light that's going to take tens of minutes, one way. As the parents suggest, even at Earth-Moon distances, we need to completely rethink things.

So who cares? Just adapt the TCP timeouts (resend timeouts) to 10 minutes.

We’ll end up with the same, TCP-based system, except it’s going to be somewhat different, as time scales are not invariant for us humans.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#156

Post by severine » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

frio wrote: post #98

m3at wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced that centralization in its current iteration (cloud operators controlling huge infrastructures) is the best long run You might be interested in checking the InterPlanetary File System [1] which attempt to tackle this among other issue. I can't find it now but I remember the doc mentioning the need for a future space network to be decentralized, so there is that too. [1] https://ipfs.io/#why

From a conference I attended years ago, the key motivator is that request/response networking is pretty much already broken when we get to the moon; once Mars comes into the picture, it'll be even more so. When each TCP packet requires an ACK, and an ACK takes minutes to arrive... things break down a bit. So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection o…

> SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed

I think this is a reference to Secure Scuttlebutt: http://scuttlebutt.nz/

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#157

Post by realPubkey » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:14 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #130

nine_k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Fire upon the Deep" describes an interstellar communication system which is very email-nntp-fidonet like. I'm afraid it's more realistic that we could imagine.

It was written during the time that was the peak of those systems (the endless September would happen a year after the book was published), so there's no surprise there. But I think it's not particularly accurate, in that, while latency would be extreme, that doesn't necessarily translate to bandwidth - and bandwidth constraints shaped Usenet and especially FidoNet as much as latency. I think a more likely primary mo…

So basically the offline-first approach

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#158

Post by lolive » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:25 AM UTC

vezycash wrote: post #149

IMO, there are two key barriers to a decentralized internet (other factors are minor in comparison.) (1) IPv4 (2) Bandwidth limits IPv6 makes NAT unnecessary. With IP scarcity gone, IP addresses might become permanent like phone numbers. ISPs are currently making money off fixed IP addresses. Market forces would change that eventually.

The need for a search engine seems, imho, to be the major argument versus (full) decentralization. Another formulation for that: there is a (valid) need for (some kind of) centralization. (and from there, you all go back to full centralization, first because of search, then because of convenience, at last because of laziness).

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#159

Post by lolive » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

orasis wrote: post #23

Large systems want to centralize for the sake of efficiency. I was among the first wave of P2P hackers in the 2000s and we learned the hard way that decentralization leaves a LOT to be desired.

Remember when Audiogalaxy arrived in the P2P world. It was a (limited) form of centralization. But it made the P2P MUCH more usable.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#160

Post by fghtr » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #147

wslh wrote: post #54

There is an easy contrarian view about decentralization: even if a decentralized protocol wins, at the end it is all about the UI/UX/Aggregation which clearly cannot be decentralized. For example, OpenBazaar can be great but the one who develop the best UI and search engine will win.

There is a semi-centralized solution: make search run on a handful of central machines, and check if the results of (e.g.) two of them match.

This problem is essentially solved by YaCy: http://yacy.net