121–130 of 137 posts
Is there an effective way to suppress denial of service attacks in a decentralized network? Given that there are DNS root servers, isn't the internet actually centralized?
You have to centralize somewhere—IP address assignments are also centralized.
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…
Here is the answer: SOFTWARE. We have amazing hardware - phones, tablets, routers, computers. There is no good software to run on those things.
Facebook, Google, YouTube - why are they so popular?
It’s the software stupid :) (it’s an expression, not calling you stupid).
Facebook has better social networking capabilities with real time chat, videoconference calls etc. than Wordpress or PHPBB. That said, Wordpress powers 30% of the Web. But most of the Web is kinda static, not dynamic like Facebook / Slack / Telegram which took MILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO DEVELOP.
Now, if I ask you, with your amazing hardware, how would you collaborate on a document? Why of course Google Docs or maybe Dropbox etc. WHY? THEY HAVE THE SOFTWARE!
They didn’t give it to you. They have it on their backend servers. Same with YouTube - they do all the transcoding, social networking etc.
Why is github popular? Because you have profiles, ratings etc. The always-on broadband led to an explosion of “software as a service” models, and “the cloud”.
Once upon a time there was AOL, Compuserv and MSN. Steve Case was the Mark Zuckerberg of the day. Then TBL invented the Web Browser which didnt really do much but it let anyone run a web server permissionlessly and HTTP was an open protocol. Fast forward 10 years and aol is just a website. Everyone left the walled garden, starting with the brands. Why have AOL KEYWORD FACEBOOK when you have FACEBOOK.COM. The Web is what in fact allowed facebook, google and amazon to even exist. AOL would have never given them permission!!!!
So today you had those sites and they have the software of Web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Which open software could disrupt all this? SOCIAL NETWORKING AND COLLABORATION. Web 3.0. Meaning user accounts, profiles, realtime updates, notifications, videoconferencing and maybe payments.
My company built exactly this and more (events, group rides etc.) We are like a more modern Wordpress / Drupal codebase. And we are working on a utility token to monetize the ecosystem
See https://qbix.com/platform the video there
Also see https://qbix.com/token (speaks about how to get from a feudal society to a free market on the Web).
Please see this for broader societal implications:
https://qbix.com/blog (latest article)
Look through the articles on that blog for more info.
As someone who works in the domain name industry, I'd like to note that there is ever increasing pressure to police domain name use. When you buy and use a generic TLD such as "com" or "ninja", you are buying a US product and it is subject to sanction laws and other things you may not realize. CC TLDs (two characters long like "ch") are products of that country and have their own laws UNLESS the registry company is l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming it is not trolling. Every time you get new IP from the ISP, you update DNS record for that domain. And browsers can connect to it to the exposed 80/443 port.
I believe GP's point is that some providers don't provide a publicly routable ip address.
The article calls ipv6 an “easy way” to decentralize but I don’t see it. If you click the link on how to get your own ipv6 space you get two options: Ask your ISP for an address or set up a tunnel to someone else who will give you one. These are the same options we have today for ipv4. I went on my crappy large ISP’s website. They are not handing out static ipv6. Why would they? The problem has always been more about…
On the other hand, this won't really change much for the firewall issues named above. Computers are too insecure to expose them all to the internet, all the time. We'd need pretty radical changes in how software is written to create a truly flat worldwide network (which has never existed before).
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…
Abuse is another one. Note how you almost never see spam on GitHub. And you can effortlessly cross-reference issues across repos and notify other users by mentioning them. That works, because global view across all repos makes spotting and blocking abuse easier, and moderation is possible thanks to the business side subsidizing it. Contrast that with WordPress trackbacks. They're all spam. And blog comments are full…
Maybe decentralized services should function strictly on a web-of-trust basis. In the end, if you have something valuable to contribute in a given domain, you have either joined a relevant organization or have contact with people in the field.
Maybe collaboration between complete strangers with unknown reputation, is not a good idea and explains why it doesn't function like that in the real world?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to selfhost many of those apps, we have built a tool (Cloudron) to take away most of the deployment hassle for many of those apps mentioned in the link. Also to work around the provider lock-in with ipv4 addresses while hosting from your home or on-premise we have a built-in dynamic DNS feature https://cloudron.io/documentation/networking/#dynamic-dns So in the end it doesn't matter if you change ISP or i…
I think something like Sandstorm/Cloudron is the way forward with decentralization. I'm more than happy to pay someone else to manage all my services for me. But I see where my apps are hosted as the least interesting question. The important issue for me is lock-in. How easy would it be to switch if Cloudron does something I don't like, or if they outright ban me for some reason? If it's easy to switch, that keeps in…
It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…
I see this as a problem with trust. Decentralized systems require less trust for them to work (think consensus mechanisms) but ironically users today don't trust the tech because it is still early IMO, centralized systems need more trust. People these days are using centralized systems because they trust the centralized system (FB, Google) more then the decentralized tech.
As someone who works in the domain name industry, I'd like to note that there is ever increasing pressure to police domain name use. When you buy and use a generic TLD such as "com" or "ninja", you are buying a US product and it is subject to sanction laws and other things you may not realize. CC TLDs (two characters long like "ch") are products of that country and have their own laws UNLESS the registry company is l…
Any thoughts on which TLDs are least susceptible to shenanigans?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where does my use or possession end? For example, I trade two sheep for a bicycle which I need for transportation to get to my job. Can someone come along and take my bicycle any time I'm not using it? If so, how is this theft justified? You either work out an agreement with the people who might take it that a bicycle be available for you after work or you just go and find another bicycle. It's funny you say this b…
> Socialist nations who have transitioned smoothly from capitalism have done so very successfully (take Norway). Do you have a source for that? I'm pretty certain Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) are not socialist and more of a social democracy, where they simply provide a large social safety net through heavy taxation. I believe they still very much are in favor of a free market economy.