Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

#11

Post by jazzyjackson »

Freenet has been around since 2000, and I remember wondering why Wikipedia was always begging for millions of dollars when there was a way to have users host the content. Sure you don't want to ask someone to install a node just to view wikipedia, but there's enough editors and archivists out there that would be willing to be mirrors if it was just a background process you could run like freenet. It got me interested in programming and I learned that handling conflicts on a decentralized system makes things difficult, plus apparently there's more to running an encyclopedia than hosting servers.

Now wikipedia is mirror'd on IPFS, but its just a mirror, you can't edit. Still the performance of it is surprisingly good.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1m...

Re: Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

#12

Post by rafiki6 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #10

Skype used to use each user's PC as a node, and every once in a while your PC would become a "supernode" and handle other people's traffic. The only part that was centralized was the login, as there was only one global namespace. [1] It was end-to-end encrypted too, tho it was proprietary and maybe backdoor'd but what's new. After microsoft bought it they started handling the supernode traffic. "nine months after Mic…

Yes I recall this. Too bad what MSFT did with it. I also noticed severe performance reductions when this eventually happened, but I wasn't entirely sure if it was due to a botched transition by MSFT or not. Needless to say, Skype has lost a ton of market share now.

Re: Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

#13

Post by rafiki6 »

scrollaway wrote: post #4

The internet? And many of its protocols that came with it, including email, etc. Sidenote, and I dunno if it's what you're implying but many people do: "company x takes decentralized solution, offers services on top that aren't decentralized" doesn't make the whole thing centralized. Git is still a wonderful decentralized tool. There is very little functionality that Github offers on top of git that is particularly c…

Agreed with the idea that the internet is inherently decentralized. Too bad that we ultimately needed to succumb to some form of centralization in the form of ISPs in order for it to be a truly global technology. There are now some blockchain based hardware projects coming out trying to circumvent this.

And you're right about Github and git. I mean to say git couldn't really scale to the level of adoption it had without that centralized discovery layer on top of it.

Re: Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

#14

Post by rafiki6 »

aklemm wrote: post #2

Email remains underrated in terms of decentralized notions.

Again, unfortunately for mass adoption to occur centralized solutions had to be developed to allow for wide market adoption, but yes I absolutely agree that Email IS the decentralized application. Too bad a lot of ISPs block outbound traffic on SMTP forcing you to use theirs or another centralized email solution.

Re: Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

#15

Post by duskwuff »

rafiki6 wrote: post #12
jazzyjackson wrote: post #10

Skype used to use each user's PC as a node, and every once in a while your PC would become a "supernode" and handle other people's traffic. The only part that was centralized was the login, as there was only one global namespace. [1] It was end-to-end encrypted too, tho it was proprietary and maybe backdoor'd but what's new. After microsoft bought it they started handling the supernode traffic. "nine months after Mic…

Yes I recall this. Too bad what MSFT did with it. I also noticed severe performance reductions when this eventually happened, but I wasn't entirely sure if it was due to a botched transition by MSFT or not. Needless to say, Skype has lost a ton of market share now.

It would have had to happen anyway. Skype's use of their customers' PCs for relaying traffic depended upon 1) users keeping their PCs turned on, and Skype running, constantly; and 2) users being tolerant of Skype consuming their computer's bandwidth and processor time. Both of these were starting to change by 2013, particularly as the market started shifting towards laptops (which are shut off frequently, often have less reliable wireless network connections, and make CPU consumption much more obvious by spinning up their fan).

Re: Ask HN: Truly successful applications based on decentralized networks?

#19

Post by rafiki6 »

duskwuff wrote: post #15
rafiki6 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I recall this. Too bad what MSFT did with it. I also noticed severe performance reductions when this eventually happened, but I wasn't entirely sure if it was due to a botched transition by MSFT or not. Needless to say, Skype has lost a ton of market share now.

It would have had to happen anyway. Skype's use of their customers' PCs for relaying traffic depended upon 1) users keeping their PCs turned on, and Skype running, constantly; and 2) users being tolerant of Skype consuming their computer's bandwidth and processor time. Both of these were starting to change by 2013, particularly as the market started shifting towards laptops (which are shut off frequently, often have…

Interesting lesson here I would say. It seems that relying too heavily on users with limited uptime computing power is not a good idea, until you reach a certain network size where it makes sense. The question now is, does this change with more computing devices with longer uptime (for e.g. a smart phone)?
Post reply on HN