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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#101

Post by notyourday »

0xCMP wrote: post #80
casmclas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#102

Post by smitty1e »

antihipocrat wrote: post #90
smitty1e wrote: post #34

> No, the solution has to be political. That’s uncomfortable for me, as it probably is for you too. Software I can do, politics though? That’s hard. I've been noodling this point from the political end for academic reasons of late. Conclusion: society is an 80/20 problem. - 80% geared toward stability (why I want actual companies with heft doing things like bridges and hardware &c). Socialized things. - 20% geared to…

The 80 per cent also includes the large rent seeking corporations. It is in their interest to stifle innovation as well, or if not, then be in a privileged position to aquire it once it has been de-risked.

Indeed.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#103

Post by ayyy »

the8472 wrote: post #39
bawolff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism. You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.

I think Bittorrent could be made usable for 1:1 transfers. The building blocks are there. But you'd have to streamline the process and build a client optimized for that case instead of the more common usage. The main missing piece would be a standardized encryption format. That doesn't really need protocol changes, just a storage-level convention how the data is encrypted before turning it into a torrent.

What do you mean, could be? https://instant.io/ is just one of many webtorrent sites that do this. It's a wonderful use of bittorrent.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#104

Post by catlifeonmars »

opsy2 wrote: post #89
travisgriggs wrote: post #73

Does it need to be centralized vs decentralized? The human organism is (IMO) an awesome demonstration of both centralization and decentralization. As is the little blue speck we call our home biome. What I might accept is that proponents of both arguments ("we need more centralization so we can provide a better service" vs "we need more decentralization so we have the freedom to evolve better services") ideally come…

In my reading, the article was arguing not decentralized v centralized one-or-the-other, but just that decentralized is failing.

I read it as more of decentralization failing to stay decentralized. Which is important if decentralization is a goal in and of itself. And relatively uninteresting otherwise.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#105

Post by Tyr42 »

notyourday wrote: post #101
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

hotmail.com? Just as many syllables

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#106

Post by plorkyeran »

cloudking wrote: post #70
marcinjachymiak wrote: post #8

This is a really myopic view on uses of crypto and the BitTorrent protocol. There's so much more going on than criminal applications. BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent As for crypto, I recommend peo…

Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute their games and patches https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

"was" is an important word in the first sentence there. They finished moving away from BitTorrent in 2013, and they'd phased out actual p2p transfers in favor of just using the BT client to download from a web seed a while before that.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#107

Post by samatman »

the8472 wrote: post #39
bawolff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism. You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.

I think Bittorrent could be made usable for 1:1 transfers. The building blocks are there. But you'd have to streamline the process and build a client optimized for that case instead of the more common usage. The main missing piece would be a standardized encryption format. That doesn't really need protocol changes, just a storage-level convention how the data is encrypted before turning it into a torrent.

I'm not sure I see the point though?

For 1-to-1 transfers, Magic Wormhole is the system to beat, and I struggle to imagine how it could be improved.

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#108

Post by Talanes »

notyourday wrote: post #101
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

Yahoo tried to make Ymail a thing, but that was long after they'd lost most their market to Google.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#109

Post by bstar77 »

marcinjachymiak wrote: post #8

This is a really myopic view on uses of crypto and the BitTorrent protocol. There's so much more going on than criminal applications. BitTorrent is used in a lot of settings for data distribution and for software distribution. Saying it's just for pirating reveals the author's laziness. Several of these use-cases are listed in the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent As for crypto, I recommend peo…

This article is laughably bad. I'm not even sure it's worth the time to give a counter response. The BitTorrent comment he made is objectively false and can be proven as such. Tons of game installers use torrents under the hood to distribute their massive game payloads.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#110

Post by lolinder »

eloisius wrote: post #99
0xCMP wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

I’ve occasionally wondered why the responsibility to mitigate abuse can’t be pushed all the way out to edge nodes (individual ISPs and data centers) instead of relying on centralized abuse prevention. I imagine this does happen for certain kinds of abuse, but wouldn’t the threat of others not peering with your node be good motivation for ISPs not to provide services to spammers?

That's one big part of what Google does, and it's part of why it's so hard to get Google to accept self hosted email. They have a list of known good hosts (that they effectively "peer" with), and if you're not on that list your mail may or may not make it into a Gmail inbox.
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