Althea Mesh sounds like a great idea.
I'd love to get your input on the in progress whitepaper!
Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#22Nearly all of these relate to blockchain tech. Which is interesting. I do ask: why blockchain ? Are modern blockchains still cycling away on silicon to find hashes? Seems a terrifically ineffecient way to build a system. I can understand the distributed hash table / transaction tree idea, but I struggle to grasp the rationale for proof of work systems.
Proof of work is the only known way to achieve consensus among entities that don't trust anyone. It also provides a way to "fairly" distribute new currency among entities who don't trust anyone. It's not clear to me that the decentralized Web needs consensus, its own currency, or total lack of trust.
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#23Watching the recorded feed from this summit is kind of nuts. You have Vint Cerf (co-inventor of TCP/IP) providing Q&A about a distributed digital archive of the internet and the first guy to ask a question is Carl Hewitt (developer of the Actor Model) and then the guy looking over his shoulder at Carl is Tim Berners-Lee (some web dude).
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#24Nearly all of these relate to blockchain tech. Which is interesting. I do ask: why blockchain ? Are modern blockchains still cycling away on silicon to find hashes? Seems a terrifically ineffecient way to build a system. I can understand the distributed hash table / transaction tree idea, but I struggle to grasp the rationale for proof of work systems.
There is no other known effective defense against Sybil attacks in fully decentralized systems.
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#25So wish we could have made it to this. In any case ZeroTier was conceived with Internet decentralization motives in mind specifically with the goal of making edge device connectivity easy. It can be and is used for other things but that was the original motive.
/no relation to ZeroNet, didn't know about that when I named it.
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#26Nearly all of these relate to blockchain tech. Which is interesting. I do ask: why blockchain ? Are modern blockchains still cycling away on silicon to find hashes? Seems a terrifically ineffecient way to build a system. I can understand the distributed hash table / transaction tree idea, but I struggle to grasp the rationale for proof of work systems.
There is no other known effective defense against Sybil attacks in fully decentralized systems.
Sybil attacks do not work in small communities that members may choose to form where the members already know each other.
If a system forces all users to be part of some large, Borg-like, distributed hash table, or ledger, then by my definition it's not "fully decentralized".
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no other known effective defense against Sybil attacks in fully decentralized systems.
Sybil attacks do not work in small communities that members may choose to form where the members already know each other. If a system forces all users to be part of some large, Borg-like, distributed hash table, or ledger, then by my definition it's not "fully decentralized".
Indeed, if you don't plan on writing distributed systems that work for more than a few people, you don't need to worry about Sybil attacks. However, the nice thing about the internet is that it connects billions of people, so here we are.
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#28While i love the idea of a Decentralised Internet, i would say that it does not solve the problems that well.
An awful lot of these techs are completely block-chain and consensus dependant. Which makes sense (you are in a byzantine environment after all) but is far from being a solved, ready to be used idea. Really far. And that is awfully unefficeint in term of power.
Additionally, except the wifi router project, none of them really solve anything. It just push the boundaries a bit.
I still like the fact we have people working on it, and i will keep working toward it, but we are so so far from solutions.
Still super nice to see some of the things here. Thanks for the hard work :)
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#29While i love the idea of a Decentralised Internet, i would say that it does not solve the problems that well. An awful lot of these techs are completely block-chain and consensus dependant. Which makes sense (you are in a byzantine environment after all) but is far from being a solved, ready to be used idea. Really far. And that is awfully unefficeint in term of power. Additionally, except the wifi router project, no…
Indeed it has been said that decentralization is the worst form of networking except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
(With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
Re: Technologies of the Decentralized Web Summit
#30Nearly all of these relate to blockchain tech. Which is interesting. I do ask: why blockchain ? Are modern blockchains still cycling away on silicon to find hashes? Seems a terrifically ineffecient way to build a system. I can understand the distributed hash table / transaction tree idea, but I struggle to grasp the rationale for proof of work systems.
Proof of work is the only known way to achieve consensus among entities that don't trust anyone . It also provides a way to "fairly" distribute new currency among entities who don't trust anyone. It's not clear to me that the decentralized Web needs consensus, its own currency, or total lack of trust.
Which is why I like layered approaches like IPFS that separate the merkle-tree layer (hashed content) from the naming layer (IPNS, DNS, Namecoin, etc.).
There are definitely valid uses of blockchain tech but requiring it as central part of the architecture is a recipe for (re)centralization because eventually it will always grow beyond home-computer scale.