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"Most are based on open-source software, which anybody can use without charge, so startups will have to make money with add-on services, such as updates, maintenance and subscriptions." I hope that in the next century, we'll chuckle with nervous laughter at how absurd the loaded assumptions in quotes like this were, and at how reasonable it seemed at the time.
Economist paywall. Can someone post the article?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the short term, you are likely right. But do you remember the days when some folks thought society might not need anything more than CompuServe, prodigy, earthling.net, aol? Long term I am hopeful about decentralization.
I'd definitely like to think so - and in practice, I've done more of running my own infrastructure recently. But what about those who're stuck under capped internet plans? What about the people whose interest in computing begins and ends with owning a smartphone?
Heh, searched for IPFS and was disappointed they didn't because it didn't come up. But turns out it did, they just misspelled it "IFPS".
Some years ago in the university I wrote a paper about that in a seminar to summarize the possible counter meassures, but from what I remember, there were no really practical solutions. I think the most promising one is the use of a centralized certificate authority, which reintroduces some of the problems p2p wanted to solve. Does anyone know if new ideas have come up in the last years?
Side note: I found it amusing how the article pretended that decentralized downlownding of copyrighted media stopped after Napster, and that:
> these technologies ended up being limited to a few services, such as Skype.
I'm having trouble interpreting the section with this quote as anything other than the author being hugely misleading. According to Wikipedia, BitTorrent alone has at least 150 million users.
Streembit is currently the only such project actively participating to W3 Web of Things standardization group and already incorporates all currently evolving standards put forward by the W3 Web of Things (WoT). We're working on a proposal to standardize "IoT over P2P" that we can put forward to IETF.
[0] https://streembit.github.io
[2] http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/06/09/streembit-hel...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia
[4] despite popular believe P2P networks suffer from centralization issues in P2P bootstrapping. Also Ethereum is not truly decentralized as the DAO attack shows
Disclaimer: I do not financially benefit from evangelising Streembit though I'm a voluntary contributor to the project so my position is certainly one that I would want to see them succeeed.
It's cyclical and this should be obvious to anyone in technology. We move between eras of centralisation and decentralisation. The internet started as a decentralised network in which we then built high capacity centralised systems at an accelerated rate. We're now about to shift back into a new era of decentralisation fuelled by edge/fog computing, IoT and p2p networks all on top of the existing infrastructure. The…