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

Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

ingrids.space

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 311 posts

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#251

Post by savingisbadnow »

taaha47 wrote: post #206
carlosrg wrote: post #196

I stopped reading when the author claimed that Bitcoin failed. If you think a virtual coin that has reached 1T market cap recently has failed I don't know what to tell you. Your definition of "failing" or "don't work" is flawed.

The point was it has deviated from it's original purpose which is a decentralized, identity free financial system. Dark markets apart, it has almost no practical use today. I've read some comments on people sending money cross borders using bitcoin, the author might have overlooked this. Anyways, without numbers it is mere speculations... What is interesting in his article is the fact that decentralized solutions are…

It hasnt deviated from its purpose. You are just free to use it however you want.

And each year you can do much more, you just have to admit you dont understand it first, then you can learn.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#252

Post by oblio »

atatatat wrote: post #241
pnt12 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I'm..." A specific user from a niche geek website, a rounding error, an anecdote. I'm glad for those fighting against these walled garden overlords, but let's keep in mind we're talking about a side with thousands of people VS a side with billions of people. Numbers matter, and the fall of these giants is still far away. If anything, the battle is starting from recent anti-competition and privacy concerns in the…

You are a technology influencer, according to the research of those large companies. We are the ones who give the network effect to those services.

And those same companies have entire departments, with huge budgets, to promote their stuff, draw people into them, discourage people from using those other services, buy out influencers, etc

It's not a fair fight and it will never be.

I wouldn't say it's completely lost, but it's not far.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#253

Post by ladyattis »

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…

if I recall correctly, Blizzard's updater uses Bittorrent to distribute updates for WoW and other applications. So I'm confused by the fact people still focus on the piracy aspect of Bittorrent when there's been many commercial uses of the platform.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#254

Post by oblio »

samatman wrote: post #107
the8472 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

First time I hear about Magic Whatever™. Any modern download tool needs to be embedded into browsers and mobile OSes for it to have any chance these days.

I haven't seen any regular user use a separate download tool or a download manager for a decade or more.

Except for BitTorrent clients, but those aren't targeted at 1:1, of course :-)

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#255

Post by StavrosK »

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…

> 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

How can these two sentences be true at the same time?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#256

Post by ridaj »

boomlinde wrote: post #246
ridaj wrote: post #165

Another reason it doesn't work is that networks used by humans need policing to be usable by anyone but the most advanced and psychologically resilient users, and there isn't an economic model that funds this at scale with completely open networks. Mail is only usable because of spam filters, the best of which are completely opaque, and paid by ads. The web is open, but the search index isn't, and it spends a signifi…

> Another reason it doesn't work is that networks used by humans need policing to be usable by anyone but the most advanced and psychologically resilient users Does policing need to be centralized? I seem to remember having a better time visiting small special interest forums spread around the web than I've had with the kind of everyone-everything-social networks that are ubiquitous today. They were typically moderat…

You're right, it does not structurally need to be centralized and there are small trusted networks that are volunteer-moderated. They are a minority of what people actually spend time on when they use social networks these days though. The strong economies of scale involved in content policing (eg, investment in ML porn classifiers, moderation guidelines enforcement, dealing with the legal questions associated with kicking-out of a political person calling for this or that violent act) make it economically advantageous for centralized networks to pursue a scale-up strategy.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#258

Post by tcrow »

The author and those of you who find true decentralized applications interesting, may want to check out ClarionOS [0] by Dan Larimer, esteemed creator of BitShares, Steemit, and EOS blockchain projects, as well as the author of "More Equal Animals" [1] a free-for-everyone book about rebuilding our political system using fractal democracy.

Clarion is NOT A BLOCKCHAIN BASED project, so hopefully you won't have a tendency to dismiss it outright.

From the Introduction: "Clarion aims to give everyone in the world the tools to broadcast their message to everyone who wants to hear their message without creating dependencies on centralized infrastructure. It will achieve this with a censorship resistant "friend to friend" network which will leverage the unused resources of your friends and family to distribute your content.

The ultimate goal is to provide the performance and reliability of a "centralized service" with the freedom and independence of a logically decentralized network. With the help of the Clarion community we can free our friends and family from the tyranny of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Apple and Google and produce a social network free from manipulation and 3rd party dependence."

[0] https://github.com/Clarionos/clarion [1] https://moreequalanimals.com/posts/book-launch

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#259

Post by rakoo »

rapnie wrote: post #189
3np wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix where the server-to-server protocol is decentralized/peer-to-peer but clients interact with the network through designated servers are generally considered "federated" (which can be either considered as distinct from or a subset of "decentralized") So the author seems to take "decentralized" here to mean "fully decentralized and peer-to-peer", which is indeed an unconvention…

> Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix I must correct you here on "Protocols like Mastodon". The protocol that underlies the Fediverse is the W3C ActivityPub Recommendation [0] and making that distinction is really important. Not doing so would encourage centralization in the same ways as discussed elsewhere in this thread for Email vs. Gmail. Mastodon is just a fediverse app that was an early adopter of Activi…

Your point would be true if ActivityPub was a properly defined specification, but it isn't. It is voluntarily vague in many places to accommodate for the differences in implementations, which means that each implementation needs to understand how other software works to interoperate. So in practice it is more accurate to say "Protocol like Mastodon", because even if you can talk with Mastodon it doesn't mean you can talk with Pleroma or Pixelfeed or others.

More details here: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-t...

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#260

Post by rakoo »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #237
lrvick wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have moved email provider multiple times without any of that pain. It is easy. I just point my domain name at new MX servers.

Do you have any advice how to best move the old emails to the new IMAP account? My current provider started getting flaky when they were bought out by a larger one, but I've been putting it off for years trying to move. Maybe offlineimap to a local box, probably best to have your own backup anyway.

You can use offlineimap or mbsync to transfer from an IMAP server to another IMAP server
Post reply on HN