Reweaving the web: A slew of startups is trying to decentralise the online world

We have to look at why these centralized services have succeeded: for instance the network effects, the economies of scale, their business models are attractive to ambitious VC investments, they have better UX because they have more resources, and so on. Then you can either try to build something which matches these advantages, or you can try to do an end-run where you offer the market something more important.

Privacy and security are things the market is starting to value but I don't think these alone can woo everyone away from the network effects, better UX etc. of the centralized giants.

Anything which brings people out of an ad-heavy experience has a lot of appeal right now. I think we'll see more freemium and paid services in the future which is good because the economies of scale in the ad business are brutal to small businesses.

Anything we do to create more robust p2p and client-side encryption platforms is important. When building an app today it's just much easier to run it on a server and keep all the data on a server. p2p storage, identity and so on needs to become just as easy.

And finally we have to ask how this re-decentralized stuff is going to attract investment and build big businesses, because if the big money is always on the other side it's going to be very hard to win.

To be honest I think the technical challenges are fascinating but it really needs to start out with the business model and investment challenges, if you can figure out how a lot of money can be made off of a decentralized search engine or social network, now you have some real allies and resources and marketing behind you. This requires us to think about why open source business models are typically not as lucrative as proprietary walled gardens, and why they have a hard time getting traction in b2c.

IPv6 anycast looks quite promising[0][1][2] to help solve the problem with fully decentralizing bootstrapping of P2P nodes. This is a central issue currently affecting all p2p like networks including Ethereum, BitTorrent, Gnutella, Bitcoin, ...

main issue is probably lack of IPv6 anycast support (??) due to misinformation, broken middle boxes, and and lack of understanding in how to properly configure your network correctly for IPv6 (there are so many features making it also more secure, yet the impression I get is that people don't want to learn about it and in practice just aim for IPv4 maximum compatibility ... ).

[0] http://ryandoyle.net/assets/papers/Distributed_Bootstrapping...

[1] http://doc.tm.uka.de/2009/ipv6-contest-p2p-bootstrap.pdf

[2] https://www.ipv6council.de/fileadmin/summit09/presentations/...

That's a fairly modest problem. You need a bunch of nodes with above-average capacity to handle the bootstrap traffic and a way to occasionally update lists of such nodes. But a bunch of 10$ per quarter virtual boxes at a hoster of your choice and a bunch of domains with DNS SRV records can do that job.

In the absence of any/multicast-for-everyone someone will have to pay a little money or (ab)use a handful of non-decentralized services for the bootstrapping but that's more of a philosophical problem than a practical one.

There certainly is no single point of failure, you can have plenty of redundancy in the bootstrap process.

I think it is the misunderstanding of how decentralized applications work. The seeds decide about nothing during runtime. In an ideal scenario the seeds execute the application without being able to make any decisions terms of the business logic. That's how the trust between seeds can be established by executing the common functions i.e. Bitcoin mining or performing the Ethereum smart contracts by executing the application.

The issue is, we do not want the peers decide anything or be able to modify anything term of business logic. The objective is that all seeds execute "the" honest, published version of the software. Because such cannot be guaranteed, fundamental security issues exist in decentralized computing, some node can act dishonestly, and therefore vulnerability to 51% attacks and Byzantine Generals Problem exist.

The closest and best solution for this problem was the early days idea of Bitcoin to use IRC to publish the listening seed information, but IRC still not decentralized, so IMHO decentralized bootstrapping is a real problem which we need to solve.

I kicked out a discussion for this at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/streembit-dev/Xl2DpG...