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Decentralize All the Things

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Re: Decentralize All the Things

#31

Post by lbruder »

7952 wrote: post #18

I am starting to think that the killer app for a decentralised web is actually business. Think of the typical large corporation: * Massive reluctance to use cloud services and active blocking of services like Dropbox. * Centralised "intranet" style software is usually slow and badly designed. * Internet connections are slow, but local network connections are usually fast. * Desktop computers spend most of their time…

We used to run a decentralized server on our office PCs to aid in protein folding. The program would lie in the background and monitor CPU usage, then spring into action once the CPU was idle for some time, and utilize all but one CPU core to process one of the work packages available on a central server. To fold proteins, you'd just add your request to the queue, and some time later, you'd get the results, calculated on various PCs from customer support to the labs. Good times.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#32

Post by walterbell »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #6

Everybody has a project they kick around in the back of their head but will probably never get around to doing. My project is an O/S. It should be built from the ground up to be networkable, self-updating, and handle biometrics and P2P trust. And of course heavy use of encryption. In addition, it should operate along two streams: everything should have an execute and a verify stream running simultaneously. The reason…

> In addition, it should operate along two streams: everything should have an execute and a verify stream running simultaneously.

What would a "verify stream" do ... input validation, regression testing, anomaly detection, ..? Would it be verifying code or data or endpoint identity?

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#33

Post by evgen »

7952 wrote: post #18

I am starting to think that the killer app for a decentralised web is actually business. Think of the typical large corporation: * Massive reluctance to use cloud services and active blocking of services like Dropbox. * Centralised "intranet" style software is usually slow and badly designed. * Internet connections are slow, but local network connections are usually fast. * Desktop computers spend most of their time…

The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decentralized service that is less expensive to develop or maintain than an equivalent centralized service.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#34

Post by walterbell »

dj-wonk wrote: post #16
dj-wonk wrote: post #14

I'd be interested to hear what decentralized technology projects HN readers are working on and/or most interested in -- and hopefully that a community could help with. Care to share your favorites below?

I'm helping out on a project that is a mix of decentralized and distributed. It is "a (nascent) specification for distributed, immutable, derived, addressable data. It defines a layer for addressing data, providing a foundation for downstream functions such as data caching, transport, discovery, and computation." https://github.com/tdxlabs/fondo I know there are related projects (mentioned and linked in the repo abov…

Would there be any room for cooperation with camlistore?

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#35

Post by walterbell »

evgen wrote: post #33
7952 wrote: post #18

I am starting to think that the killer app for a decentralised web is actually business. Think of the typical large corporation: * Massive reluctance to use cloud services and active blocking of services like Dropbox. * Centralised "intranet" style software is usually slow and badly designed. * Internet connections are slow, but local network connections are usually fast. * Desktop computers spend most of their time…

The idea that distributed apps are "no maintenance" or require less overhead than centralized apps is the big lie that will always make such proposals fall apart. If there is a reluctance or genuine opposition to cloud services maybe you should ask why and consider the fact that they might know more than you do about the reasoning (we don't use it because Dropbox internal security is shit) and that there is no decent…

Would you consider Skype (in the original supernode topology) to be a centralized or decentralized service?

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#36

Post by oco101 »

How can you right this kind of article and completely ignore some of the best technology in the space that solves many of the problem mentioned ?I.E Bitshares 10 seconds block, 10000 transaction per second and more, Ripple 5 seconds block.

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#37

Post by dvanduzer »

fchollet wrote: post #17
sz4kerto wrote: post #9

I have been playing with an idea to decentralize search (or, more generally, information processing). I would consist of - a publicly available hierarchical type system (similar to how classes look like in an OOP language with multiple inheritance). For example, URL is a type, or set of search terms is a type. - any number of nodes on the net. Each of them would provide a mapping from a set of input data to a set of…

How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? How do you guarantee that a node is actually doing what it is supposed to and not inserting malware into its results? Reputation systems can be gamed (and will be if there's money at stake). I like the notion of trustworthy, general-purpose, publicly distributed computing: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustwo...

> How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node?

With math.

First you need a common consensus of what the publicly searchable corpus is at a given point in time. Computing a hash on the entire set may be impractical, so you partition the crawlspace. Dynamic content makes it tricky to validate distributed crawling, which motivates things like http://named-data.net

A blockchain might be useful as the public ledger for retrospective diffs when asking "What is all the currently public available data right now?"

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#38

Post by bachback »

sz4kerto wrote: post #26
bachback wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. How about creating a github project for this? Would like to follow. Blockchain based DNS systems already exist. Web search mostly builds on links and DNS. If one thinks about it TLD names are pretty much fixed, where as in Namecoin they are subject to consensus. What one can do, and that's one example out of many, is create unique hashes for any content to create indestructible information.

Maybe in the near future I'll create some kind of skeleton, but I have to write this down properly, not just in a HN comment. Blockchain is not something that I'd use for these kind of stuff as it trades computational power for trust. As it came up somewhere else: the whole Bitcoin accounting could be run on a Raspberry Pi if we trusted the guy who owns the RPi -- but people who want to use BC don't trust anybody tha…

With Namecoin anyone can design new naming protocols based on consensus. That's not possible with ICANN's DNS (the Internet is centralized in this regard - nobody can change the semantics of ".com"). New naming protocols are a huge deal => for searching & finding any information, for Identification, and more. Namecoin did not get it right, and PoW style blockchains are too complicated. But potentially one gets things like single-sign on, integrated micropayments, and things which are hard to imagine (smart contracts, etc.).

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#39

Post by existencebox »

forgottenpass wrote: post #10
lawl wrote: post #2

Uhhh, either I don't get what they are trying to say or the article doesn't really say anything at all? They state the example that a bitcoin like blockchain isn't the right solution for distributed email? Well no shit? A few paragraphs before that they even say "blockchain is a distributed database", well you don't want a distributed database to deliver messages to individuals. And yes, torrent doesn't need a databa…

Did I miss the message they were trying to convey? Nope, you had it in your first sentience, the article doesn't really say anything at all. I've recently started considering TC's coverage "tech-adjacent", a poorly-formed idea that their target audience is people who work in or with tech-heavy fields, but would never be called on to design or implement systems themselves. TC can talk tech-adjacent stuff to techies, o…

You'll have to forgive me for tangenting this a bit, but yours and my sister posters mulling prompted some mulling of my own.

While I can certainly say I've gained the apprehensiveness you speak of, I realize I've gained it for systems at scale; centralized or otherwise. In fact, for badly engineered distributed systems, where you previously had one problem (getting modules to communicate) you now have N; (getting modules to communicate over potentially unreliable channels; which may themselves have additional hidden points of failure and varying failure modes/symptoms, etc etc). I'm being a bit high-level-hand-wavy with this, but it seems to get the point across (I hope.)

My takeaway being, I'm curious if there have been people who have addressed this potential conundrum (and if you even see what I stated as a problem at all.). Data to show that systems are more/less reliable due to certain failure modes under different architectures would be nice, but that seems like a MASSIVE undertaking to do if you have any desire for the data to be meaningful; if only that it may be testing the competency of the team rather than the actual underlying relative difficulty. (although if done broadly enough maybe that would still provide useful guidance? I'm rambling at this point, but some thoughts.)

Re: Decentralize All the Things

#40

Post by wcummings »

lawl wrote: post #2

Uhhh, either I don't get what they are trying to say or the article doesn't really say anything at all? They state the example that a bitcoin like blockchain isn't the right solution for distributed email? Well no shit? A few paragraphs before that they even say "blockchain is a distributed database", well you don't want a distributed database to deliver messages to individuals. And yes, torrent doesn't need a databa…

I think you misunderstand how Bitmessage works. It doesn't use a blockchain. It's like alt.anonymous.messages, but with a Bitcoin-like broadcast protocol

http://www.quora.com/What-is-Bitmessage-and-how-does-it-work

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