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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#61

Post by emteycz »

lmm wrote: post #41

Counterthesis: decentralised applications are losing popularity because XMPP was so awful that it poisoned the view of decentralisation. Pre-XMPP everything was decentralised and federated. Post-XMPP decentralisation became synonymous with less-good clones of centralised systems, and both new systems and existing decentralised systems started moving towards centralisation. Decentralisation will come back again when t…

Just a coincidence. Most people have no idea what XMPP was, never even cared, and joined the change.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#62

Post by casmclas »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #31
thesausageking wrote: post #12

The author's definition of what makes a "decentralized application" is too strong and 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. To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can bu…

Calling decentralised software centralised because companies built good defaults on top is a fallacy. Email, the web and torrents are definitely success story. I don't like cryptocurrencies (those who are unbacked and resource hungry, I like the tech behind) but bringing payments in the software world and out of financial gatekeepers could exactly the missing piece of the puzzle to have even more working decentralise…

It isn't a fallacy, and in any case the article isn't claiming that decentralised software has become centralised because companies have built good defaults on top, so that's a complete strawman.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#63

Post by tomphoolery »

the8472 wrote: post #39
bawolff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism. You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.

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.

Agreed, but I don't think there's a lot of motivation to do so. At that point, BitTorrent is just DCC in a new fur coat. As stated earlier, BT is most appropriately used in a setting where you want to download a single file from multiple sources, distributing the workload between them and your network. This results in faster downloads, and does so in a way that is decentralized (for the most part) and scalable by design.

So while it could be done, the question is really "should it be done"? I'd love to be able to send a file over the internet easily without using some centralized service, but if there's only 2 people that are meant to have the file, does the overhead of BitTorrent make any sense?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#64

Post by halikular »

the8472 wrote: post #39
bawolff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the author laments that bittorrent is not used for 1:1 transfers. Bittorrent's strength is in distributing bandwidth for popular files. Direct file transfers between people who know each other isn't really its target. So i feel that's a pretty unfair criticism. You don't always need to take over the world to be succesful. Its fine to have a niche and just do that really well.

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.

We already have SFTP for this.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#65

Post by Const-me »

Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #35

Author wants political solutions (socialism) to "fix" centralized applications instead of developing better technological solutions. Yawn.

I disagree that such a political solution == socialism.

Every time some piece of infrastructure became critically important for the society, people used political power to regulate the companies providing the infrastructure. Happened with railroads, water and sewers, electricity distribution.

The modern big tech with it's social networks is very similar to these older networks.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#67

Post by Quiark »

gpm wrote: post #32
endisneigh wrote: post #11

Is there even a single decentralized app that is mainstream? BitTorrent is great but I wouldn’t exactly call it mainstream. I do wish more sites used it for downloads though. I haven’t sat down and researched this, but an argument could be made that inherently a centralized app, who is trusted, available and resilient, will always be superior. Any thoughts?

Blizzard's game launcher (use to?) downloads the games via Torrent. E.g. starcraft II, world of war craft, etc. That's pretty damn mainstream. A lot of older networked games were, probably some modern ones too. One player hosts the game (either picked automatically by the match making system, or by running a game server listed by a index server), and everyone else connects to them. Call of duty, counter strike, starc…

HK resident here ... FireChat wasn't mainstream.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#68

Post by dboreham »

thesausageking wrote: post #12

The author's definition of what makes a "decentralized application" is too strong and 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. To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can bu…

Basically you can be decentralized at the wholesale level but not retail. Like the internet.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#70

Post by cloudking »

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…

Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute their games and patches https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
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