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

71–72 of 72 posts

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

#71

Post by zzzcpan » Mon, Jun 20, 2016, 5:58 PM UTC

tzpardi wrote: post #70

zzzcpan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a user builds the software from source Again, sources do not emerge out of thin air and have to be shipped to users somehow. No matter what you do, user must get the software first to bootstrap. And since bootstrapping always requires information from the sources it cannot be considered a separate problem until you solve the problem of shipping that information to users in a decentralized way. All of the so call…

It seems, you are trying to decentralize the who world which I think is a) unrealistic b) doesn't make sense. On the other hand, we are trying to solve specific use cases with decentralized applications. For instance Bitcoin implements a decentralized payment network to address a specific use case and our application Streembit implements a decentralized communication framework for humans and machines. I am perfectly…

I cannot acknowledge the decentralized bootstrapping problem, I'm sorry. It relies on the information from a centralized authority (i.e. source code) and therefore cannot be solved until the first one is solved.

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

#72

Post by ralala » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 9:30 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #39

ralala wrote: post #26

For most of the P2P overlays there are multiple serious attack possibilities (Sybil attack, routing table poisoning). 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 pro…

http://doc.tm.uka.de/SKademlia_2007.pdf Combine that with using the global overlay only for bootstrapping of common-interest sub-networks and you'll limit the incentives that an attacker will have to attack the global overlay while also reducing the effectiveness because a single non-fake contact will be sufficient to join the subnetwork. It's not an absolute defense (sybil-resistance without central authority is har…

I think it's still important to find a good balance for the computational cost of the crypto puzzle.

Attackers will probably have a lot of computational resources (think of AWS, botnets, GPU computations), while typical users don't (mobile phones).

I haven't had time yet to look into the IPFS details yet, but thanks for the reference.

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