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Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#81

Post by kanwisher »

mpva wrote: post #71

This person clearly has a biased view about bitcoin ( as evident by their talk about and distain of the market and its "scammers", although we all hate scammers), so much so that they mix blockchain and bitcoin up. Blockchain technology has not failed in its task, and as to bitcoin failing, well I guess we will see. It reads like someone just lost a lot of money in they recent dip and is venting. For the record, Ther…

Everyone is downvoting you cause it makes zero sense to use blockchain to do IOT. IoTA is also largely a scam, the technology doesn't work

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#83

Post by Zak »

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…

XMPP was created to provide an open alternative to the proprietary instant messaging systems that popped up in the mid 1990s, but wasn't usable until several years after several of those had gained significant popularity. I suspect the number of people who tried XMPP and rejected it in favor of something proprietary is tiny in comparison to those who never heard of it.

IM may be the first category where an internet application first appeared in a modern, user-friendly, full-featured form in a proprietary implementation before there was a standardized implementation.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#84

Post by lmm »

emteycz wrote: post #61
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.

Most ordinary users have no idea. But there's a cultural generation of developers who tried to use Jabber in their high school / college years, found out how much it sucked, and carried that experience consciously or unconsciously into their programming careers.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#85

Post by BlueTemplar »

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.

Isn't this basically Resilio's Sync ? I've been using it for years on smartphone backups that otherwise wouldn't be able to hold a sustained transfer.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#86

Post by aabbcc1241 »

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…

Agree, that's the different between decentralized (like github and gitlab) and distributed (peer-to-peer like ipfs and zeronet)

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#88

Post by bombcar »

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…

This seems to be a rule - “inbound” decentralized systems are susceptible to the spam problem - but “outbound” ones like DNS seem to work OK. Nobody cares if you create fifty billion sub domains.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#89

Post by opsy2 »

travisgriggs wrote: post #73

Does it need to be centralized vs decentralized? The human organism is (IMO) an awesome demonstration of both centralization and decentralization. As is the little blue speck we call our home biome. What I might accept is that proponents of both arguments ("we need more centralization so we can provide a better service" vs "we need more decentralization so we have the freedom to evolve better services") ideally come…

In my reading, the article was arguing not decentralized v centralized one-or-the-other, but just that decentralized is failing.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#90

Post by antihipocrat »

smitty1e wrote: post #34

> No, the solution has to be political. That’s uncomfortable for me, as it probably is for you too. Software I can do, politics though? That’s hard. I've been noodling this point from the political end for academic reasons of late. Conclusion: society is an 80/20 problem. - 80% geared toward stability (why I want actual companies with heft doing things like bridges and hardware &c). Socialized things. - 20% geared to…

The 80 per cent also includes the large rent seeking corporations. It is in their interest to stifle innovation as well, or if not, then be in a privileged position to aquire it once it has been de-risked.
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