18 ms·

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

142 points by vasaulys 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sverige 10y ago
The narrative for the last few years, at least in the mainstream media, is that Google Facebook Twitter Microsoft et al. are too big for anyone else to replace them. It's the old "inevitability" argument - if your new thing gets too big, they'll just buy you up. Let's hope people continue to try to create services that a big percentage of people use and then resist to sell to the big data companies.
- x5n1 10y ago
  I loved the web in the early mid-2000s. Web 2.0 so many startups, so many ideas, so many failures. It was great. Lots more hope than what is out there right now.
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    We are now in another part of the hype cycle for the web.
  - zeemonkee3 10y ago
    It reminds me of early 20th century footage of barnstorming aircraft inventors. Now it's just Boeing and Airbus and precious little in the way of real innovation.
- doctorshady 10y ago
  This probably won't be a popular opinion, but it seems like Google/Facebook/etc are entrenched too deeply in this incarnation of the web to be displaced any time soon. They seem to understand where they are too - it goes beyond just buying out competitors. Look at Facebook's Internet Lite plan for India.
  - sverige 10y ago
    > Look at Facebook's Internet Lite plan for India. Which was a spectacular failure...
    - a3n 10y ago
      For now.
    - doctorshady 10y ago
      Right. My point was more that they're willing to go to some fairly extreme measures to try insuring their market dominance.
      - sverige 10y ago
        And it sounds like we share the hope that they'll never fully succeed.
        doctorshady 10y ago
        Definitely can't disagree :) . I've had my reservations about the direction of the internet before, but a Facebook walled garden internet just sounds plain scary. Or worthless.
  - mxuribe 10y ago
    In the short term, you are likely right. But do you remember the days when some folks thought society might not need anything more than CompuServe, prodigy, earthling.net, aol? Long term I am hopeful about decentralization.
    - doctorshady 10y ago
      I'd definitely like to think so - and in practice, I've done more of running my own infrastructure recently. But what about those who're stuck under capped internet plans? What about the people whose interest in computing begins and ends with owning a smartphone?
chuhnk 10y ago
It's cyclical and this should be obvious to anyone in technology. We move between eras of centralisation and decentralisation. The internet started as a decentralised network in which we then built high capacity centralised systems at an accelerated rate. We're now about to shift back into a new era of decentralisation fuelled by edge/fog computing, IoT and p2p networks all on top of the existing infrastructure. The point is that it only occurs when we have a specific need and a niche vertical to initially leverage it in. In one form it's bitcoin for payments. In another form its IoT and essentially sensor networks. You can imagine autonomous vehicles being a huge p2p network for speed as opposed to feeding all the data back to the cloud.
- amelius 10y ago
  Could be. But how can you assume the trend is cyclical if we've seen only one and a half cycles?
- qwtel 10y ago
  Or consider the much more "cynical" (and in my mind more obvious, if it wasn't for our habit of seeing patterns everywhere) view that there might not be any structure, cyclical or other, to the course of history. In that view, whether the future of the internet will be centralized or decentralized is undetermined and will most likely be a mishmash of both, the extent of with will depend on inertia, ideology, economics and luck.
  - jeffreyrogers 10y ago
    I think the tendency will be towards centralization because centralization is more efficient.
    - substack 10y ago
      Not for transferring large files. A centralized architecture is the most expensive, slow way to do that.
- digi_owl 10y ago
stephengillie 10y ago
Can the title be corrected? It has a plural noun leading into a singular verb. Unless we're supposed to parse "slew of startups" as singular...
- rosser 10y ago
  > Unless we're supposed to parse "slew of startups" as singular... Yes, that's how that works, grammatically. The noun in that sentence is the slew, which, in this instance, happens to be of startups.
Ericson2314 10y ago
Heh, searched for IPFS and was disappointed they didn't because it didn't come up. But turns out it did, they just misspelled it "IFPS".
- oolongCat 10y ago
  Even searching for IPFS the first result on google for me is, https://www.ipfs.com/ https://www.ipfs.com/ lol
joelg 10y ago
"Most are based on open-source software, which anybody can use without charge, so startups will have to make money with add-on services, such as updates, maintenance and subscriptions." I hope that in the next century, we'll chuckle with nervous laughter at how absurd the loaded assumptions in quotes like this were, and at how reasonable it seemed at the time.
- woah 10y ago
  Why?
aphextron 10y ago
Economist paywall. Can someone post the article?
- pmontra 10y ago
  Click on web at the top, find the link and open in private window. It let me in through the main door without paywall tough.
ralala 10y ago
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 problems p2p wanted to solve. Does anyone know if new ideas have come up in the last years?
- the8472 10y ago
  http://doc.tm.uka.de/SKademlia_2007.pdf 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 hard) but in practice it won't be worth it for attackers.
  - ralala 10y ago
    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.
- pdimitar 10y ago
  You should read about the implementation of IPFS and how it tackles this exact problem. Look it up, it's readily accessible from the first few results in Google. I believe their system will work. Or require only minor tweaks.
zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago
Ah, tech startups. Because there's truly never enough silly solutions to problems that don't exist.
dwaltrip 10y ago
This is an important topic. I think that centralization is more of a risk in the digital realm, as single button presses can affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people in serious ways, especially as tech gets more entangled with all aspects of our lives, including very personal things. Side note: I found it amusing how the article pretended that decentralized downlownding of copyrighted media stopped after Napster, and that: > these technologies ended up being limited to a few services, such as Skype. I'm having trouble interpreting the section with this quote as anything other than the author being hugely misleading. According to Wikipedia, BitTorrent alone has at least 150 million users.
DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
Streembit[0] is missing in the discussion. It's not a new company and just a FOSS project. I believe it has same if not better potential than Ethereum[1] but without the risks associated with Ethereum or Bitcoin (e.g. Sybil attacks, blockchain block size debate, time it takes for proof of work, fully decentralized* etc). Plus it is up and running and can be tested by anyone who wants to give it for a spin[2]. Compared to Ethereum it has optional blockchain hooks, but uses a Kademlia[3] DHT. One can inject scripts that achieve more complex tasks (Smart-Contracts, Code to use the blockchain instead, centralization[4] logic, etc) on top of the Streembit network by injecting the Javascript into the DOM. Streembit is currently the only such project actively participating to W3 Web of Things standardization group and already incorporates all currently evolving standards put forward by the W3 Web of Things (WoT). We're working on a proposal to standardize "IoT over P2P" that we can put forward to IETF. [0] https://streembit.github.io https://streembit.github.io [2] http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/06/09/streembit-hello-world-1st-ever-video-call-over-a-decentralised-p2p-network/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/06/09/streembit-hel... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia [4] despite popular believe P2P networks suffer from centralization issues in P2P bootstrapping. Also Ethereum is not truly decentralized as the DAO attack shows Disclaimer: I do not financially benefit from evangelising Streembit though I'm a voluntary contributor to the project so my position is certainly one that I would want to see them succeeed.
- the8472 10y ago
  > despite popular believe P2P networks suffer from centralization issues in P2P bootstrapping. 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.
  - 10y ago
apatters 10y ago
I wish the article had spent more time discussing the root causes of the centralized Internet and ways to address them. This is the most interesting problem in tech right now in my opinion and many people are working on it from different angles but I've yet to see anything which really struck me as a killer app for the "re-decentralized" web. 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.
- DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
  >> as a killer app for the "re-decentralized" web. 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_of_P2P_Networks-RDoyle.pdf http://ryandoyle.net/assets/papers/Distributed_Bootstrapping... [1] http://doc.tm.uka.de/2009/ipv6-contest-p2p-bootstrap.pdf http://doc.tm.uka.de/2009/ipv6-contest-p2p-bootstrap.pdf [2] https://www.ipv6council.de/fileadmin/summit09/presentations/IDEA-pv6contest-p2p-bootstrapping.pdf https://www.ipv6council.de/fileadmin/summit09/presentations/...
tzpardi 10y ago
All these articles in the mainstream media about decentralized computing are very nice and the Ethereum and Bitcoin PR teams are doing a fine job to disseminate the idea of decentralized computing. At the same time, I think we need to be more honest about one of the fundamental issues of decentralized networking, which is that the bootstrapping of the network is not decentralized. The bootstrapping in fact centralized in Bitcoin, Ethereum, all existing cryptocurrencies and Streembit as well. The unique selling point of these application are decentralization, but there is a big, fat single point of failure risk, which is the bootstrapping of the network. I have started a discussion at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/streembit-dev/Xl2DpGpd-vw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/streembit-dev/Xl2DpG... to start working on the problem and propose a solution for the issue. Disclaimer/disclosure: I wrote the Streembit application which is mentioned in this thread, so I am heavily biased towards decentralized, peer-to-peer solutions I try to explain in this blog what we try to achieve with Streembit at http://streembit.github.io/2016-02-23-What-is-Streembit/ http://streembit.github.io/2016-02-23-What-is-Streembit/.
- scoot 10y ago
  /disclaimer/disclosure/
- textmode 10y ago
  This is true and IMO does not get enough discussion. It's a relatively easy problem to solve, but I'm not sure that hardcoding IP addresses into programs is the best solution for users who do not compile from source. Out of curiosity I once reviewed the source code for a certain "onion router" program and found a handful of hardcoded IP addresses. Servers at MIT if I recall correctly. If these servers are inaccessible, what is the effect? Perhaps "bootstrapping" is simply a matter of voluntarily downloading a trusted file, containing some reachable IP addresses. Can millions of people all download the same file? If no, then how does Firefox, Adobe Flash or Chrome get installed on so many computers? I consider the web (cf. internet) as more or less "bootstrapped". This is because of the preference for domain names versus IP addresses. It necessitates lookups. Bootstrapping all starts with one file: root.zone. Since 1993, this file has not changed very often. The IP address for the server where one can download it does not change very often either. Once I have that file, whether the root servers are working is irrelevant. Don't need them. Only need TLD nameservers, .com, etc. to be working. And of course one can download a local copy of the .com zone, etc., as a backup. But assuming those root servers are working I do not even need this file. Long ago I memorized the IP addresses for one root server and one com nameserver. As long as I have a means to send DNS packets[1] I can look up the IP address for any domain name and I can "surf the web". Or at least get myself out of a jam without the use of recursive DNS servers. 1. Even netcat will work, as explained in its tutorials. I do not use "dig" or BIND libraries. Nor do I ever need to set the recursive bit. I can do the resolution using non-recursive requests, using some helper scripts/programs I wrote. Interestingly, using this method beats the speed of a cold cache in nearly all cases. For the newly decentralized web, we will need supernodes that do not pass traffic but only provide port information to allow users to connect with each other through NAT. The IP addresses of these supernodes will be the "bootstrap". There could be millions of supernodes. Today, the "web" is addresses of servers controlled by companies pandering to advertisers. The "decentralized web" is addresses of users that can connect with each other to form communities. Those communities can be connected with each other, and so on. The "content" being served to users by today's web is largely "user-generated". But overrun with advertising and "analytics". The content is served indiscriminantly to the open internet. And even if there are access controls, because the data is centralized with a handful of companies it's an easy target for third parties who want access to it. Tomorrow's decentralized web allows user to selectively exchange their content with each other, without the companies and advertisers in the middle. Third parties wanting access may have to be more clever and more selective.
xg15 10y ago
> Then there is the question of how decentralised services will earn their keep. [...] More fundamentally, an internet that eschews control points may be one that affords firms less opportunity to build profits. To create a return that makes venture capitalists happy, the new tech firms will almost certainly come under pressure to get ever bigger. This seems to me the core problem and contradiction of the current initiative: As I understand it, the whole promise of decentralized services is that: 1) Because most of the logic is run by peers, the "upkeep" for the designers of the system is very low, if existent at all. Ideally, the system is completely self-sustaining (as long as there are peers) and the designers don't have to do anything to keep it running. (In the face of bugs and hackers this is probably utopic as you'd need at least some way to do security patches. It should however be significantly less than to run/rent servers) 2) Because most of the logic is run by peers, its the peers who decide how the system evolves, not the original designers. One consequence of this (and the main reason why users would want a decentralized system) is that the designers can't change the system for political/strategic/profit reasons. If VCs are now pushing startups in building decentralized products with the traditional expectations of growth and/or profit, I don't see how we can get a product that satisfies point (2). My fear is that anything that comes out of such a partnership would be "flawed by design" in the same way that DRM and many IoT products are: Such a product would look on the surface just like a "real" decentralized system, except with the one thing removed that makes decentralized system more useful than centralized ones: The lack of control points. Because you'd need such a control point to actually steer the system in a direction that satisfies investors.
- tzpardi 10y ago
  <<< Because most of the logic is run by peers, its the peers who decide how the system evolves, not the original designers. >>> 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.
qq66 10y ago
Is there anyone making consumer SaaS applications that I can deploy myself? For example, being able to run Dropbox, Spotify, Evernote-style applications backed by my own server in my house.

142 points by vasaulys 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

The narrative for the last few years, at least in the mainstream media, is that Google Facebook Twitter Microsoft et al. are too big for anyone else to replace them. It's the old "inevitability" argument - if your new thing gets too big, they'll just buy you up. Let's hope people continue to try to create services that a big percentage of people use and then resist to sell to the big data companies.

x5n1 10y ago
I loved the web in the early mid-2000s. Web 2.0 so many startups, so many ideas, so many failures. It was great. Lots more hope than what is out there right now.
- therealmarv 10y ago
  We are now in another part of the hype cycle for the web.
- zeemonkee3 10y ago
  It reminds me of early 20th century footage of barnstorming aircraft inventors. Now it's just Boeing and Airbus and precious little in the way of real innovation.
doctorshady 10y ago
This probably won't be a popular opinion, but it seems like Google/Facebook/etc are entrenched too deeply in this incarnation of the web to be displaced any time soon. They seem to understand where they are too - it goes beyond just buying out competitors. Look at Facebook's Internet Lite plan for India.
- sverige 10y ago
  > Look at Facebook's Internet Lite plan for India. Which was a spectacular failure...
  - a3n 10y ago
    For now.
  - doctorshady 10y ago
    Right. My point was more that they're willing to go to some fairly extreme measures to try insuring their market dominance.
    - sverige 10y ago
      And it sounds like we share the hope that they'll never fully succeed.
      - doctorshady 10y ago
        Definitely can't disagree :) . I've had my reservations about the direction of the internet before, but a Facebook walled garden internet just sounds plain scary. Or worthless.
- mxuribe 10y ago
  In the short term, you are likely right. But do you remember the days when some folks thought society might not need anything more than CompuServe, prodigy, earthling.net, aol? Long term I am hopeful about decentralization.
  - doctorshady 10y ago
    I'd definitely like to think so - and in practice, I've done more of running my own infrastructure recently. But what about those who're stuck under capped internet plans? What about the people whose interest in computing begins and ends with owning a smartphone?

chuhnk 10y ago

It's cyclical and this should be obvious to anyone in technology. We move between eras of centralisation and decentralisation. The internet started as a decentralised network in which we then built high capacity centralised systems at an accelerated rate. We're now about to shift back into a new era of decentralisation fuelled by edge/fog computing, IoT and p2p networks all on top of the existing infrastructure. The point is that it only occurs when we have a specific need and a niche vertical to initially leverage it in. In one form it's bitcoin for payments. In another form its IoT and essentially sensor networks. You can imagine autonomous vehicles being a huge p2p network for speed as opposed to feeding all the data back to the cloud.

amelius 10y ago
Could be. But how can you assume the trend is cyclical if we've seen only one and a half cycles?
qwtel 10y ago
Or consider the much more "cynical" (and in my mind more obvious, if it wasn't for our habit of seeing patterns everywhere) view that there might not be any structure, cyclical or other, to the course of history. In that view, whether the future of the internet will be centralized or decentralized is undetermined and will most likely be a mishmash of both, the extent of with will depend on inertia, ideology, economics and luck.
- jeffreyrogers 10y ago
  I think the tendency will be towards centralization because centralization is more efficient.
  - substack 10y ago
    Not for transferring large files. A centralized architecture is the most expensive, slow way to do that.
digi_owl 10y ago

stephengillie 10y ago

Can the title be corrected? It has a plural noun leading into a singular verb. Unless we're supposed to parse "slew of startups" as singular...

rosser 10y ago
> Unless we're supposed to parse "slew of startups" as singular... Yes, that's how that works, grammatically. The noun in that sentence is the slew, which, in this instance, happens to be of startups.

Ericson2314 10y ago

Heh, searched for IPFS and was disappointed they didn't because it didn't come up. But turns out it did, they just misspelled it "IFPS".

oolongCat 10y ago
Even searching for IPFS the first result on google for me is, https://www.ipfs.com/ https://www.ipfs.com/ lol

joelg 10y ago

"Most are based on open-source software, which anybody can use without charge, so startups will have to make money with add-on services, such as updates, maintenance and subscriptions." I hope that in the next century, we'll chuckle with nervous laughter at how absurd the loaded assumptions in quotes like this were, and at how reasonable it seemed at the time.

woah 10y ago
Why?

aphextron 10y ago

Economist paywall. Can someone post the article?

pmontra 10y ago
Click on web at the top, find the link and open in private window. It let me in through the main door without paywall tough.

ralala 10y ago

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 problems p2p wanted to solve. Does anyone know if new ideas have come up in the last years?

the8472 10y ago
http://doc.tm.uka.de/SKademlia_2007.pdf 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 hard) but in practice it won't be worth it for attackers.
- ralala 10y ago
  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.
pdimitar 10y ago
You should read about the implementation of IPFS and how it tackles this exact problem. Look it up, it's readily accessible from the first few results in Google. I believe their system will work. Or require only minor tweaks.

zfnsgmdydmy 10y ago

Ah, tech startups. Because there's truly never enough silly solutions to problems that don't exist.

dwaltrip 10y ago

This is an important topic. I think that centralization is more of a risk in the digital realm, as single button presses can affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people in serious ways, especially as tech gets more entangled with all aspects of our lives, including very personal things. Side note: I found it amusing how the article pretended that decentralized downlownding of copyrighted media stopped after Napster, and that: > these technologies ended up being limited to a few services, such as Skype. I'm having trouble interpreting the section with this quote as anything other than the author being hugely misleading. According to Wikipedia, BitTorrent alone has at least 150 million users.

DyslexicAtheist 10y ago

Streembit[0] is missing in the discussion. It's not a new company and just a FOSS project. I believe it has same if not better potential than Ethereum[1] but without the risks associated with Ethereum or Bitcoin (e.g. Sybil attacks, blockchain block size debate, time it takes for proof of work, fully decentralized* etc). Plus it is up and running and can be tested by anyone who wants to give it for a spin[2]. Compared to Ethereum it has optional blockchain hooks, but uses a Kademlia[3] DHT. One can inject scripts that achieve more complex tasks (Smart-Contracts, Code to use the blockchain instead, centralization[4] logic, etc) on top of the Streembit network by injecting the Javascript into the DOM. Streembit is currently the only such project actively participating to W3 Web of Things standardization group and already incorporates all currently evolving standards put forward by the W3 Web of Things (WoT). We're working on a proposal to standardize "IoT over P2P" that we can put forward to IETF. [0] https://streembit.github.io https://streembit.github.io [2] http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/06/09/streembit-hello-world-1st-ever-video-call-over-a-decentralised-p2p-network/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/06/09/streembit-hel... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia [4] despite popular believe P2P networks suffer from centralization issues in P2P bootstrapping. Also Ethereum is not truly decentralized as the DAO attack shows Disclaimer: I do not financially benefit from evangelising Streembit though I'm a voluntary contributor to the project so my position is certainly one that I would want to see them succeeed.

the8472 10y ago
> despite popular believe P2P networks suffer from centralization issues in P2P bootstrapping. 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.
- 10y ago

apatters 10y ago

I wish the article had spent more time discussing the root causes of the centralized Internet and ways to address them. This is the most interesting problem in tech right now in my opinion and many people are working on it from different angles but I've yet to see anything which really struck me as a killer app for the "re-decentralized" web. 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.

DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
>> as a killer app for the "re-decentralized" web. 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_of_P2P_Networks-RDoyle.pdf http://ryandoyle.net/assets/papers/Distributed_Bootstrapping... [1] http://doc.tm.uka.de/2009/ipv6-contest-p2p-bootstrap.pdf http://doc.tm.uka.de/2009/ipv6-contest-p2p-bootstrap.pdf [2] https://www.ipv6council.de/fileadmin/summit09/presentations/IDEA-pv6contest-p2p-bootstrapping.pdf https://www.ipv6council.de/fileadmin/summit09/presentations/...

tzpardi 10y ago

All these articles in the mainstream media about decentralized computing are very nice and the Ethereum and Bitcoin PR teams are doing a fine job to disseminate the idea of decentralized computing. At the same time, I think we need to be more honest about one of the fundamental issues of decentralized networking, which is that the bootstrapping of the network is not decentralized. The bootstrapping in fact centralized in Bitcoin, Ethereum, all existing cryptocurrencies and Streembit as well. The unique selling point of these application are decentralization, but there is a big, fat single point of failure risk, which is the bootstrapping of the network. I have started a discussion at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/streembit-dev/Xl2DpGpd-vw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/streembit-dev/Xl2DpG... to start working on the problem and propose a solution for the issue. Disclaimer/disclosure: I wrote the Streembit application which is mentioned in this thread, so I am heavily biased towards decentralized, peer-to-peer solutions I try to explain in this blog what we try to achieve with Streembit at http://streembit.github.io/2016-02-23-What-is-Streembit/ http://streembit.github.io/2016-02-23-What-is-Streembit/.

scoot 10y ago
/disclaimer/disclosure/
textmode 10y ago
This is true and IMO does not get enough discussion. It's a relatively easy problem to solve, but I'm not sure that hardcoding IP addresses into programs is the best solution for users who do not compile from source. Out of curiosity I once reviewed the source code for a certain "onion router" program and found a handful of hardcoded IP addresses. Servers at MIT if I recall correctly. If these servers are inaccessible, what is the effect? Perhaps "bootstrapping" is simply a matter of voluntarily downloading a trusted file, containing some reachable IP addresses. Can millions of people all download the same file? If no, then how does Firefox, Adobe Flash or Chrome get installed on so many computers? I consider the web (cf. internet) as more or less "bootstrapped". This is because of the preference for domain names versus IP addresses. It necessitates lookups. Bootstrapping all starts with one file: root.zone. Since 1993, this file has not changed very often. The IP address for the server where one can download it does not change very often either. Once I have that file, whether the root servers are working is irrelevant. Don't need them. Only need TLD nameservers, .com, etc. to be working. And of course one can download a local copy of the .com zone, etc., as a backup. But assuming those root servers are working I do not even need this file. Long ago I memorized the IP addresses for one root server and one com nameserver. As long as I have a means to send DNS packets[1] I can look up the IP address for any domain name and I can "surf the web". Or at least get myself out of a jam without the use of recursive DNS servers. 1. Even netcat will work, as explained in its tutorials. I do not use "dig" or BIND libraries. Nor do I ever need to set the recursive bit. I can do the resolution using non-recursive requests, using some helper scripts/programs I wrote. Interestingly, using this method beats the speed of a cold cache in nearly all cases. For the newly decentralized web, we will need supernodes that do not pass traffic but only provide port information to allow users to connect with each other through NAT. The IP addresses of these supernodes will be the "bootstrap". There could be millions of supernodes. Today, the "web" is addresses of servers controlled by companies pandering to advertisers. The "decentralized web" is addresses of users that can connect with each other to form communities. Those communities can be connected with each other, and so on. The "content" being served to users by today's web is largely "user-generated". But overrun with advertising and "analytics". The content is served indiscriminantly to the open internet. And even if there are access controls, because the data is centralized with a handful of companies it's an easy target for third parties who want access to it. Tomorrow's decentralized web allows user to selectively exchange their content with each other, without the companies and advertisers in the middle. Third parties wanting access may have to be more clever and more selective.

xg15 10y ago

> Then there is the question of how decentralised services will earn their keep. [...] More fundamentally, an internet that eschews control points may be one that affords firms less opportunity to build profits. To create a return that makes venture capitalists happy, the new tech firms will almost certainly come under pressure to get ever bigger. This seems to me the core problem and contradiction of the current initiative: As I understand it, the whole promise of decentralized services is that: 1) Because most of the logic is run by peers, the "upkeep" for the designers of the system is very low, if existent at all. Ideally, the system is completely self-sustaining (as long as there are peers) and the designers don't have to do anything to keep it running. (In the face of bugs and hackers this is probably utopic as you'd need at least some way to do security patches. It should however be significantly less than to run/rent servers) 2) Because most of the logic is run by peers, its the peers who decide how the system evolves, not the original designers. One consequence of this (and the main reason why users would want a decentralized system) is that the designers can't change the system for political/strategic/profit reasons. If VCs are now pushing startups in building decentralized products with the traditional expectations of growth and/or profit, I don't see how we can get a product that satisfies point (2). My fear is that anything that comes out of such a partnership would be "flawed by design" in the same way that DRM and many IoT products are: Such a product would look on the surface just like a "real" decentralized system, except with the one thing removed that makes decentralized system more useful than centralized ones: The lack of control points. Because you'd need such a control point to actually steer the system in a direction that satisfies investors.

tzpardi 10y ago
<<< Because most of the logic is run by peers, its the peers who decide how the system evolves, not the original designers. >>> 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.

qq66 10y ago

Is there anyone making consumer SaaS applications that I can deploy myself? For example, being able to run Dropbox, Spotify, Evernote-style applications backed by my own server in my house.