5 ms·

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "Thi

The edited title was a bit confusing to read for me. I would've found it easier to see it reversed: The Four Most Expensive Words in the English Language: "This time is different" Anyway, on to the actual topic... I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. The big incentive is being able to keep your own copy and being able to do whatever you want with it. How many times have you tried searching for an old YouTube video, only to find it got taken down? Another example: package managers! You want to have a machine-local cache, a remote cache for reproducible builds and deployments, and whatever other remotes you get the original packages from. Maybe different registries have varying content policies, and you can pick your favorites. If you have a few developers in an office it's a lot faster to grab dependencies from the laptop of the person sitting next to you than a CDN.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xemasiv 8y ago
> I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. My argument against this is just because it's purely peer-to-peer, it doesn't always directly mean it's an overall improvement in the user experience. > You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. Yes there is definitely value in that, I even agree with there! But I personally think turning the whole thing into a completely peer-to-peer approach isn't the answer. It's the raw shit problems about bandwidth capability and network latency which really matters - which, if you've tried streaming from utorrent/bittorrent before, it's very obvious that the experience is still greatly affected by the lack of a little centralization that YouTube has. > The big incentive is being able to keep your own copy and being able to do whatever you want with it. How many times have you tried searching for an old YouTube video, only to find it got taken down? Neutral on this, very nuanced since most of the time it involves legal issues and opinionated perspectives, lol.
- smolder 8y ago
  The lack of upstream bandwidth offered by cable providers almost seems deliberate. (I.e. a disinterest in improving the upstream capabilities of docsis standards, as well as offering pitiful upstream bandwidth in their plans.)
zeth___ 8y ago
What you're talking about is the difference between an ecology and a monoculture. The reason why we don't see monocultures in nature is because they put every single one of their members at risk of sudden death. A single pathogen can wipe them out. The exhaustion of resources required to sustain them can starve them. The build up of by products can kill them. Think of a medieval town drowning in excrement, running out of top soil and about to get hit by the plague. An ecology on the other hand puts none of their members at risk by virtue of their existence because they are diluted. Think of a band of hunter gatherers, they might individually die at 40, be exposed to ebola and worse, but the fact they are so widely separated and so few means that they have few if any vulnerabilities that can kill the whole tribe. The reason why we see monocultures now is because they are more efficient and our time horizons are tiny. Amazon will fail catastrophically. Billions or trillions will be lost. No one will learn anything because it's cheaper not to than to build a really resilient network.
- akanet 8y ago
  This is a greatly simplified and probably unproductive view of both ecologies and monocultures. Certainly nature as a whole is an ecology, but you are vague in defining what a monoculture even is, or how both even apply to human culture. To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life. Is Amazon itself a monoculture? Is that relevant? Is enforcement of law by the state a monoculture? There's a lot of evidence to suggest that centralized information management entities are actually much more robust in the long term than a loose confederation of peers.
  - IGI-111 8y ago
    I think it's fair to be reminded here that centralized computing has existed in the past, and that the IBM was unsinkable.
    - yifanl 8y ago
      The glib rebuttal would be that the internet was once distributed, and it was unimaginable that the content would become as centralized as it has today.
akanet 8y ago
I think replicated personal data is great, but the author's point is you are probably going to get a lot more storage and bandwidth per dollar by replicating across centralized storage providers. There may be some wins for the specific case of loading something from someone on the same LAN as you, but that's probably not something that can sustain a P2P storage market.
- IGI-111 8y ago
  The obvious benefit of something like Filecoin is that you don't have to trust people to host your data. However vile it may seem to some, if they want to get paid they have to provably host it. And it's fragmented enough that you can't go after everyone who has only part of a series of forbidden bits. I think there's a market for impossible to take down information. The competitors aren't the Amazons of the world, more like whomever is hosting Scihub.
  - akanet 8y ago
    Yeah, I think we can agree that there will probably be lots of interesting innovation in the distribution of illicit material. However, for an information technology to truly shape our culture, it needs a plausible path to go mainstream. None of the champions of current P2P crypto storage systems are claiming their focus will be on the distribution of said illicit materials. They all claim it will revolutionize transmission and storage of totally ordinary data, too.
    - IGI-111 8y ago
      I think the core assumption blockchain proponents make is that a lot of problems can be better solved if they rely on trustless sytems, and that this includes mainstream things. I'm not sure if i agree with that, but there once was a time when the only people who would ever need a decentralized network were the military, and the benefits did generalize to everyone. I think it's too early to tell.
jrumbut 8y ago
I don't think the author is arguing against the entire concept of P2P networks (though if I read correctly he does make an off hand comment saying they can be difficuly, which is probably true of anything), just the idea that cryptocurrency backed distributed storage is likely to be widely adopted and profitable.
- chipuni 8y ago
  I don't think the author could argue against the entire concept of P2P networks. One of his major projects is LOCKSS -- a decentralized P2P network for preserving articles. https://www.lockss.org/news-media/blog/ https://www.lockss.org/news-media/blog/
wpietri 8y ago
Aren't you just replicating the same mistake he's describing as being made over and over again? Where people express a reasonable desire but don't think through the issues before deciding it's worth pursuing? In tech we have this habit of going from, "Wouldn't it be cool if X..." to "Let's build X right now!" I think that's a fine instinct if it hasn't been tried and it's something that runs on the author's machines. Something will be learned. But when we're talking real money and real work from a lot of people, I think it's worth stopping and asking some questions. Yes, sure, X would be cool. But are there perhaps subtle reasons why X has not happened yet? As with jetpacks and 3D video, sometimes cool things are impractical or don't pay off as much as you'd first think.
- smolder 8y ago
  Subtle reasons why P2P technologies are squashed likely include the difficulty of subversion by authorities and the threat that private communications represent to the copyright lobby.
walshemj 8y ago
why is your edit any more or less "confusing to read"
- TylerE 8y ago
  His way is actually considerably worse. The new way is: The (singular) most expensive four words "this time is different". The original parses as The four most expensive works (plural) "this","time","is", "different".

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xemasiv 8y ago

> I need to sit down to give this more thought, but I still think there's value in P2P networks, and it's worth pursuing. My argument against this is just because it's purely peer-to-peer, it doesn't always directly mean it's an overall improvement in the user experience. > You should be able to easily replicate and share content that you care about. Yes there is definitely value in that, I even agree with there! But I personally think turning the whole thing into a completely peer-to-peer approach isn't the answer. It's the raw shit problems about bandwidth capability and network latency which really matters - which, if you've tried streaming from utorrent/bittorrent before, it's very obvious that the experience is still greatly affected by the lack of a little centralization that YouTube has. > The big incentive is being able to keep your own copy and being able to do whatever you want with it. How many times have you tried searching for an old YouTube video, only to find it got taken down? Neutral on this, very nuanced since most of the time it involves legal issues and opinionated perspectives, lol.

smolder 8y ago
The lack of upstream bandwidth offered by cable providers almost seems deliberate. (I.e. a disinterest in improving the upstream capabilities of docsis standards, as well as offering pitiful upstream bandwidth in their plans.)

zeth___ 8y ago

What you're talking about is the difference between an ecology and a monoculture. The reason why we don't see monocultures in nature is because they put every single one of their members at risk of sudden death. A single pathogen can wipe them out. The exhaustion of resources required to sustain them can starve them. The build up of by products can kill them. Think of a medieval town drowning in excrement, running out of top soil and about to get hit by the plague. An ecology on the other hand puts none of their members at risk by virtue of their existence because they are diluted. Think of a band of hunter gatherers, they might individually die at 40, be exposed to ebola and worse, but the fact they are so widely separated and so few means that they have few if any vulnerabilities that can kill the whole tribe. The reason why we see monocultures now is because they are more efficient and our time horizons are tiny. Amazon will fail catastrophically. Billions or trillions will be lost. No one will learn anything because it's cheaper not to than to build a really resilient network.

akanet 8y ago
This is a greatly simplified and probably unproductive view of both ecologies and monocultures. Certainly nature as a whole is an ecology, but you are vague in defining what a monoculture even is, or how both even apply to human culture. To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life. Is Amazon itself a monoculture? Is that relevant? Is enforcement of law by the state a monoculture? There's a lot of evidence to suggest that centralized information management entities are actually much more robust in the long term than a loose confederation of peers.
- IGI-111 8y ago
  I think it's fair to be reminded here that centralized computing has existed in the past, and that the IBM was unsinkable.
  - yifanl 8y ago
    The glib rebuttal would be that the internet was once distributed, and it was unimaginable that the content would become as centralized as it has today.

akanet 8y ago

I think replicated personal data is great, but the author's point is you are probably going to get a lot more storage and bandwidth per dollar by replicating across centralized storage providers. There may be some wins for the specific case of loading something from someone on the same LAN as you, but that's probably not something that can sustain a P2P storage market.

IGI-111 8y ago
The obvious benefit of something like Filecoin is that you don't have to trust people to host your data. However vile it may seem to some, if they want to get paid they have to provably host it. And it's fragmented enough that you can't go after everyone who has only part of a series of forbidden bits. I think there's a market for impossible to take down information. The competitors aren't the Amazons of the world, more like whomever is hosting Scihub.
- akanet 8y ago
  Yeah, I think we can agree that there will probably be lots of interesting innovation in the distribution of illicit material. However, for an information technology to truly shape our culture, it needs a plausible path to go mainstream. None of the champions of current P2P crypto storage systems are claiming their focus will be on the distribution of said illicit materials. They all claim it will revolutionize transmission and storage of totally ordinary data, too.
  - IGI-111 8y ago
    I think the core assumption blockchain proponents make is that a lot of problems can be better solved if they rely on trustless sytems, and that this includes mainstream things. I'm not sure if i agree with that, but there once was a time when the only people who would ever need a decentralized network were the military, and the benefits did generalize to everyone. I think it's too early to tell.

jrumbut 8y ago

I don't think the author is arguing against the entire concept of P2P networks (though if I read correctly he does make an off hand comment saying they can be difficuly, which is probably true of anything), just the idea that cryptocurrency backed distributed storage is likely to be widely adopted and profitable.

chipuni 8y ago
I don't think the author could argue against the entire concept of P2P networks. One of his major projects is LOCKSS -- a decentralized P2P network for preserving articles. https://www.lockss.org/news-media/blog/ https://www.lockss.org/news-media/blog/

wpietri 8y ago

Aren't you just replicating the same mistake he's describing as being made over and over again? Where people express a reasonable desire but don't think through the issues before deciding it's worth pursuing? In tech we have this habit of going from, "Wouldn't it be cool if X..." to "Let's build X right now!" I think that's a fine instinct if it hasn't been tried and it's something that runs on the author's machines. Something will be learned. But when we're talking real money and real work from a lot of people, I think it's worth stopping and asking some questions. Yes, sure, X would be cool. But are there perhaps subtle reasons why X has not happened yet? As with jetpacks and 3D video, sometimes cool things are impractical or don't pay off as much as you'd first think.

smolder 8y ago
Subtle reasons why P2P technologies are squashed likely include the difficulty of subversion by authorities and the threat that private communications represent to the copyright lobby.

walshemj 8y ago

why is your edit any more or less "confusing to read"

TylerE 8y ago
His way is actually considerably worse. The new way is: The (singular) most expensive four words "this time is different". The original parses as The four most expensive works (plural) "this","time","is", "different".