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Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It sh

• humanrebar 7y ago
  Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.
  • zrm 7y ago
    Fraud and spam are two separate problems. One of the best solutions for spam for a new system is to impose a proof of work requirement on sending the first message between any pair of users, or any (new username, hosting service) pairing for federated services. For any normal pairing that happens only once, but for a spammer they have to pay the cost for every message or else you can trivially block every message from that sender. Fraud protection is harder, but it's also something that lends itself well to being an independent service. If you're buying from someone trustworthy or dealing in small value amounts then you don't need it. If you're not, you require the seller to carry insurance from someone you do trust (or don't buy from them), and then it's the insurer's problem to deal with fraud.
    • Jasper_ 7y ago
      Spammers have large networks of computers they aren't paying for (botnets), so they aren't paying the cost of sending messages. Proof of work really doesn't solve spam anymore.
      • zrm 7y ago
        What makes it work is the asymmetry. With normal human communication you talk to the same person thousands of times, or send thousands of messages from the same account, so spending computation equivalent to something like $1 worth of Bitcoin for that is totally reasonable. Spending the equivalent of $1 worth of Bitcoin to send one spam to one person, isn't. Even if you had access to a large number of computers, you'd make much more money by using the same computational resources to mine cryptocurrency. The opportunity cost makes spamming uneconomical, and if it doesn't then you raise the cost until it is. You can also allow users to pre-approve each other to avoid paying anything so that most legitimate communication doesn't require proof of work, which makes it a lot easier to put a high price on the remaining instances.
  • zelly 7y ago
    Agreed. More broadly, decentralization is less equipped to counteract bad actors. You really are on your own, but isn't that what you asked for when you wanted to abandon Facebook/Google/government. A decentralized network cannot be trusted by nature. Anyone can join and lie. Successful decentralized networks need some cryptographically-secure checksum to verify its inputs: BitTorrent uses SHA-1; Bitcoin uses Merkle trees. The network participants are just dumb mirrors to provide redundancy and compute. This solves the problem of the integrity of the information, but there is no such analogue for verifying the behavior of humans using the network. For example, you can download a valid BitTorrent file that is also a trojan (virus databases are centralized), or you could send Bitcoin to a Nigerian prince (third-party escrow layers are centralized). There is no algorithm to make sure what you're doing is ethical. Imagine running reCAPTCHA as a decentralized service that runs on random people's machines. Impossible. There is no way to flip a switch and change everything from centralized to decentralized without making major sacrifices. No one wants to go back to the dial-up era. Much of the lauded results of the internet are actually a result of its centralization.
    • bjornjaja 7y ago
      The dialup era makes more sense actually—services are designed more bandwidth-conscious and ad networks don’t masquerade on every website in existence. As for streaming media, well people consume too much media to begin with so less is more.
    • tpxl 7y ago
      Decentralized networks lend themselves to far better moderation than centralized. Private forums have always had better moderation than something like reddit. Well, not all, but you can ignore those ;)
      • perl4ever 7y ago
        Usenet?
    • yarg 7y ago
      BitTorrent uses SHA1 only? That seems deeply flawed. Edit: https://www.quora.com/Does-bittorrent-support-SHA-2-256-512-or-future-SHA-3 https://www.quora.com/Does-bittorrent-support-SHA-2-256-512-...
• zrm 7y ago
  > You lose out on the discoverability that centralized hubs give you. This isn't a real trade off. Consider how the web traditionally worked. Everyone has their own website, then you have search engines like Google or Yahoo that allow you to find anything anywhere. A third-party search engine doesn't have most of the centralization problems you get with a Facebook or a YouTube, because people only use them to the extent that they're good, which means returning the search results people want. Moreover, if YouTube goes bust, all your videos disappear with it, but if Altavista goes bust, Yahoo and Google continue to exist and index all the same information. You can have things that index all the other things without them being a single centralized monopoly.
  • lanstin 7y ago
    Maybe someone can come up with a decentralized search infrastructure. Something agent based perhaps. Otherwise the search is both centralized and in the position to make money from ads.
    • abdullahkhalids 7y ago
      YaCy got you covered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy Never tried it, so don't know how good it is.
      • viraptor 7y ago
        It's works, but it's not amazing. You basically have to use your own spam solution for it, because the bare index will be always gamed in some way - that makes it hard in practice. The scoring algorithm is also not amazing. For example searching for ycombinator gives you http://hackr.de/tags/ycombinator http://hackr.de/tags/ycombinator and some Twitter entries as top results.
• WalterSear 7y ago
  On the contrary, most of the crypto crowd wants people to decentralize on their platform.
• TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  This is how things should work, but IMO it leads to unsolvable problems. I don't think discoverability is the issue. You could easily (for hard values of easily) run a distributed and cached search system - maybe with some form of content-aware DNS-a-like metaURLs for specific information. The underlying issues are tougher. If you don't have perfectly robust security the system is useless, because it can be abused in almost endless ways. If you do have perfectly robust security you have perfect cover for a criminal Dark Net. So you need some form of identity escrow which is robust enough to allow anonymous free speech but permeable enough to allow law-enforcement to take action to prevent crimes like child porn and human trafficking. And even then, you'll still get people gaming the system in corrupt ways - for example by setting up astroturfing businesses, paying for followers, distributing fake news, and so on. These are political and economic problems, and I don't think they can be solved with technology.
• zcw100 7y ago
  Your home is not a datacenter.
• pjc50 7y ago
  > torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) This is one of those things that can only exist so long as it's a minority interest; whenever piracy becomes "mainstream" action will be taken against it, such as your ISP portscanning for it and banning you. > personal Bitcoin node (replace banking Likewise the minority safety, and has all the disadvantages of keeping cash at home as well as still needing a centralish interface to the real financial system. Also, who's going to fight the spam? That was the crippling problem for both SMTP and USENET; SMTP built a mountain of filters for this, including centralised blacklists. USENET never quite fully solved it until it went obsolete. Anyone attempting to return to that world would do very well to look at the problems of those two and all the attempted solutions.
• xiphias2 7y ago
  ,,You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service'' Although that's the decentralized way to recieve Bitcoin transactions, the fact that people have a way to check centralized hubs and opt out from centralization of transaction checking easily is enough deterrent for those centralized hubs to cheat. As an example I'm using my own Bitcoin node just for checking the relatively bigger transactions.
• yowlingcat 7y ago
  Broadly agree with one caveat -- the ISP. A mesh network is probably the last link in this chain needed for this to work, and even that relies on a central node: the backhaul, although (and please correct me if I'm wrong if someone more knowledgeable is reading this) I believe that the backhaul is a "dumb" pipe that is not usually censored/traffic shaped.
• renox 7y ago
  Plugin and forget? Until it fails of course, then you have the backup issue.
• wolco 7y ago
  You should be able to buy a memory card with most of the software above that could be installed with a single click.