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>Databases we have today aren't designed for the kind of consumer applications we use today. Yes they are? Relational databases are very good for consumer appl

>Databases we have today aren't designed for the kind of consumer applications we use today. Yes they are? Relational databases are very good for consumer applications with relational data. NoSQL databases are good for everything else. >Data(bases) should be owned by users, and synced with friends and colleagues. Why? You use words like should - why SHOULD it be that way? Users are able to create / buy / rent infrastructure to manage their own data - and yet they don't ... why? >Shouldn't be centralized in this fashion. Data(bases) should be owned by users, and synced with friends and colleagues. So instead of a single centralized database, we need a million tiny little databases which are synced with peers. Nice in theory (maybe). The problem is that centralization provides enormous quality and performance metrics. Distributed systems are resilient, but slow, and require a lot of care to maintain consistency and integrity of the network. Take email as an example. It took us 20 years to get email spam somewhat under control and a major part of that was creating a centralized infrastructure (from using centralized email providers to third party whitelists and blacklists). It's gotten to the point where hosting your own mail server is a huge hassle and pretty much impossible for regular people. I spent about a week trying to figure out why our Office365-originating mail wasn't being received by one of our customers. It turned out, their mail provider matched a particular phrase in our automatically-inserted disclaimer and completely rejected the mail. Decentralized systems also make controlling your data all but impossible. If I want to remove my data from Facebook, that's the only entity that I need to deal with and it's relatively easy for regulators to set sound policies in place. In your distributed system, once your data leaves your node, you've lost all control all of it forever.

hansvm 6y ago
> Decentralized systems also make controlling your data all but impossible. If I want to remove my data from Facebook, that's the only entity that I need to deal with and it's relatively easy for regulators to set sound policies in place. In your distributed system, once your data leaves your node, you've lost all control all of it forever. That's already the case though. When I ask Facebook to delete my data they delete their copies of it. However, anyone who has downloaded photos, any advertisers who have scraped that data, any archival attempts, any search results, and a whole slew of other partial copies of that data still exist. It's almost better for data to be explicitly distributed to make it more obvious that it can't be easily removed.

hansvm 6y ago

> Decentralized systems also make controlling your data all but impossible. If I want to remove my data from Facebook, that's the only entity that I need to deal with and it's relatively easy for regulators to set sound policies in place. In your distributed system, once your data leaves your node, you've lost all control all of it forever. That's already the case though. When I ask Facebook to delete my data they delete their copies of it. However, anyone who has downloaded photos, any advertisers who have scraped that data, any archival attempts, any search results, and a whole slew of other partial copies of that data still exist. It's almost better for data to be explicitly distributed to make it more obvious that it can't be easily removed.