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I tend to think the web as we see it today is made on a lot of shortcuts made for the sake of simplicity and performance. There will be no free lunch, if we wa

I tend to think the web as we see it today is made on a lot of shortcuts made for the sake of simplicity and performance. There will be no free lunch, if we want something more distributed, reliable, secure, we will need to make compromises on simplicity and performance.

zwkrt 4y ago
Lunch can in fact be free if you skip it. I feel market forces will almost always prefer a centralized (I.e., marginally cheaper) solution so long as it is robust enough. I would have to imagine an entire economic and cultural shift to imagine S3 being usurped by a decentralized solution. Sometimes centralization is a benefit because it gives you someone to invoice/sue if it breaks.
- Galanwe 4y ago
  I agree with you, and that's what makes me sad. The current internet, with all its shortcomings, has created an impossible standard for alternative solutions that would be more secure / free to reach.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The problem is that the "freer" alternatives based on blockchains rely on network effects. In other words, they are incompatible with the freedom to choose something else. A freer alternative that does not rely on blockchains would not have this problem.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Cloud storage is already distributed, reliable, and secure. It allows you to do multi-region replication just fine, and the data loss SLOs (14 9's) are actually serious. Even if you are paranoid about security, encrypt with a key you hold before you upload it and you're fine - you need to do this with blockchain storage anyway, because all of the stored data blocks are publicly readable. There's no free lunch of course, you pay for all of these services. It is much cheaper to just use a NAS at home. However, the market provides those services I'm the most efficient form possible, which means that no blockchains are involved in commodity services.
- junofan 4y ago
  If AWS suspends my account I’m fucked.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Mirror to a backup service you like (or a local disk) and it's still cheaper and more available than filecoin/ipfs.
- Galanwe 4y ago
  It's not really what I meant by distributed. I meant more in terms of governance, though the underlying implementation should mirror than distributed governance. Living close to Russia, then close to China for many years, I realised how western-centric my view of the internet was. Internet was built on originally distributed technologies (DNS, BGP, etc) but the scale of this distribution did not expand with adoption. "Distributed" back then meant "a bunch of universities interconnected". For instance, most root DNS servers and major TLDs are controlled by western orgs or governments. How could you convince non-western entities to rely on DNS to address their content, when e.g. the US can unilaterally order the disappearance of a domain? Maybe the good question to ask ourselves is "would I use Outlook if it was made by a Russian company?" or "would I trust SSL if 90% of the websites I visit have a certificate from a Chinese CA?". I think most of us would say no, and that scares me, because the way I see it, internet is more and more becoming just a bunch of separated "islands", with fewer and fewer bridges in between. I would not be surprised if in 10 years time, each superpower will have reinvented and deployed their own version of internet, incompatible with each other, with vastly different content and technologies, and each user will live in the illusion that they are accessing a worldwide network. I would love to see a new internet emerging. Something that would be secure, opt-in anonymous, reliable, and unrestrictable by design. And I think for this to succeed, we will need to accept that we cannot have the same performance, immediacy and simplicity as we have now.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    You're talking about an internet - in fact, an internet that already exists - and deciding that the infrastructure architecture of users of that internet should mirror the "ethos" of that internet. That's quite a leap! Infrastructure is very different than "the web," particularly because there are contracts involved - you pay AWS to store bits and it stores them. If they lose your bits, you sue them. They don't like being sued, so they don't lose your bits. If you are concerned about AWS banning you, store a copy in GCP too, or on a backup service. Because of the customer-provider relationship, infrastructure generally doesn't need to be distributed in the way you suggest, and probably can't be. The infrastructure you use has a contractual relationship with you, which implicitly relies on contract law. You have something better than distributed systems here, you have economic incentives and courts. Also note that the infrastructure behind the internet also isn't particularly distributed as you describe: most of the physical wires in your local area are usually owned by 2-4 companies total, if they aren't state-controlled. Those companies do not have distributed governance. What they do have is a set of contracts and regulations that ensure that you are free to use them as you want.

zwkrt 4y ago

Lunch can in fact be free if you skip it. I feel market forces will almost always prefer a centralized (I.e., marginally cheaper) solution so long as it is robust enough. I would have to imagine an entire economic and cultural shift to imagine S3 being usurped by a decentralized solution. Sometimes centralization is a benefit because it gives you someone to invoice/sue if it breaks.

Galanwe 4y ago
I agree with you, and that's what makes me sad. The current internet, with all its shortcomings, has created an impossible standard for alternative solutions that would be more secure / free to reach.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The problem is that the "freer" alternatives based on blockchains rely on network effects. In other words, they are incompatible with the freedom to choose something else. A freer alternative that does not rely on blockchains would not have this problem.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Cloud storage is already distributed, reliable, and secure. It allows you to do multi-region replication just fine, and the data loss SLOs (14 9's) are actually serious. Even if you are paranoid about security, encrypt with a key you hold before you upload it and you're fine - you need to do this with blockchain storage anyway, because all of the stored data blocks are publicly readable. There's no free lunch of course, you pay for all of these services. It is much cheaper to just use a NAS at home. However, the market provides those services I'm the most efficient form possible, which means that no blockchains are involved in commodity services.

junofan 4y ago
If AWS suspends my account I’m fucked.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Mirror to a backup service you like (or a local disk) and it's still cheaper and more available than filecoin/ipfs.
Galanwe 4y ago
It's not really what I meant by distributed. I meant more in terms of governance, though the underlying implementation should mirror than distributed governance. Living close to Russia, then close to China for many years, I realised how western-centric my view of the internet was. Internet was built on originally distributed technologies (DNS, BGP, etc) but the scale of this distribution did not expand with adoption. "Distributed" back then meant "a bunch of universities interconnected". For instance, most root DNS servers and major TLDs are controlled by western orgs or governments. How could you convince non-western entities to rely on DNS to address their content, when e.g. the US can unilaterally order the disappearance of a domain? Maybe the good question to ask ourselves is "would I use Outlook if it was made by a Russian company?" or "would I trust SSL if 90% of the websites I visit have a certificate from a Chinese CA?". I think most of us would say no, and that scares me, because the way I see it, internet is more and more becoming just a bunch of separated "islands", with fewer and fewer bridges in between. I would not be surprised if in 10 years time, each superpower will have reinvented and deployed their own version of internet, incompatible with each other, with vastly different content and technologies, and each user will live in the illusion that they are accessing a worldwide network. I would love to see a new internet emerging. Something that would be secure, opt-in anonymous, reliable, and unrestrictable by design. And I think for this to succeed, we will need to accept that we cannot have the same performance, immediacy and simplicity as we have now.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  You're talking about an internet - in fact, an internet that already exists - and deciding that the infrastructure architecture of users of that internet should mirror the "ethos" of that internet. That's quite a leap! Infrastructure is very different than "the web," particularly because there are contracts involved - you pay AWS to store bits and it stores them. If they lose your bits, you sue them. They don't like being sued, so they don't lose your bits. If you are concerned about AWS banning you, store a copy in GCP too, or on a backup service. Because of the customer-provider relationship, infrastructure generally doesn't need to be distributed in the way you suggest, and probably can't be. The infrastructure you use has a contractual relationship with you, which implicitly relies on contract law. You have something better than distributed systems here, you have economic incentives and courts. Also note that the infrastructure behind the internet also isn't particularly distributed as you describe: most of the physical wires in your local area are usually owned by 2-4 companies total, if they aren't state-controlled. Those companies do not have distributed governance. What they do have is a set of contracts and regulations that ensure that you are free to use them as you want.