5 ms·

A nitpick, but decentralized & distributed systems do not guarantee "no single point of failure". For example, Skype switched from pure p2p because of a softwa

• flyinRyan 13y ago
  That's not true. The whole network was effected because the centralization point they chose had a client bug and since the whole network had to use these nodes it took them down. To take down a decentralized network with a bug you'd have to have every user on the exact same version and no way for them to simply role back to the previous version. I.e. nearly impossible.
  • matthewmacleod 13y ago
    That's also not true - all you need is to bring down a high enough percentage of nodes, which will effectively take down the network through capacity constraints. Combine this with auto-updating clients and you've got a crashing software bug that brings down the whole network. Agreed however that the centralisation point effectively still exists thanks to automated updates.
    • flyinRyan 13y ago
      >all you need is to bring down a high enough percentage of nodes, which will effectively take down the network through capacity constraints On a fully distributed network, that's pretty hard to do. DDOS works by having tons of nodes to attack with. That won't work very well when your target has as many or more nodes than you do. Taking down a centralized target is vastly easier. >Combine this with auto-updating clients and you've got a crashing software bug that brings down the whole network. Only if I can't role my client back nor turn off auto-update.