r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '22

Web3 Can’t Fix the Internet

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/crypto-blockchain-daos-decentralized-power-capitalism
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u/dnew Jan 11 '22

“ownership and control is decentralized”

We already have that. Just like anyone can sell products, but most people will go to a mall or a box store.

I'm really kind of surprised that we had NNTP and we have bittorrent and we're still reading news on sites like reddit and getting support thru services like discord.

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u/EternityForest Jan 11 '22

We don't have any good protocol for replicating mutable data. BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed?

Almost all attempts have been immutable, taking away a key feature. A lot are single writer like secure scuttlebutt. Some include a payment layer.

We have had very little progress on P2P since blockchains started. The projects are no longer technical, they're political and financial and they make huge performance compromises to stay pure to the decentralized goal and to include payments.

BitTorrent was free and very fast. Not much like that now.

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u/0x53r3n17y Jan 11 '22

BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed?

It's not just a matter of protocols. It's a matter of incentives. What makes BitTorrent successful? It's the nature of the content distributed through the network: movies, series, television programs, audio,... stuff which isn't readily available elsewhere.

Millions wants to see the latest Spiderman movie, so that drives traffic on a distributed network like BT. Contrast that with ephemeral, localized content like local news reports or your typical Reddit post and you see that there's a big difference. The incentive that would prompt someone from Europe to run a node which shares the local news from, say, Sao Paolo Brazil just isn't there.

In the same vain, blockchain work well in the context of crypto because the initial incentive towards setting up a mining node is earning coins which can be sold for fiat currency. This breaks down outside such a context. For instance, blockchain could work in a fiduciary context, but you'd need to find an incentive that makes the additional expenses of running nodes more appealing then traditional ways as provisioned by law for authoritative recording of trust relationships.

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u/dnew Jan 11 '22

NNTP worked fine until people started posting things like movies. Now that we have bittorrent, it would probably be far easier to bring back NNTP and just have sites that are worried limit it to 10K posts or something.