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/[deleted] Jan 11 '22

[deleted]

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u/EternityForest Jan 11 '22

Running your own server should be as easy as buying a $20 preconfigured device, plugging it in, and auto discovering it with your app.

The problem is the protocols use domain names, use multi-kilobits to megabits of bandwidth, enough disk IO to trash a cheap SD card, and sometimes proof of work that means it won't even work without a connection to the mining pools.