LebGeeks

rtp

Member

Ethereum

I found this interesting news/concept about decentralized internet.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/ethereum-b … 5-million/
https://www.ethereum.org/

So what do you think guys?

rolf

Member

Re: Ethereum

I'm confused by these articles, and not very interested in hyped-up stuff in general.
The internet is already decentralized by design.

Last edited by rolf (September 12 2014)

samer

Admin

Re: Ethereum

I haven't looked deeply into ethereum, but I'm generally interested in Bitcoin and other blockchain-based technologies. A few things to look into:

– OpenBazaar
– Mastercoin
– NXT
– Counterparty
– opentransactions.org

DaveAchkar

Member

Re: Ethereum

Rolf, actually if you dig deeper into the design of the Internet you'd find out that it's not really that decentralized. Just a few examples:
+ Domain names are managed by ICANN
+ Our data is almost always centrally stored (whether with AWS, Dropbox, etc.) - the nuance is that it may be "distributed" over servers globally, but it remains centrally managed.
+ Therefore all the services that rely on that data are also generally centralized (email, search, chat, and so on)

And it is because of this centralization that we have stuff like the NSA fiasco.

Check out MaidSafe.net for another take on decentralized internet.

rolf

Member

Re: Ethereum

I don't know what you mean with NSA fiasco.
I am aware that there is some level of centralization. The internet is basically designed to have no "central point of failure", so it would not possible to "shut it down" although in practice a government or entity with lots of power could probably succeed in "shutting down" at least part of it.
The DNS is centralized, but then it is also a somewhat non-essential component, if DNS stopped functioning, resources would still be accessible by IP, in theory, but in practice it would be very disruptive.

I just had a problem with you saying "decentralized internet", which in a way I felt ignores or negates the current level of decentralization which already exists.
To prove my point, the technology you were talking about could not exist if the Internet was not already decentralized in big part. If the internet was centralized and had a single point of failure, like a LAN with a central switch, there is no technology which can make a "centralized network" become "decentralized".
So it also depends what is meant by internet, but the basic TCP and IP protocols, including the various routing protocols, offer a decentralized infrastructure, on top of which Etherum runs.

Anyway, distributed data, which is what I would call it, is an interesting topic. I know the concept, but it's hard to pinpoint a proper expression on it.

It reminds me of an experiment or study I read about a while ago - someone determined that every network has an inherent storage capacity. For example when you send a packet to some server in China, the packet takes a while to reach there (not too long, maybe .5 second to 1 second) and while in transit, it would be effectively "stored on the network", existing in the various buffer memories on whatever routers which forward the packed. The experiment included calculating the storage capacity of different networks, and creating systems to use that storage capacity. Of course it is not very useful for most consumers, but still interesting.

Last edited by rolf (September 24 2014)

DaveAchkar

Member

Re: Ethereum

Thanks Rolf. And I like your distinction between Decentralized Internet and Decentralized Data. I guess we're somewhat talking about the same thing.

If I were to restate my point, I'd agree that the Internet *infrastructure* is decentralized, however its data is very much centralized ("in the hands of a few") but in some cases distributed ("in multiple physical locations"). We can all benefit from a decentralization of the data, in addition to an already decentralized infrastructure.

The NSA fiasco refers to the major (and illegal) breach of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA, in the USA) of citizens of the US and the rest of world. They were basically able to do so because they forced companies (a.k.a. centralized repositories of data) to introduce "back doors" to their servers for the NSA to access the data.

rolf

Member

Re: Ethereum

Ok, I understand better now :)

What you say makes much sense. I am concerned about the influence of google: the search engine, gmail, youtube, Chrome and many other things we don't know or which are more "behind the scenes" about such as ITU, a system related to airline ticket booking - bought by google, or node.js, promising server-side JavaScript which is taking off, powered by V8 (developed by Google), and oh, Android!

This is just crazy how they managed to be involved in most of our online lives, and getting closer to more "physical services", such as ISPs and telephony, and they're not stopping! One of the rare places where they failed is social networking - their Orkut, and many other social network trials did not take off and did not threatened Facebook and the others very much, maybe because there was nothing around for them to buy off.

Anyway this is concerning. The amount of information that Google could bring up on me if they really wanted is hard to measure, but probably impressive.

So yeah what you (and me too, I guess) want to do is decentralize the upper layer(s) of the internet, the "application layer".

DaveAchkar

Member

Re: Ethereum

Yes, it's scary if we take a minute to think about it :)

Definitely. MaidSaif, Ethereum, and the like--if successful--would enable the decentralization of these upper layers. Both of these have raised millions $ for their effort (purely through crowd-funding, using their own platform).