Reweaving the web: A slew of startups is trying to decentralise the online world

All these articles in the mainstream media about decentralized computing are very nice and the Ethereum and Bitcoin PR teams are doing a fine job to disseminate the idea of decentralized computing. At the same time, I think we need to be more honest about one of the fundamental issues of decentralized networking, which is that the bootstrapping of the network is not decentralized. The bootstrapping in fact centralized in Bitcoin, Ethereum, all existing cryptocurrencies and Streembit as well. The unique selling point of these application are decentralization, but there is a big, fat single point of failure risk, which is the bootstrapping of the network.<p>I have started a discussion at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;streembit-dev&#x2F;Xl2DpGpd-vw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;streembit-dev&#x2F;Xl2DpG...</a> to start working on the problem and propose a solution for the issue.<p>Disclaimer&#x2F;disclosure: I wrote the Streembit application which is mentioned in this thread, so I am heavily biased towards decentralized, peer-to-peer solutions I try to explain in this blog what we try to achieve with Streembit at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;streembit.github.io&#x2F;2016-02-23-What-is-Streembit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;streembit.github.io&#x2F;2016-02-23-What-is-Streembit&#x2F;</a>.

It&#x27;s cyclical and this should be obvious to anyone in technology. We move between eras of centralisation and decentralisation. The internet started as a decentralised network in which we then built high capacity centralised systems at an accelerated rate. We&#x27;re now about to shift back into a new era of decentralisation fuelled by edge&#x2F;fog computing, IoT and p2p networks all on top of the existing infrastructure.<p>The point is that it only occurs when we have a specific need and a niche vertical to initially leverage it in. In one form it&#x27;s bitcoin for payments. In another form its IoT and essentially sensor networks. You can imagine autonomous vehicles being a huge p2p network for speed as opposed to feeding all the data back to the cloud.

Streembit[0] is missing in the discussion. It&#x27;s not a new company and just a FOSS project. I believe it has same if not better potential than Ethereum[1] but without the risks associated with Ethereum or Bitcoin (e.g. Sybil attacks, blockchain block size debate, time it takes for proof of work, fully decentralized* etc). Plus it is up and running and can be tested by anyone who wants to give it for a spin[2]. Compared to Ethereum it has optional blockchain hooks, but uses a Kademlia[3] DHT. One can inject scripts that achieve more complex tasks (Smart-Contracts, Code to use the blockchain instead, centralization[4] logic, etc) on top of the Streembit network by injecting the Javascript into the DOM.<p>Streembit is currently the only such project actively participating to W3 Web of Things standardization group and already incorporates all currently evolving standards put forward by the W3 Web of Things (WoT). We&#x27;re working on a proposal to standardize &quot;IoT over P2P&quot; that we can put forward to IETF.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;streembit.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;streembit.github.io</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.valbonne-consulting.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;streembit-hello-world-1st-ever-video-call-over-a-decentralised-p2p-network&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.valbonne-consulting.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;09&#x2F;streembit-hel...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kademlia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kademlia</a><p>[4] despite popular believe P2P networks suffer from centralization issues in P2P bootstrapping. Also Ethereum is not truly decentralized as the DAO attack shows<p>Disclaimer: I do not financially benefit from evangelising Streembit though I&#x27;m a voluntary contributor to the project so my position is certainly one that I would want to see them succeeed.

&gt; <i>Then there is the question of how decentralised services will earn their keep. [...] More fundamentally, an internet that eschews control points may be one that affords firms less opportunity to build profits. To create a return that makes venture capitalists happy, the new tech firms will almost certainly come under pressure to get ever bigger.</i><p>This seems to me the core problem and contradiction of the current initiative: As I understand it, the whole promise of decentralized services is that:<p>1) Because most of the logic is run by peers, the &quot;upkeep&quot; for the designers of the system is very low, if existent at all. Ideally, the system is completely self-sustaining (as long as there are peers) and the designers don&#x27;t have to do anything to keep it running. (In the face of bugs and hackers this is probably utopic as you&#x27;d need at least some way to do security patches. It should however be significantly less than to run&#x2F;rent servers)<p>2) Because most of the logic is run by peers, its the peers who decide how the system evolves, not the original designers. One consequence of this (and the main reason why <i>users</i> would want a decentralized system) is that the designers can&#x27;t change the system for political&#x2F;strategic&#x2F;profit reasons.<p>If VCs are now pushing startups in building decentralized products with the traditional expectations of growth and&#x2F;or profit, I don&#x27;t see how we can get a product that satisfies point (2).<p>My fear is that anything that comes out of such a partnership would be &quot;flawed by design&quot; in the same way that DRM and many IoT products are: Such a product would look on the surface just like a &quot;real&quot; decentralized system, except with the one thing removed that makes decentralized system more useful than centralized ones: The lack of control points. Because you&#x27;d need such a control point to actually steer the system in a direction that satisfies investors.

The narrative for the last few years, at least in the mainstream media, is that Google Facebook Twitter Microsoft et al. are too big for anyone else to replace them. It&#x27;s the old &quot;inevitability&quot; argument - if your new thing gets too big, they&#x27;ll just buy you up.<p>Let&#x27;s hope people continue to try to create services that a big percentage of people use and then resist to sell to the big data companies.

This is an important topic. I think that centralization is more of a risk in the digital realm, as single button presses can affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people in serious ways, especially as tech gets more entangled with all aspects of our lives, including very personal things.<p>Side note: I found it amusing how the article pretended that decentralized downlownding of copyrighted media stopped after Napster, and that:<p>&gt; these technologies ended up being limited to a few services, such as Skype.<p>I&#x27;m having trouble interpreting the section with this quote as anything other than the author being hugely misleading. According to Wikipedia, BitTorrent alone has at least 150 million users.

I wish the article had spent more time discussing the root causes of the centralized Internet and ways to address them. This is the most interesting problem in tech right now in my opinion and many people are working on it from different angles but I&#x27;ve yet to see anything which really struck me as a killer app for the &quot;re-decentralized&quot; web.<p>We have to look at why these centralized services have succeeded: for instance the network effects, the economies of scale, their business models are attractive to ambitious VC investments, they have better UX because they have more resources, and so on. Then you can either try to build something which matches these advantages, or you can try to do an end-run where you offer the market something more important.<p>Privacy and security are things the market is starting to value but I don&#x27;t think these alone can woo everyone away from the network effects, better UX etc. of the centralized giants.<p>Anything which brings people out of an ad-heavy experience has a lot of appeal right now. I think we&#x27;ll see more freemium and paid services in the future which is good because the economies of scale in the ad business are brutal to small businesses.<p>Anything we do to create more robust p2p and client-side encryption platforms is important. When building an app today it&#x27;s just much easier to run it on a server and keep all the data on a server. p2p storage, identity and so on needs to become just as easy.<p>And finally we have to ask how this re-decentralized stuff is going to attract investment and build big businesses, because if the big money is always on the other side it&#x27;s going to be very hard to win.<p>To be honest I think the technical challenges are fascinating but it really needs to start out with the business model and investment challenges, if you can figure out how a lot of money can be made off of a decentralized search engine or social network, now you have some real allies and resources and marketing behind you. This requires us to think about why open source business models are typically not as lucrative as proprietary walled gardens, and why they have a hard time getting traction in b2c.

Heh, searched for IPFS and was disappointed they didn&#x27;t because it didn&#x27;t come up. But turns out it did, they just misspelled it &quot;IFPS&quot;.

For most of the P2P overlays there are multiple serious attack possibilities (Sybil attack, routing table poisoning).<p>Some years ago in the university I wrote a paper about that in a seminar to summarize the possible counter meassures, but from what I remember, there were no really practical solutions. I think the most promising one is the use of a centralized certificate authority, which reintroduces some of the problems p2p wanted to solve. Does anyone know if new ideas have come up in the last years?

&quot;Most are based on open-source software, which anybody can use without charge, so startups will have to make money with add-on services, such as updates, maintenance and subscriptions.&quot;<p>I hope that in the next century, we&#x27;ll chuckle with nervous laughter at how absurd the loaded assumptions in quotes like this were, and at how reasonable it seemed at the time.

Is there anyone making consumer SaaS applications that I can deploy myself? For example, being able to run Dropbox, Spotify, Evernote-style applications backed by my own server in my house.

Economist paywall. Can someone post the article?

Ah, tech startups. Because there&#x27;s truly never enough silly solutions to problems that don&#x27;t exist.

Can the title be corrected? It has a plural noun leading into a singular verb.<p>Unless we&#x27;re supposed to parse &quot;slew of startups&quot; as singular...