Kim Dotcom reveals more about his blockchain-inspired alternative Internet | Hacker News Reader

Kim Dotcom reveals more about his blockchain-inspired alternative Internet

mashable.com

89 pointsascorbic40 comments

Wouldn't this be akin to creating an alternative to the world wide web and not the internet? It's still needs the internet or any other similar global network to work not to mention that beyond being excessively wasteful I don't really see the point of having a "proof of work" based network rather than other distributed peered networks like Tor or Maelstrom.

Also considering his constant legal troubles and his general some what self destructing personality I have very big doubts that anyone would actually fund this guy.

That note aside I don't really see the value of all of those wannabe "internet replacement" services, I for one would rather see investment going into self arranging, self healing multi-protocols mesh networks that you could seamlessly re-build local networked infrastructure in such events as natural disasters or complete government/infrastructure meltdowns.

A solution that will able you to construct an autonomous peered mesh network across Ethernet, WiFi, Radio, and P2P links like IR and Microwave which can provide internet and WWW like infrastructure when established networks fail or are intentionally shut down can actually be rather useful, while these attempts seem to try to re-invent what already exists and that is internet lock down/censorship bypass, heck even if a government shuts down their internet uplink completely as long as the local networks are intact you can still make Tor and the likes of it work, at least as far as hidden services go and it only requires a handful of exit nodes to have an internet uplink to restore internet services as well.

Aside from ad hominems though, what does HN think about the idea of a blockchain-driven internet? Genuinely curious.

I think that like anything, it's exploitable. Just see the example of bitcoin where a mining pool had over 50% of the computing power. If the internet was driven by a block chain, with enough money and time, you could "control it".

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-ditch-ghash-io-pool-5...

Wouldn't people notice it though ? I mean if you hold 50% percent of that computing power, wouldn't someone detect that a large portion of the network traffic revolves around one place ?

Also people would notice that the internet would be "off".

Owning 50% of the mining infrastructure is not an exploit. The system is designed with that in mind - anyone in control of that much hash power has no incentive to use it, because the value of the currency would instantly evaporate. They in fact have strong incentives to avoid putting themselves in that position - because it devalues the currency (which they have invested so heavily in), and makes them a target for attack. And that is exactly what we saw when ghash hit 50 percent.

Anyway, it's a false choice. I'll take the hyper-public well described risk of a 50% 'attack' over the risks of counterfeit paper currency manipulated in secret by unelected officials any day. Similarly, it'd take much more time and money to control a blockchain based internet than the one we have now, and if it were exploited in that way, it'd be substantially more likely to be known by everyone, which in itself is a deterrent to exploiting it in the first place.

All that being said, there are probably reasons that other architectures on which to build an overlay network are better than this - but 'exploitability' is not one of them.

I don't think you can dress up the 50% thing as a deliberate design point. It may be a self-mitigating weakness, but still...

>It may be a self-mitigating weakness, but still...

I think this is a strange way of looking at things. What non-trivial protocol doesn't have known design limitations?

Moreover, what could you possibly hope for in addition to a self-mitigating limitation, i.e: a theoretical limit that doesn't matter in practice?

>> I think this is a strange way of looking at things. What non-trivial protocol doesn't have known design limitations?

It's still a weakness, not a feature, and when a blockchain is not a monetary thing the pressures and incentives to run infrastructure will be different, it's hard to say that a 50% attack won't be possible or desirable in that circumstance.

>> Moreover, what could you possibly hope for in addition to a self-mitigating limitation, i.e: a theoretical limit that doesn't matter in practice?

It's not theoretical though, pools have got there with BTC. There are incentives not to obviously mess with the currency at that point but perhaps subtle ways to operate to your own benefit could happen at that point.

It's a huge design flaw though. The original intention of the blockchain in Bitcoin was to make it so it was decentralized...except the increase in computational difficulty, the winner-takes-all payouts, and the electrical cost, of course means that eventually the only people running the blockchain are large centralized organizations.

At which point one can wonder, why bother being distributed when we're still ultimately invoking trust in several groups? Couldn't we do this a lot more simply and efficiently by just having everyone delegate a private key signing operation to these groups so that it's just based on maintaining consensus, rather then burning CPU time on computationally hard problems?

Ad hominems? He's a convicted fraudster and embezzler.

An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attack on an argument made by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, rather than attacking the argument directly.

I think the point is that ad hominem attacks are actually relevant in this case. The idea might (or might not) be good, but the fact that Kim Dotcom is involved is fishy.

Sure, I wasn't saying that ad hominems are irrelevant here. I said, "aside from ad hominems," because I'm actually curious what technical/social issues are interesting and/or challenging about the idea. In other words, I'm not saying anything about whether the ad hominems already in the replies were good or bad, I simply want to have a separate, parallel discussion about the actual proposal.

An ad hominem call is often a logical fallacy, as in many cases the person can be a very key point in the argument.

If some one is running for president for example then his personal views and life experience can and should be brought into question regardless of what his says in his speeches.

This case isn't different, he isn't talking about global warming he is talking about founding and funding a new company so his past, and current troubles are very much material to the debate and cannot and should not be thrown aside because it might appear to to be an ad hominem.

- Non-IP Based. I think that Dotcom refers to the fact that the "webpages" or whatever they're going to serve are not hosted on a specific IP but are instead distributed in the blockchain; and he talks about IP because either a) he doesn't know what he's talking about or b) he's oversimplifying a lot. In any case, the MegaNet would run over IP because no ISP is going to let non-IP protocols go through their networks.

- Using mobile phones. Even when on WiFi, that's going to eat batteries for breakfast: users aren't going to like that. And another issue: MegaNet traffic would still go through traditional ISPs, so they would probably be able to filter it.

Another point is that Android, iOS and Windows Phone have closed, controlled stores. That's going to make it difficult for them to implement.

- Using the blockchain. I don't know why would they use the blockchain, which is a method to ensure integrity over time (e.g., you don't spend two times the same bitcoin). What would would make sense to use P2P webpages, like BitTorrent's Maelstrom does [1]. Maybe they use the blockchain so they can keep a correct history of a certain webpage, who knows. Another option is that they are thinking of using the authentication part of the blockchain, but one could do that with Maelstrom using PGP signed pages, for example.

In any case, they'd face significant issues. For example, they would be introducing useless delays when creating/updates webpages (blockchain relies on proofs of work to avoid malicious nodes to insert duplicate/forged transactions). But if they make the verification process fast, they would be more vulnerable to malicious nodes.

Another problem would be how to store the information they want to transmit. The blockchain works because the information in each transaction is just a few bytes long. However, a webpage is way bigger than that. How do they store not only the current versions of the webpages, but the old ones too? I don't think the combined storage of mobile phones is enough to hold all that information. Maybe they could use deltas, but that's only going to make browsing slower (instead of one block, you'd need to retrieve several to reconstruct the page) and they would not avoid completely the problem: what if the difference between versions is too big? E.g., encrypted pages: deltas would be useless then.

- "New layer of encryption that will run through all digital communications". Well good luck with that.

- "We are going to use very long keys, systems that will not be reverse engineered or cracked by any supercomputer". Long keys imply long encrypt times too. With phones, and probably with several communications with several different nodes. That's going to be interesting.

- "If you have 100 million smartphones that have the MegaNet app installed, we'll have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined". Distributed computing doesn't work like that. You don't just "add up things". Yeah, you may have terabits per second of bandwidth combined, but using single nodes that maybe can get up to 1Mbps. You have a lot of processing power but have to distribute any computation through a lot of nodes because no one has enough single computing power to do complex tasks fast. And you have 100 million smartphones distributed through the world: good luck with the latency and reliability of the connections.

In any case, I think this is either going to be a Maelstrom clone or a complete bluff.

[1] http://project-maelstrom.bittorrent.com/

Edit: added a few points.

Great insights and thanks for the link. Extremely interesting and hot topic. What do you think of Project Maelstrom's chances of succeeding in what they're trying to accomplish?

I think they're going to make an interesting tool (I tried it a few months ago and it worked fairly well), but it's impossible to make it widespread, same as Tor isn't going to be widespread. The restrictions imposed by their goals are going to make those networks less attractive than the current, regular internet. And, let's face it, few people really need to use Tor or Maelstrom.

Maelstrom is going to fail because it's closed source.

The blockchain's distributed consensus algorithm manages the network tokens (e.g. Bitcoins) very well. These tokens and their corresponding transaction data are small in size. Storing large web documents in the blockchain will blow up its size and consume significant network resources. If you wanted to mitigate those effects, you could restrict publishing based the tokens you spend - e.g. you can store 4kb per "coin" - but such a system would have nowhere near the capacity to publish at the rate of the internet today.

Bitcoin manages 7 transactions per second globally. The internet is...somewhat faster then that.

I think it is dumb to call something that runs on top of and requires the traditional internet an alternative to it.

I guess it could be an alternative to the web and DNS and such.

The question is almost too broad to respond to. 'a blockchain-driven internet' . . . there are so many things that could mean.

My expectation is that we will see blockchains taking up role somewhere between servers and databases.

I recommend Janet Abbate's "Inventing the Internet". You will feel like a prophet after reading it.

I think you could call it an Internet of blockchains rather than 'a blockchain-driven internet'. But the blockchain really is a Pandora's box . . .

Not sure what to think about the Kim Dotcom projects. They all seem to be short lived. What about that mega.co.nz thing he launched lately? I read that he sold it and distanced himself from the new owner already.

IMO he is more of a shady celebrity businessman than a hacker or innovator, mostly known for his flamboyance.

A megalomaniac with no talent, that use his mates work to shine. He changed his handle but he's still the same pathetic lamer he was ~3 decades ago.

Does he know how to write code? Did he actually write the first version of mega?

The question is, did he really write the first version of Kazaa?

Is it said to be him who wrote it?

Is the obligatory comment attacking his character on every thread about him really necessary? How about discussing the solution he is actually proposing?

It's relevant because everything he's done up till now isn't anything technically innovative, just mainly ways for him to make money and promote himself as some kind of Internet hero, which is is not. This project will be more of the same nonsense.

Did you read the article? He's not proposing a solution, beyond using the words "blockchain" and "encryption".

Does it even matter? The importance is the end product.

The company runs well and doesn't want his interference, he raised money from investors who conspired to wrest control from him. Kim accepted what happened and moved on. Mega.co.nz is alive and well, just not under his control.

Didn't he warn that Mega.co.nz can't be trusted anymore?

Yes, there is some discussion about it:

https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-mega-trade-barbs-over-ho...

And his investments in Letsbuyit.com …

> To fund the project, Dotcom said the company will be conducting a seed round in January. Once the prototype is ready, he will also undertake a massive equity crowdfunding campaign.

He wants to do what Ethereum and Maidsafe did -- create a crypto-asset, drive up demand by publicity, and then sell it.

It's not so much of an idea. Many are already thinking about it. Like always the devil is in the execution.

I'm more interested into how he will manage to develop it, meaning how much investment he can built up, and what kind of talent he can attract.

It's not an idea. He has no theoretical underpinning. He would have to luck out and hire someone smart enough to actually make something resembling his promises, and then let go of his ego enough to let them do it. Not going to happen, and no amount of capital will help.

Not sure how he plans to get this to work without IP addresses at some layer.

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