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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion the best thing about the Internet is it enables everyone to reach anyone, anywhere and share anything. It's a great levelling force, or it potentially could be. It's rather worrisome that in recent years the same kind of top-heavy power structures out in the real world seem to have taken control on the Internet too. It would be a pity were it to become just a glitzed up version of our world.

To reach its potential the most important single technology remains decentralisation. The average netizen should be able to serve and control his own data, even if he/she didn't create much of it in the first place.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where all real functionality moves to the Cloud and all our devices just become I/O thin clients. Saying that the average user won't care is frankly self-fulfilling and defeatist. How would they care if they are not provided alternatives to centralised services that are usable and compelling?

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The Internet is part of the real world. Whatever you dislike about the real world, you will probably eventually dislike about the Internet. And to save what you like about the Internet, you have to go into the real world and fight for it. Thomas Anderson has to leave the Matrix and go into the real world to save all the people who think they are living normal lives in the Matrix.

It doesn't actually allow this though right because it doesn't remove the things that kept this from happening before the Internet: language, differing customs, differing lived experiences, etc.

It doesn't allow anyone to reach anyone. You have very little chance of reaching people who spend time in non-English online communities (assuming you only know English). Those people have very little ability to reach you.

Furthermore, everyone is able to reach everyone, technically, but there is still a cost to doing so which everyone cannot bear.

It takes time (and for many, lost wages) to join multiple social networks and forums and write on all of them or to start a blog or to report news. And there is a certain class of people in the world who have that time and a certain class which don't.

The internet has always been a glitzed up version of our world, just with a lot more anonymity (which, many would argue has been a tragedy).

It's interesting to observe that, just like in the real world, the benefit of security is something that doesn't distribute well and ends up being provided by centralized sources.

Per your second paragraph, even in the real world people have little to no control over what data of theirs is shared between third parties (eg gossip).

There's a baseline ability to control how much information third parties have in the first place - some people keep to themselves, some people tell anybody everything about themselves. People who care about it can, for the most part, at least know what other people know about them.

In any case gossip is lossy and low-bandwidth, and people understand those limitations when operating on information from that channel. The same cannot be said for, say, comprehensive real-time browser history.

I think a major problem is the lack of mainstream software to make it happen. Once that software takes off, it is often a watershed moment.

Please take a look at this and I would love to hear feedback: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

A quick note is that megacorps get some credibility from having high production value. This video isn't as polished, and (unjustly) doesn't look as legit.

its funny to think that if in the future once everything have been decentralized where all your data, your purchase history, medical records are spread out over the internet, it is inevitable that centralization and privacy will all be the rage and people would pay premium for it.

If medical records were spread out, they would be spread out in encrypted form. Nobody would be able to read them except for the right people, which would actually be a step up from today's poor situation.

perhaps you must be thinking of using blockchain just to store the hash of the files so you can check against it using private key, in that case as a one way hash it “maybe” be fine. but then again that wont be a fully decentralized system.

i was thinking of a full on decentralized future where every file and data (encrypted / hashed address) are sitting exposed on the blockchain ala ipfs, etc. where only thing preventing it being decrypted is just a key.

not sure how far we are away from quantum computing but it might make what is considered standard encryption process obsolete. it wasnt even that long ago where cracking md5, sha1 became a piece of cake.

Keep that comment in mind. In 10 years, when the inevitable big breach occurs releasing millions of medical records, i hope you will be strong enough to go back to it and and think hard about your next moves.

I'm not sure I follow. How does a data breach relate to his comment? In fact, it might be quite a lot better if the security mindset was "literally anyone could have access to the raw bits". Strong encryption might not be so often regarded as gravy.

I understand your point now. You're talking about spreading medical records between hundreds of third parties with terrible security practices, and I'm talking about an ideal decentralized system with lots of clever cryptography a la the blockchain.

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