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Comment by molus | Hacker News Reader

> What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization?

If you are following the rise of "dapps" or blockchain applications (circa 2017) then I would answer your question with "almost anything Internet-related".

Some examples:

* Decentralized Storage (IPFS)

* Decentralized Computation (Golem)

* Decentralized Professional Networking (Indorse)

There are many other examples, but a lot of them are vaporware and not worth mentioning.

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That are solutions, what are the problems they tried to solve? What is wrong with storing your files on Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3? What is the advantage of IPFS?

https://ipfs.io/#uses

Those points are neither specific to IPFS nor to a decentralized solution and they do not really highlight any advantage of IPFS over something like Dropbox to begin with. The best point is probably saving bandwidth due to its peer-to-peer nature. There are certainly more traditional solutions where you can save bandwidth if you can convince other people to provide it for you, for example classical FTP mirrors, but this is certainly a valid use case for a distributed solution. It however is more to the benefit of the service provider and not the user and it really hinges on the popularity of that data you want distribute, if it is not really popular just using a file server will most likely provide a better user experience as compared to depending on a few potentially low bandwidth peers.

The two problems I care about most that decentralization is trying to solve are privacy and censorship. Another important one is not having something important disappear, like happened to millions of websites when Geocities went out of business. Also there is good connectivity for populations that presently lack it, like in African countries. Also there is connectivity during emergencies that cut off the centralized web.

I am a bit surprised you are not aware of all of these, since they have been extensively discussed in the last few years.

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