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Comment by boramalper | Hacker News Reader

His points about blockchain are compelling but I disagree with “blockchain/decentralisation” part. Blockchain is a decentralised ideal, but so is BitTorrent, so is Tor, and so on, to some significant extent. To say that decentralisation failed because blockchain failed ignores all the other technologies which are serving people well.

I think the distinction between “decentralised” (i.e. federated) and “distributed” is important (as decentralised is often used as an umbrella term to cover both).[0] There are tons of federated projects out there from Matrix to Mastodon, and there are initiatives to make federated networks more decentralised (such as the integration of Kademlia DHT in BitTorrent).

No need for pessimism I think. :)

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Hoelscher/publica...

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> Blockchain is a decentralised ideal, but so is BitTorrent, so is Tor, and so on, to some significant extent.

So is internet. Most people use centralized services but no one prevents you from setting up your DNS servers, with your own domains, servers, website etc.

DNS is probably a bad example here. While DNS does have federated servers in the end the entire system is controlled by whoever controls the root name servers. It's pretty much the definition of centralized control.

It’s possible to set up your own servers different than root. The ability to have multiple roots and how they swap info is really decentralized.

It’s like saying bitcoin is centralized because there’s only a single blockchain.

Sure there’s a single DNS root, but not all countries and network follow it. And the assignment of names is not centralized.

Well sure, you can set up your own servers but no-one else will know about them and you won't be part of the "the DNS system" as such.

I do not think your assumption is correct here. If you and I and 1,000,000 of our friends decided to create our own root name servers and co-opt the .com domain for our own purposes then there is nothing that would/could stop us and all existing software would work as expected (modulo the fact that DNS mappings would use a different source of truth than that used by most other participants on the network.) The fact that we all tend to agree upon the same root servers means that we share the same source of truth regarding tld mappings, but there is nothing that says we all need to use these same root servers.

In practice, men with big sticks dressed in blue coming and fucking up your day prevents this.

It's essentially just building an intranet. That's not illegal

The same goes for inventing your own paper currency, no?

Close. There is nothing illegal (in the US) about creating your own currency as long as it is convertible to USD. With domain names there is no such requirement to interoperate with the existing root nameservers and ICAAN tlds. In your private .com there is no requirement that the facebook.com A record map to facebook IP addresses so you could collectively decide to map it to 127.0.0.1 and no one could do anything to stop you.

That's like saying anyone could open their own Facebook, and therefore Facebook is not centralized.

The DNS is centralized, even if domain names are used in conjunction with decentralized protocols like TCP/IP, and even if anyone is free to create their own instance of a DNS.

The only sense in which it's decentralized is in relation to the legal right to operate one. It is a free market institution, instead of government-instituted monopoly.

Except that even if you use your own paper currency, you have to pay taxes in your country's oficial currency. Taxes are usually a significant amount of every transaction. So, the new system will very quickly bleed out.

Because of that and other reasons, it is in practice impossible to make your own paper currency.

DNS is just a glorified search engine that’s controlled top-down by ICANN.

Anyone can build a different, distributed search engine where things are looked up on a DHT by their hash.

I have come to the conclusion, and have since then ofted said, that URLs do NOT need to be human-readable, and the idea of hostnames and domains tied to IP ranges will eventually give way to far lighter weight things

I keep hoping content-addressed hashes will take off but even IPFS had to invent IPNS so we're probably not collectively ready as a species to move away from name->technical_ID mappings.

Handshake is building a decentralized DNS layer to address this. TLDR; it's a blockchain anyone can use to register a TLD on and it improves the security model by getting rid of CAs.

Disclaimer: building a company on top of Handshake

On a semi-related note, I don't know if torrents are successful outside of piracy.

In the last week or two I went back and downloaded all of my years worth of Humble Bundle ebooks/videos. I downloaded the torrent versions as they were easier to track failures with and the HB store does limit simultaneous downloads.

I'm still wondering if I'm going to get an automated scaremail letter about using torrents from my ISP. I already received one for downloading Ubuntu years back, though IIRC that was a different provider.

Computer game launchers and updaters, such as the one used by Blizzard, have used BitTorrent under the hood for years, for large downloads.

The Blizzard client even used to have a window you could open where it would show the status of all the BitTorrent connections. I think they got rid of that some time ago though.

They stopped using BitTorrent due to issues with home firewalls, antiviruses misdetecting malware, etc.

Does anyone if windows update use some DHT protocol too? It has an option to share windows updates with other computers.

> On a semi-related note, I don't know if torrents are successful outside of piracy.

Regardless of the cause, they've been successful don't they? :)

I think partially it was because you had to download a separate piece of software -a BitTorrent client- to utilise the network. This is also changing thanks to WebTorrent[0] and IPFS.js[1] which works right in our web browsers without even requiring an add-on! They enable initiatives such as PeerTube[2] -a decentralised video-hosting platform- and distributed (NoSQL) databases such as OrbitDB[3].

Convenience is the key and huge advancements have been made in that direction!

[0]: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs

[2]: https://joinpeertube.org/en/

[3]: https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db

Have you ever downloaded a Linux distro installer from a torrent? They are lightning compared to not only all of the other torrents but even direct downloads from the hosting sites.

> Have you ever downloaded a Linux distro installer from a torrent?

> > I already received one for downloading Ubuntu years back

Ah whoops. Still it highlights a clear legitimate if relatively niche use.

Another example is the success of DVCS like Git in open-source development (despite GitHub / Gitlab being dominant hosts).

That's a pretty big "despite." It's definitely notable that the first thing people did when decentralized VCSes started to take off was find a way to centralize them.

And yet, GitHub hasn't become (and is unlikely to become) the single repository of ALL software in the world. Clearly, there's a counter-balancing force (sovereignty, innovation etc). To call centralization as "efficient" is to ignore these valuables.

If we think about the Tor consensus mechanism as the part of Tor infrastructure which aspires to decentralization, then Tor is probably about as decentralized as Certificate Transparency—"kinda"!

Maybe I2P would be better example but it hasn't gained as much traction as Tor unfortunately.

Also, the blockchain has introduced (AFAIK) the idea of using append-only databases to build decentralized applications, and this is currently used in very interesting new techs which have nothing to do with currencies or economics (like secure-scuttlebutt). The "dweb" is becoming a thing, IMO.

Ironically I guess, your bank has been keeping your account balance as an append only ledger since literally the introduction of banking.

That the word 'decentralised' is tacked onto the idea is really a red herring.

That is very not new - even transaction based decentralized databases technically date back to the 1980s - even if they received less practical use. The theory of databases are pretty old and practically ancient in computing terms.

Before blockchain was a thing much less a hyped one cloud computing used it and before that some databases practiced 'tombstones' for databases. The easiest way to maintain absolute consistency has been known to be not really deleting things but marking them as 'deleted' and leaving them to be ignored by default until consistency can be achieved. That was the approach when cloud computing dawned to make things scaleable and avoid the bottlenecks and load-balancing server overhead.

Transaction based databases are logically equivalent to an append only database. If you have a list of transactions that add up to the same resulting database state - with the option of more versatility if you don't constrain things to be operational order insensitive.

I see, thanks to you and @weego for historical context.

It makes me realize that git is probably some kind of append-only database too (and used for decentralization too).

I guess I can still thank blockchain for having introduced the idea to me.

The similarity goes deeper than that, given that git uses Merkle trees as does Bitcoin. There's hashing and in the typical use case there is even some distributed consensus process involved although often in git human decision making takes the place of an algorithm.

Some good discussion here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46192377/why-is-git-not-...

I think the water gets muddied by people who know very little and yet have an opinion as well as by people who know so much they can't see the forest for the trees (if you'll allow the pun).

> the idea of using append-only databases to build decentralized applications

The ideas of a write-ahead log, appended event identifiers as analogous to a monotonic clock, and of state/integrity checking by having log items "check" (-sum, usually) each other have underpinned the most popular databases for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_file_system

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