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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> What we really need is a killer app that requires end-to-end connectivity.

That seems unlikely to emerge. Anything you can do with end-to-end connectivity you can do with a server in the middle forwarding packets. Servers are cheap and reliable, so there's very little incentive to get rid of them.

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Servers for things like this are expensive and a reason why "the internet" is one of the biggest users of electrical energy. Doing things with extra servers involved in the process always results in an environmental footprint that could be avoided.

I still like the idea of a peer to peer web, with something like hosting in your own browser. This could be a great alternative fallback network with distributed DNS. Most phones are capable. Energy, speed and security are concerns, but in cracking them you'd probably make the web a better place.

I like that idea too. A lot of geeks like that idea. But ordinary people couldn't care less. All they care about is that their latest instagram photo gets a lot of likes. They neither know nor care what goes on under the hood. Unfortunately, that ignorance and apathy is what drives the market.

I can't really comment about what other's care about and use the web for. I've never met anyone that even uses Instagram!

You can make that work with hole punching, IPv6 isn't a major blocker.

IPFS works okay.

The problem is that if you want to host something usually you want it to be up and reachable 0-24. And that has costs, and p2p can help with that, but the freeloader problem is not trivial. (You need reputation or some other kind of accounting, that requires solving sybil attacks, and possibly global sync/enumeration, both are hard, etc.)

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