Comment by cr0sh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cr0sh | Hacker News Reader

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> Any ideas how to reach people without gatekeepers? I have just one way: a desktop app or mobile app that is allowed to periodically wake up and poll a server.

If you're asking "anybody today" then yes, that's probably one of the only ways.

But maybe tomorrow might be better.

On the horizon (where it may stay - it's been slow in coming) is the idea of "distributed and serverless" internet. Also known as "peer-to-peer".

You can think of it as everyone (well, their device) being their own server - kinda like the internet was originally meant to be (before vast sums of money got involved).

Through "magic" - each person that is on the network can browse, send, receive, post, etc - to others without needing much of anything else - just the pipe (not really any way around that kind of "gatekeeper" unless you have a mesh network of some sort - and even there, long-haul can be tough or impossible). A well known example:

https://ipfs.io/

...there are others out there as well; just google around for "peer-to-peer web" and similar terms.

Funny that you mention that. One of my company’s initiatives is building social networking software to run on local networks and mesh networks. I also want to see a future where cellphone signals, energy generation and so on don’t go through “last mile” gatekeepers but those are just one of many commodity choices to connect to “the grid” / “the cloud” / “the mesh” whatever it is called.

I think that is super important given what’s going on:

https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...

We have started to work on captive portals so your device can surf from wifi to wifi just like a cellphone does with towers, and check in wherever you visit without you doing anything (with your prior permission, of course)

https://qbix.com/blog/2017/12/18/power-to-the-people/

IPFS is great, as is BitTorrent. I have met a lot of the people running these projects, like Tom Berners-Lee and the guys from Solid (back then), David Irvine and the guys from MaidSAFE, and Petar Maymounkov from NYU who invented Kademlia DHT.

I think there are several things that are needed:

  NAT hole punching
  End to end encryption
  Kademlia or other DHT
  Small group consensus
  Merkle DAG with validators

All these can be incrementally added to an existing, web-based solution. The problem with BlockStack and MaidSAFE is that they require you to download a new browser that only works on the desktop. Instead of trying to build on the existing Web.

For me it’s not even so much about privacy as being permissionless. No gatekeepers.

Whether it’s your cellphone company or your cable internet ISP or the Google Maps API or Amazon Web Services, they require you to pay them for their closed-source infrastructure and data.

The infrastructure should be a mesh and the data should be open source. The challenge is simply in the software to coordinate the mesh participants, and for the data it’s software to enable the right rules to maximize the chances of data being correct.

There is tons, tons to do and frankly most VCs and investors don’t get it. The payoff is huge for humanity as a whole, and can unleash even more innovation than the Web did after it disrupted AOL etc. But they don’t capture even 10% of the whole value. It’s free to the world.

So we’re chronically underfunded but we have already put together so much. And now we are making money the old fashioned way: earning it from users and clients hahaha. The Basecamp guys would be proud.

Blockstack Engineer here. You do not need to download a browser to use Blockstack. We also have a working mobile version, and multiple apps built on the Blockstack API that have their own ios and android apps. You can check out Blockstack without downloading the browser here: https://browser.blockstack.org

If it is your first time, you will be asked to create an identity on Blockstack: https://docs.blockstack.org/core/naming/introduction.html

Each instance of the "browser" whether on desktop or phone, requires a unique password, associated with the id. The id is stored on the Blockchain, the data is stored in your own gaia hub which you can host wherever you like: https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html

In regards to your comment about "Kademlia or other DHT": Blockstack previously used Kademlia, but iterated on an improvement to Kademlia by creating Atlas which is what we use at Blockstack. More here: https://github.com/blockstack/atlas

and the specific reasons about why Atlas was built in lieu of Kademlia here: https://blog.blockstack.org/blockstack-core-v0-14-release/

Together, Atlas, BNS, and gaia create the foundation upon which the Blockstack API is built on.

You can build applications using the Blockstack API here: https://docs.blockstack.org/develop/zero_to_dapp_1.html

If you want to explore the ecosystem of existing decentralised applications on Blockstack and other decentralised solutions, you can see that here: https://app.co/

You can read more about how identity, Atlas, and user owned storage works here: https://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf and maybe poke around here a bit: https://core.blockstack.org/

Oh yes, also you can download the browser on your desktop if you like.

Hey, are you around in NYC? Would love to grab coffee with you and discuss archtecture together. I am curious how Kademlia and DHT turned out to be unreliable in practice and the lessons you learned for why what you use now is better

Can you drop me a line at username greg with the domain qbix.com ?

Absolutely. We will be in touch shortly. In the mean time, you can check out our forum: https://forum.blockstack.org/ or hit is up on our slack.

Cool — what to look out for, to make sure I don’t miss it?

Hey, didn’t get any email from you

Since you are name dropping projects:

Tox, a P2P Skype alternative.

Unfortunately it is not well known outside of tinfoil hat community.

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