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Comment by stevedekorte | Hacker News Reader

AFAICS, neither Blockstack or dpage.io are "decentralized". Note the login page. Ask what happens if dpage.io site goes down. This is just a website. The fact that this site uses Blockstack's centralized servers doesn't make it "decentalized" any more than using AWS would.

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Muneeb from Blockstack here.

Dpage can be easily converted to a Desktop app. Most of the app logic is client-side anyway and hosting at a domain is mostly for convenience.

Blockstack's "centralized servers" doesn't really fully capture the technology at play here. The pointers to user data lockers are stored in the Stacks blockchain, and users can host their own private encrypted data lockers where they want. Blockstack PBC does provide a free service to host data lockers, as a way to help bootstrap initial usage.

It's fine to have some default servers for discovery bootstrapping (as Bitcoin does) but any subset of Bitcoin nodes can go down without the network failing. Is this true of Blockstack? If every Blockstack controlled or financed server went down, would the network continue to work?

Of course you still need to have servers somewhere. The decentralized parts are these: blockstack identity (which is stored on blockchain) and the fact that all user data is not stored on one server, but on multiple nodes. The user can choose what node to store their data on. It can be your own hosted node too.

If dpage.io goes down all the authors still have their pages on their storage. It is just a question of spinning of a new page that aggregates the pages again. Authors own their page content.

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