Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe there will be a need for massive computing in remote areas: Antartica, or space. They need a lot of local storage and compute. And they have low bandwidth.

It's kind of like GPUs are in cars right now. You can't drive a Tesla with dumb sensors over the Internet -- you need smart local compute.

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-self-driving-car-computer-...

So I guess IoT and doing heavy local computation is a technical reason you would need decentralization. I can see that happening for many use cases. I'm not sure if it will happen for the consumer web because centralization is more efficient and the current network effects are so ingrained. Similar to how Windows is still dominant on the desktop, but iOS/Android are perhaps more important platforms.

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I think major changes in behavior are driven by new hardware -- phones in the 00's, PC's in the 80's, Internet in the 90's, etc.

People have been trying to push VR, but to me VIDEO is the real VR -- more stuff happens there and more people use it. I was chatting with a friend yesterday and observed that YouTube is basically what "SecondLife" was supposed to be. People are exchanging all kinds of valuable information and entertainment on YouTube.

So if you need to process a lot of video locally for some reason, that could be a killer app for decentralization. Just like a self-driving car, although I'm bearish on self-driving impacting the average consumer in the next 10 years. I think it will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates.

> YouTube is basically what "SecondLife" was supposed to be. People are exchanging all kinds of valuable information and entertainment on YouTube.

A keen observation!

Yeah it's probably because I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately, but it feels like there's just a lot more real interaction going on there than on other platforms. It sounds like Twitch is the same way.

One example: I learned how to clean my toilet from this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd6pV5lyvG8&t=1s

The comments are hilarious... Tons of people having the same "AHA" moment. (Basically you paper mache your toilet with vinegar and wait a couple hours. Old mineral stains come off like butter!)

Compare a google search for "clean toilet" and it feels like a bunch of SEO-infested crap.

YouTube is more like the "old web" where you can get a real opinion on something.

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I have friends who cook and that's a whole other subculture of YouTube. I've been watching a good MMA show. And there are programming streams, and pretty much every programming conference has an archive, which is a rich archive of free information (e.g. PyCon, CppCon, etc.)

I don't know what's going on in Second Life now but to me it feels like it's probably not "real life". I guess people want "life" and not "second life", and video is becoming an increasingly large aspect of the former.

Rebutting my own comment: even if you need heavy computation and storage locally, that still doesn't motivate a decentralized network.

I would think of it as control plane vs. data plane. The data plane can be massively distributed in space, but the control plane can still be centralized.

And of course that's how Tesla works, and how software-defined networking works.

The "powers that be" just need to control software updates and the network's control plane (routing). They can remotely manage distributed resources.

So yeah unfortunately I'm not seeing a big motivator for decentralized networks (which can be very, very slow). You would have to have some need for a lot of local video processing but also a whole way to distribute code and software updates.

And right now that's more centralized than it's ever been. I'm not a fan of the "silent, frequent, and huge updates and pop up new TOS" model but that's the status quo.

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