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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> It is a Peer-to-Peer Web-Like Network that cannot be censored or taken down, thanks to its decentralized nature.

That's - wrong. A suitably motivated attacker can or will take down your network, figure out the involved ISPs, find your precious server and your basement and shut it down.

Let's not kid ourselves. These networks are tolerated...until they become inconvenient.

Consider bot networks: They are taken down routinely. (just google https://www.google.com/search?q=which+bot+networks+have+been... )

Instead of basing a user-space network on these impossible ideals, find a economic incentive to operate them - centralized or not, federated or not. Someone has to pay for the Ramen.

And now downvote me for pooping all over "open, free, and uncensored network and communication."

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The difficulty might be that an attacker would have to take down users all over the world to remove a page. Like BitTorrent, there is no server, the clients share the hosting effort all over the world. Not saying it would be impossible, only potentially very hard.

And yet Bittorrent succeeded while MojoNation did not. Please, go and take your best shot at creating a distributed protocol that has the best chances for widespread adoption, as you see it. But no need to shit on someone else's attempt. Especially over some simplistic filler in some introductory writeup.

I did not know about Mojo Nation. I also discovered it was replaced by Mnet in 2002 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnet_(peer-to-peer_network)

One could probably argue that Bittorrent identified a more actionable economic incentive on the part of the swarm participants (wanting access to a very specific piece of media) rather than the more general objective in MojoNation of participating in a swarm that stored some set of arbitrary files that you or someone else may or may not come back to retrieve at some future point. Incentive engineering was considered for both systems, but only one of them hit upon a way to make the data pools self-sustaining.

Can't parse this weird opinion. Do you think cryptography doesn't work? I don't understand.

The cryptography here is likely sound, but motivated actors have other tools, like traffic analysis (how much data and the timestamp at which it was downloaded), that could help narrow things down to few enough targets to investigate each more thoroughly. The more traffic with similar data sizes at the same time the harder it will be, of course.

There is a grain of truth in your post. But the "economic incentive to operate" is often misconstrued by crypto projects. I won't pay for what I already have for free, period. Economic incentives, you see. Doubly so if it's a service inferior to alternatives in every respect I care about. The final nail in the coffin is the necessity to buy your rainbow coins which I have no use of otherwise, a huge inconvenience and insurmountable hurdle even when that's just a few cents.

Its the best that can be done when the underlying physical network layer itself is not decentralised.

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