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Comment by chris_st | Hacker News Reader

Two things:

1. There's almost certainly a port of Sqlite3 to WASM that would be more than glad to run in your browser.

2. I'd really love to know what applications fit in the "we had replication from the browser, peer-to-peer, I think we'd be living in a much more useful world" situation. We've had GunDB, IPFS, etc. that live in the browser for decades (and projects like Urbit), and the killer app just... doesn't seem to exist? Let alone anything useful as just a basic demo? Anyone have anything to point to? I just don't see it, personally.

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https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/trunk/index.md

Heh. Well, #2, brilliant question. But no, I'm not thinking of anything as sexy as totally distributed filesystems. 15 years ago when I was into crypto and ran a bitcoin casino I would have had much bigger ideas for fully distributed DBs (which surely would have tanked and caused me ruin). Currently, I deal with a lot of site-specific software installations that run their own MySQL servers, some of which have unexpected downtime or go offline. I have a lot of custom code to align them with a master source of truth when they come back up. At least a few times a year, one of them gets so corrupted that I have to just login remotely and rebuild its database by hand. If I could have designed them to share a single database peer to peer, it would have saved me a lot of personal time.

There are probably a lot of hub-and-spoke systems like this flying way under the radar that would be a lot better if there were a reliable technology to keep them synchronized. I keep looking at Litestream and thinking about it.

Your best answer for "a much more useful world" is... easier development of crypto gambling? That sounds like an actively worse world to live in to me, to be honest.

Wow, that sounds like a really difficult situation! I think your idea of using Litestream is definitely worth a try. Good luck (but not with crypto gambling :-).

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