Comment by kaoD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaoD | Hacker News Reader

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> All your points seem to focus on DNS.

Not at all. How did you get that impression?

DNS is just one of the many ways email is centralized (email relies in a centralized third party service to resolve domain names and find mail servers for them) but I just mention it near the end in a single sentence. Remove the sentence and my point still stands.

Please read again and understand my comment!

> And in fact neither is IP.

Actually IP is neither centralized nor decentralized. Our current largest scale implementation (which we call the Internet) is centralized, but it's a side-effect, not a requirement.

> As far as I understand nothing in SMTP makes it inherently more centralized than any piece of software that relies on IP

Re-read my comment.

Perhaps you don't know how Bitcoin works? In Bitcoin there are no servers... or rather, everyone is a server. The cool thing is I'm still receiving coins whether I am connected to the Bitcoin network or not. It just works, regardless of who is or isn't connected to the network!

In email, I'm still tied to a provider (even if I'm my own provider) which is a single point of failure.

I'll say it again: if your systems has clients relying on servers (which Bitcoin does not), it is not decentralized.

Come on, this is actually what makes Bitcoin so revolutionary!

> Does bitcoin/bitpost not rely on IP?

It does (remember IP is not inherently centralized), but it does not rely on the Internet.

Even if we're using IP (the protocol), Bitcoin is transport-agnostic. In fact it is a goal for the community to use other transports (such as radio or satellites) to avoid the problem of relying on the centralized Internet.

Even then, IP (the protocol) will probably be used for addressing and such, but in a decentralized manner. It's not a requirement, but IP is a useful protocol and nobody wants to reinvent the wheel.

Mh, I feel stupid now. In which ways other than relying on DNS and IP is "email" centralized?

Sorry, I did some edits to the parent comment which may clarify.

Don't feel stupid, Bitcoin's architecture is quite hard to grasp since it's such a beautiful piece of science and engineering.

> In which ways other than relying on DNS and IP is "email" centralized?

In email, there are servers which clients connect to and rely on. You can't be any more centralized than that! :P

Re-read my comments and do a bit of research on how Bitcoin handles decentralization, it should make the picture clearer.

If it isn't fully peer-to-peer, it isn't decentralized.

Can you explain why you think SMTP is not "fully peer-to-peer"?

I didn't say SMTP is inherently centralized. I said email is inherently centralized.

You could use (a variant of) SMTP as a transfer protocol in Bitmessage ignoring target host discovery and using the p2p network for relaying, and then it would be decentralized... but without them SMTP is not much besides the envelope part, which is pretty meaningless.

The great thing about Bitmessage is that it replaces DNS, target host discovery and single sending/receiving points.

SMTP relies on single relay points, while Bitmessage relays through the whole network (regardless of who's online or not).

Bitmessage's architecture actively avoids users lumping in a single provider since each user is his own provider by design.

Also: SMTP relies on mail servers and ties addresses to them. In Bitmessage, your address belongs to the whole system. You can't switch from an SMTP provider to another while keeping the same address. That's a single point of failure.

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Imagine a perfect scenario where everyone on the internet has its own mail server and nobody uses DNS for target discovery because they send emails directly to IPs (e.g. target@10.10.10.10). What if your IP changes to 10.10.10.11? Are you going to update your address everywhere? What about people with dynamic IPs? What if I don't want to give you my IP? You wouldn't have a mail address you could publish!

How did we solve these problems? Using centralized DNS and mail servers. Which is what we want to avoid in the first place.

So SMTP isn't centralized by design, but for it to be comfortable, it has to be centralized.

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And Bitmessage solves even more problems:

Let's say your ISP or your government wants to isolate you from communications.

You publish target@10.10.10.10 as your email. Your government finds it out and tells your ISP to close your server at 10.10.10.10.

Now you won't receive communications. Single point of failure!

You can change your address (which is a burden in and of itself) but then you have a single point of failure again which is as easy to cut you off from.

You can't do that in Bitmessage because everyone has and can relay your email, whichever their IP or yours is. They'd have to control and cut you off from all relay servers, which is everyone on the network as opposed to email where they have to cut you off from a single server.

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Okay, so for SMTP to be decentralized we have to strip email down so it:

- Wouldn't rely on DNS which is centralized.

- Wouldn't rely on target host discovery, which creates single points of failure (i.e. addresses weren't tied to single servers and could "float" in the network).

- Would broadcast your messages to all their known relays (which would in turn relay to all their relays, which would in turn... ad infinitum) so they can't cut you off the network.

Then SMTP would be decentralized.

But I have just described Bitmessage!

I see your point, however I have to politely disagree:

The naive solution to the problem you described would be to simply broadcast every email to every possible receiver. And in fact, I believe this is how bitcoin actually works (but I am happy to be corrected).

> The naive solution to the problem you described would be to simply broadcast every email to every possible receiver.

Exactly. And to every possible relayer too! Assuming we've dealt with the SMTP assumption of hostname = final delivery point.

You might have read the parent reply before I finished it (I have a bad habit of editing after sending replies, sorry).

As email works now, you'd receive duplicate emails, right? Easy to deal with if you wanted to, but Bitmessage works like that by design and assumes duplication as part of the system.

So, if your solution to the centralization problem is, literally, for email to become more like Bitmessage/Bitcoin... then what are we arguing about? :P

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