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Comment by awakeasleep | Hacker News Reader

A compression algorithm that works well enough to make a P2P Internet practical seems like a ground-breaking technology that is close-to-believable.

I challenge any of us to come up with something better or an alternative!

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> A compression algorithm that works well enough to make a P2P Internet practical seems like a ground-breaking technology that is close-to-believable.

That’s not the amount of transfered data that makes a P2P Internet practical or not, but rather its reliability, something a compression algorithm can’t do anything about.

Such a compression algorithm could make it much cheaper for the community to volunteer capacity to the network (short-range relays? data storage nodes? crowdfunded cell towers?), which could make it much more feasible to build a reliable P2P network.

If this were true, there would be much more P2P networks today than fifteen years ago, but that’s not the case. According to [1], in 2004 BitTorrent accounted "from 20 to 35% of all traffic on the Internet". At that time the bandwidth cost was at least two orders of magnitude higher than today. The price of hard drive has since been divided by 40 [2] and the total Internet traffic has been multiplied by 40 [3].

[1]: http://history-computer.com/Internet/Conquering/BitTorrent.h...

[2]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3182207/data-storage/c...

[3]: https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/the-history-and-future-of-interne...

My argument was only that bringing the cost down would make it easier to build a more reliable P2P network. I doubt that reliability/cost are the main reasons P2P networks aren't more popular, rather that the average person doesn't really care or even know about their existence.

A P2P Internet is not only practical but used in practice. BitTorrent at one point accounted for the majority of Internet traffic.

My problem with that technology is that, if the main character actually wanted to do good, he'd donate that algorithm to Apache and the show would be over in ten minutes. Or, if he wanted to make loads of money, he could license it for millions. Instead he wound up launching an ICO. The show should have been over in half an episode, but they turned the hero into a moronic sociopath to drag it out for five seasons.

But that’s the point of the show: a lot of “startup culture” is actually hypocritical, and doesn’t necessarily acts rationally. People want to be “the next Zuck” more than they really want to change the world or make money.

Your last sentence describes a number of actual startups, though, and that's part of why it's funny.

BitTorrent is free and open but Bram Cohen also created BitTorrent the company, which this year was acquired by a Chinese cryptocurrency/blockchain company, so. Life often holds examples that follow art.

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