Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

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I think it comes down to technology. It's tempting to argue that technology for decentralization has been invented. Bittorrent, for example. But if you think it through, Bittorrent represents a very limited form of decentralization.

Effort is inversely proportional to popularity. If something is effortless and serves a need, it will become popular. Bitcoin was basically effortless to operate in the early days.

I don't think it should be up to users to carefully collect works that they want to "make decentralized". Decentralization should be the norm.

And it shouldn't be up to them to worry about the legal ramifications of doing so. The network itself should ensure anonymity, like Tor.

Currently there is no such technology. IPFS came close, but it fails the anonymity requirement.

For most decentralized technologies, we should make legal ramifications impossible. It's impossible to break PGP encryption, monitor Monero transactions, or de-anonymize Tor traffic if the user acts prudently. This is good. We're seeing a return to the "good old days" where people protect their natural rights to privacy and property.

I don't believe anonymity is a requirement for a decentralization technology, if anything, it hampers it. The burdens of anonymity seen in projects that try to preserve is often so cumbersome as to make the software totally unusable by muggles.

The weakness in IPFS is that not enough people use it, and its really as simple as that. Distributed data addressable in a namespace is a great foundation but corporations are actively subsidizing similar, centralized services to preserve their monopoly positions.

As long as Google et al are overflowing in money nothing can really try to displace their domination of the network.

It depends on how segmented the internet gets. As long as there's enough traffic of some sort between segments, it's at least possible that stuff can be hidden well enough to get through. If necessary, using covert channels.

But if there's no traffic allowed between segments, it becomes much harder. Then you're left with workarounds like this: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-s...

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