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Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

Why would that solve anything? Google could still cancel my gmail if I say something politically incorrect, regardless of their database technology. It's not like making my email public would change anything, they are not reluctant to cancel people just because others can see it. If anything, that makes the cancellation all the more effective.

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If your email were hosted on a public blockchain, Google could not kick you off.

- Decentralized file hosting for all the emails using IPFS instead of Google's servers

- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service instead of Google's login

- a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts

Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.

This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.

By hosted, do you mean that the blockchain would act as the mail server? Wouldn't that be incredibly slow and inefficient?

By hosted I mean stored on IPFS. It's a bit like downloading a file from Bittorrent in that it can be fast and distributed, but with some added crypto layers.

The only part stored on the blockchain is the address itself. The files are not stored on the blockchain.

More here: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/what-is-ipfs/

Appreciate your question! That should get you started.

Alright, the data can be stored on IPFS, but where will the computations be carried out?

High level, Ethereum is intended as "computer", and IPFS is intended as "storage". They complement eachother well.

Beyond that, it depends on what you mean by "computations".

Our example is setting up decentralized email. What computation is needed to send and receive email?

1. You may mean the computation needed to encrypt and decrypt the emails. That would happen on your computer locally.

2. You may mean the computation to send and receive emails. I'm not sure how/where this would happen in this example. It might be on the blockchain somehow.

I mean any server application needs compute. Not sure how many clock cycles are needed to run a mail server, but since the Ethereum world computer is like a 10000 times slower than a single laptop, I figured it wasn't enough for really any kind of compute?

> any server application needs compute

I'm curious about this as well so will be learning more about dapps (decentralized apps). Starting here

https://blog.chronobank.io/what-is-a-decentralised-applicati...

https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/dapps

For messaging dapps, check out the new Blockscan chat by the creators of Etherscan : https://decrypt.co/91226/etherscan-creators-launch-ethereum-... (note: NOT very decentralized yet)

This is past my level of expertise, but you could map out what those clock cycles of a mail server are going towards. For example, serving files, like we talked about, can happen on IPFS. No compute needed there beyond what IPFS already does.

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