
The Imminent Decentralized Computing Revolution - waterlesscloud
http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/10/10/weekend-read-the-imminent-decentralized-computing-revolution/
======
FlailFast
> A revolutionary bit of technology called the block chain

Nice overview, but something that bugs me whenever someone talks about Bitcoin
(particularly some VCs): they talk about the blockchain independently, as a
"technology," without recognizing that, in fact, it's as much a triumph of
technology as it is a triumph of clever incentives. Small semantic point in
this article, but more broadly applicable when folks say "they don't love
Bitcoin, but they love the 'blockchain technology.'"

Spoiler alert: the blockchain is both reputable and trustless because there
are thousands of miners securing the network by hashing the night away. And
why do they do it? Because of the unit of account they generate by
participating.

Whenever I hear someone talk about how they love "the technology of the
blockchain" without explicitly mentioning the incentives at play, I
automatically become suspect of whether they actually understand what's going
on. (I'm looking at you, venture capitalists) Less of a problem with this
article, but I think it's worth highlighting all the same.

~~~
eric_bullington
I agree with this completely, and I agree with the peer comment that pinpoints
the motivation for this stance to be these peoples' desire to disassociate
themselves with the idea of Bitcoin and/or Bitcoiners.

Up to now, I've pretty much scoffed at this stance. The real breakthrough here
is Bitcoin, or so I've always thought.

However, I've recently come across a project that made me realize that the
blockchain technology may indeed bring about other revolutionary changes in
addition to Bitcoin itself. One in particular is assembly.com and Coin, the
blockchain-driven ownership records that formalize projects hatched under the
assembly.com organizational framework. I'm most familiar with Assembly, but I
wouldn't be surprised if other similar projects are actively underway.

If successful, assembly.com's approach to organizations has the potential to
change the way we form companies, for the better. If you're interested in big
societal changes brewing around us, I'd suggest going to take a look at how
assembly.com works with the technologies that enable this type of organization
(git and Github, in particular, in addition to the blockchain). If you've ever
read the books of Visa-founder Dee Hock and his ideas about chaordic
organizations, you'll immediately recognize this phenomenon. It's pretty
fascinating, and as soon as I finish my current contract I intend to start
working on an Assembly project.

But as for the power driving the blockchain technology (and thus enabling all
of this), I agree completely that this is indeed Bitcoin and its underlying
incentives. Pretty amazing stuff...

~~~
CMCDragonkai
Assembly is really cool. But one problem ive had with it is how founding a
project 600,000 coins for free, even for projects that aren't fully fleshed
out. This makes it much more fruitful to start your own projects.

~~~
eric_bullington
To be clear, those are 600,000 representing only the project you are founding.
Each project has different app coins. So each person or group starting a
project with Assembly gets 100% ownership of the project they start
themselves, nothing more, nothing less.

It's a high-tech, blockchain version of a partnership. What I think is so
innovative is the way this has the potential to combine kickstarters with
traditional business partnerships, with the blockchain to formalize the
relationship.

It's been pretty fascinating watching new projects start up there and gain
steam.

------
blorgle
Isn't this article just surface level technohype?

1\. Mesh Networks: FireChat isn't a mesh network. There is a long thread on
/r/Futurology about it, with lots of good posts describing what it is and the
problems with implementing real mesh networks
([https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2hvtoh/over_100...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2hvtoh/over_100000_people_in_hong_kong_downloaded/)).

The article espouses all the benefits of mesh networks and glosses over the
gritty facts of implementation that can't necessarily be solved by simply
throwing more software at the problem.

2\. The BlockChain: Yes, this is a massively distributed system. But the fact
is it relies on the existence of a fast, reliable internet that so happens to
be immensely centralised.

A rant I often like to have which makes me unpopular amongst the proponents of
so called p2p systems is that the bootstrap of all of these so called
decentralised systems is completely centralised. Bittorrent has trackers,
Bitcoin uses DNS seeds to find peers, Tor uses directory servers and most
others simply hardcode some URL list of peers into their source. If you can
attack the bootstrap you can split these so called decentralised networks
quite easily. Sybil attack is a common vector here.

The article also glosses over the fact that all the things which have driven
bitcoin adoption and popularity (Blockchain.io, Mt Gox, BitStamp, BitPay, etc)
are _all_ centralised services which require the user to essentially give up
any of the supposed benefits of decentralisation. Even in the case of mining,
how many run their own bitcoind? 99% of miners run in a pool, another form of
centralisation.

3\. Autonomous agents: I can't even...

~~~
snowwrestler
Yes and this assertion is laughably wrong:

> But history has proven that the centralized model is flawed and inefficient.

History shows the exact opposite. For example, at one point every business
above a certain size had its own electric generator, and developed their own
electricity on-site. In other words, decentralized power. That was replaced by
contracts with central generation providers because that centralized model was
so much more efficient.

You can see the same thing happening today with computing power (AWS, Azure,
Google), music (Spotify, Pandors), movies (Netlfix), and books (Kindle).

~~~
jefurii
>Yes and this assertion is laughably wrong: >History shows the exact opposite.
For example, at one point every business above a certain size had its own
electric generator, and developed their own electricity on-site. In other
words, decentralized power. That was replaced by contracts with central
generation providers because that centralized model was so much more
efficient.

Your comment assumes that efficiency is the most important thing. Addressing
power imbalances and improving local resiliency are also important.

In the 1960s and 70s for many people computers meant centralized power and
oppression. Computers were huge and expensive and therefore centralized, and
only big government and big business (i.e. The Man) could afford them. A lot
of the appeal of desktop computers in the 1980s was that they were _personal_
: you could run the computing tasks that _you_ wanted, on a machine that you
controlled.

~~~
dreamfactory2
Though rather than home users, it was business that drove the adoption and
commercialisation of the pc. That was through networks of desktop machines
running software like lotus which could be configured by users, replacing
mainframes that required costly administrators and programmers. It was largely
about cost efficiency and agility, particularly as the financial sector was
undergoing big changes at that time.

------
nine_k
While many other points may be valid, I'd say that mesh networks would be
valuable in fringe situations (disaster relief, mass protests, etc) but cannot
hope to replace the current Internet connectivity infrastructure.

Billions have been spent to create the IP transport networks. Building and
operating them at current capacities, or even at 1% of current capacity, is of
out of reach for most people who would run peer nodes of a mesh network.

Any node that'd happen to be in the bottleneck connecting two large segments,
or just on a route to a very desired host, would be hit by a huge demand to
pass traffic. Top-of-the-line 300 mbit wi-fi will be easily choked by that,
not giving the node nearly enough bandwidth for its own requests. Huge fiber
cables and microwave lines exist for a reason, and are not going to disappear.

The shape of the traffic they carry might change, though. E.g. with the advent
of bittorrent, much of the traffic worldwide has become peer-to-peer /
decentralized. This did not affect major carriers too much, except that they
had to add bandwidth.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I don't think that's the promise of mesh - it's more the local networks will
share very small amounts of data relative to say a current peer1 but large
compared to the usual daily browsing habits.

I guess it would be useful to gauge the size of local vs international traffic
- Facebook does not need to send my data to SF unless I am in contact with
someone in SF. Video uploads and downloads are similar. Most of my daily
traffic almost certainly has a strong correlation to my physical location.

~~~
nine_k
If you need to send a bit of info to your _physical neighbor_ , a mesh network
might be a good solution. If you need to send a kilobyte to your friend half
the world away, a mesh network would need to have a great number of hops.

If it just so happened that you are one of the few users with a mesh-network
connection to a peer across the street, much or all of the traffic between
your street and the next street will pass through you. Since it's a mesh
network, you are expected to have a low-power, low-throughput node, which
might be overwhelmed.

Do not conflate mesh networks (of nodes in _physical_ proximity) with peer-to-
peer networks (of nodes in _logical_ proximity via all of the Internet).

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I'm not - I think :-)

There is no particular reason a mesh network needs to be low power and low
throughout - I think one of the most potent mesh network opportunities is
(slowly?) replacing in home routers with (firmware?) to communicate amongst a
neighbourhood. With that a small and growing group of people will be able to
exchange local data and video and voice.

I perhaps naively think that physical proximity will become a major deciding
point in bandwidth between two nodes (which makes sense) and this will
encourage an explosion of useful local perhaps democratic applications - think
of it as garden fence protocol. Sharing not just pirated films but kids
calling their neighbours to just chat, parents arranging bar eques etc

------
orasis
I'm one of the pioneers of peer-to-peer file delivery from the late 90s. It
turns out that decentralization is a hammer looking for a nail. Almost
everything is simpler and more nimble when you centralize. The future espoused
by this article ain't gonna happen.

~~~
throwawayaway
file sharing? pretty big nail. a decentralised system supports easy access to
files considered to be obscure or "long tail". unless you want to say that
bittorrent is not a decentralised system.

~~~
orasis
Amazon S3 would be a much better choice for files considered obscure. A well
designed decentralized system will have to spend a decent amount of effort to
ensure that the long tail files don't drop off of the network. If you want
fast access speed to those long tail files, now you're going to need even more
redundancy to overcome access bottlenecks.

~~~
throwawayaway
bittorrent allows a more ad hoc approach that gives results, whereas there
doesn't appear to be financial incentives for someone to pay for amazon s3 to
provide the same.

------
haneefmubarak
Personally, if we can find ways to create reliable, low latency mesh networks
capable of transferring decent amounts of data, I would find _that_ exciting.

With unreasonably recurring failures, there is little incentive for mainstream
usage, as current networks are extremely reliable.

With excessive latency, there is little usability, as data may become outdated
before being consumed, thus prohibiting real time applications (ie: one of the
big reasons that we use computers).

With little bandwidth, little data can be sent, thus limiting the overall
usefulness, especially in a day and age where data just keeps getting bigger.

But if you have all three, you can effectively have an internet that is
extremely difficult to censor or alter, that is capable of connecting
multitudes of users, that can handle most uses. And that, my friends, that
will be the day.

~~~
diafygi
Can pCells be used as a mesh?

------
plainOldText

      "Most services today are centralized — sharing photos via social networks"
    

Yes, this service is centralized by virtue of choice. You can very easily
share your photos via email, which is decentralized. Of course, you won't get
all the features of a photo feed, but still, you can do it with no central
authority.

Still, decentralized systems (in the context of the article) are great, but
they present one little challenge: What incentives do people get in order to
host a participating node/agent? In the case of bitcoin, the miners get a
reward ($) each time they solve a new block, but unless all these
decentralized systems leverage an existing blockchain/cryptocurrency system
and have a system of rewards of some sort, they'll have a hard time springing
into existence.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _email, which is decentralized_

Even email is centralised these days. Look how many providers host over 90% of
people's primary email address.

~~~
plainOldText
The email, as a method of exchanging digital messages is not centralized. Now,
it's true that a few providers host most people's email addresses, but there
is not a single authority controlling the flow of the email messages.

If the case of a social network, you can't just switch and still remain
connected with everyone else, because the provider controls the flow of your
interactions. However, you can very easily switch your email provider, or even
host your own, and as long as your friends still have the same emails, you're
still "connected". I wouldn't call email centralized, but I agree is not
decentralized 100 percent.

~~~
loup-vaillant
When you switch providers, you still have to warn your friends about the
change. The only way not to is to own your own domain name (whatever that
means).

More generally, I think there's an incentive problem here: it is just too
_convenient_ to let Big Data host your email. And if you're crazy enough to
have a mail server at home, it is just too convenient for everyone else to
spam-filter you as a netbot (because you're using a residential IP address).

------
swartkrans
> And governments can’t shut them down.

This is not true. Mesh networks are vulnerable to electronic warfare.
Governments can use measures usually reserved for electronic warfare[1] to
disrupt all signals except the ones the government needs. This is a standard
capability of most modern militaries. Even the United States Marines, probably
the least sophisticated among American branches of the military when it comes
to intelligence and technology, have radio battalions that can do this.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_warfare)

------
jmgrosen
So the internet is going back to its roots, armed with some new technology?
That would make me very happy from a privacy point of view, but I'm dubious of
whether it's actually going to happen...

------
sarahj
I would argue that the gap between a centralized authority and a blockchain is
a lot less that the gulf between a blockchain and a mesh network.

Mesh networks are awesome, they have a life of their own and an be split apart
and stitched back together endlessly.

Blockchains, on the other-hand, are big and bulky, require an extraordinary
amount of co-ordination between the maintainers and the miners and the clients
to ensure everyone is running the right software. Many are so big that more
people simply defer to a company to a handle their interactions with the chain
- and as these companies grow they simple forgo the blockchain altogether in
many instances and simply move bits about in their own database.

Also, can anyone offer an insight into the benefits of decentralized voting
and storage? I can already decentralize who I rely on for storage by trusting
different parties different amounts. There seems to be no benefit for everyone
to trust the same blockchain for storage - and plenty of issues (hard forks
etc.)

As for voting, the existence of a vote requires the existence of a group that
wishes to vote (and a co-ordinated campaign.). Many countries have
decentralized counts (e.g. each region votes separately) - and may separate
organizations and individuals can become monitors to ensure the integrity of
the ballot box and count. What then is the advantage of moving the actual vote
to the blockchain?

------
jeffreyrogers
The decentralized storage applications are interesting to me since I've been
working on something similar for a networking project. The problem I see is
data accessibility. What do you do when your data is shared among others
laptops that aren't currently connected to the internet?

Clearly, for any sort of data where reliable access is important this won't be
viable. It seems to me that it is only useful to do distributed storage among
servers, rather than laptop or desktop computers, since servers have high
availability requirements already and aren't likely to be taken off the
network.

Second, you probably need to trust the servers you are storing your data on.
Sure, you have some guise of anonymity, but ultimately you're probably
transporting over TCP/IP and so you can look at the IP sender field to figure
out who's data you're storing. Obviously this is a huge problem if some
malicious person decides they want to corrupt or delete all files stored by
certain entities.

Both of these problems (availability and integrity) seem largely intractable
when dealing with distributed storage unless you make the limitations I
suggested above (trusted computers and only using highly-available servers).
Definitely an interesting thing to work on, but probably not viable for
consumers (though I could see it working at an enterprise level).

~~~
qwtel
> Second, you probably need to trust the servers you are storing your data on.
> Sure, you have some guise of anonymity, but ultimately you're probably
> transporting over TCP/IP and so you can look at the IP sender field to
> figure out who's data you're storing. Obviously this is a huge problem if
> some malicious person decides they want to corrupt or delete all files
> stored by certain entities.

Vitalik Buterin of ethereum worte an excellent blog post addressing all of
these concerns. The conclusion is that you can in theory get 99.7% (99.99%)
availability by using 3x (4x) redundancy from regular home users (defined as
being reachable 50% of the time).

[https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/16/secret-sharing-
erasure-...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/16/secret-sharing-erasure-
coding-guide-aspiring-dropbox-decentralizer/)

~~~
jeffreyrogers
I read the post, thanks, it was very interesting. It didn't address at all the
concerns about a malicious user inspecting the IP sender field, however, but I
suppose one could argue that because availability is high the network can
incur the costs of malicious users as long as they do not get above a certain
percentage of the entire user base.

Now, one problem with his math is this: the assumption is that any node that
goes down will eventually come back up. However, this isn't the case. Say I
get a new laptop and throw my old one out or otherwise wipe its drive. Well
that's no longer part of the distributed network anymore. Of course, you can
add to your file storage protocol by shifting files around as nodes go down,
but that adds a lot of complexity.

Ultimately, the problems that are trying to be solved here are very difficult
and I think a satisfactory solution via distributed computing is unlikely
unless you are willing to make severe trade-offs (such as the ones I
suggested, use trusted servers).

Now, making trade-offs doesn't make it useless. It just means the system isn't
useful in all cases. Realistically, the data you have on your laptop probably
isn't so important that it needs to be replicated across the globe, encrypted,
and stored in such a way that the government can't access it. And if it is?
Well, it's probably much simpler to just encrypt it on your end, send it to
AWS, and get on with whatever you were doing that's so important.

------
lifeisstillgood
Tl;dr - three trends look like they will form a perfect storm - mesh networks,
bitcoin/blockchain and Autonomous agents.

It's true - they do look like they will usher in a new world. It's pretty damn
hard to justify the architecture of sending my wife's photos to SF just so
they can appear on our neighbours Facebook feed.

But the technology feels too immature. I just wish I could tell if I would
have felt the same way about perl cgi scripts in 94 - but I was too young then
to know the difference.

------
fidotron
While preferring decentralization is relatively uncontroversial, the simple
problem is the economic incentives to do it do not exist, and run very far in
the opposite direction.

This isn't as simple as saying Google, Facebook etc. have a vested interest in
promoting a centralized view, but that it's basically impossible to make money
competing against them with a decentralized system.

There's a definite trend towards late 90s techno-utopianism appearing again.

~~~
dreamfactory2
What about utility? Do people or businesses have an increasingly apparent
incentive to own their data and online identity?

------
jordigh
Peer-to-peer wifi is old technology. It's called ad-hoc mode. Why has it never
really taken off until iOS whatever version and Android whatever version?

~~~
p1mrx
Follow the money. Android and iOS are developed by companies for whom
decentralization is largely incompatible with their business models. There's
no incentive to make it work smoothly.

~~~
orbifold
That's probably also the same reason why there isn't any local peer to peer
file sharing software for phones. Sure it would not be quite as amazing as
bittorrent, but at a college campus you probably could still get all the music
and movies you want without any real fear of legal repercussions.

~~~
higherpurpose
You can do that with Bluetooth. And since Android 4.0, you can use NFC to
automatically pair two phones, and then share between them through Bluetooth.
It's called "Android Beam". Samsung modified this technology to work with Wi-
Fi, too, and I think you could already do that before with "Wi-Fi Direct", you
just had to pair them manually.

I haven't looked into 3rd party apps, but I imagine they could use the same
protocols as Firechat for file sharing. But I think on Android it would only
work through Bluetooth anyway. Google needs to mandate all OEMs to use Wi-Fi
Direct otherwise.

~~~
orbifold
Had not known of Firechat, yes ideally I would want an ad-hoc mesh network
network, with peer to peer file sharing, not just one-to-one as Bluetooth
allows. I think there is some support for mesh networking in place for Wi-Fi
but have not looked into it since a long time (ca. 2007).

------
th0ma5
Anyone tracking the time periods of of the ebb and flow of centralized and
decentralized? I guess a lot of things are decentralized and a lot of things
are centralized, but it makes sense that perhaps the current subset of the
general public that is becoming more and more internet aware are now starting
to become aware of the benefits of decentralization.

------
uptown
Can anybody point me to additional sites/books/resources related to writing
about the blockchain and decentralized research? It's a topic I'm very
interested in, and something I'd like to have cross my radar more-often.
Thanks in advance.

------
mslot
Sounds cool an all, but mesh networks are slow and very insecure, the
blockchain doesn't scale and thus cannot remain fully decentralized, and
there's no practical way to run a trusted autonomous agent in an untrusted
environment.

Computer science researchers have been working on and dreaming about these
ideas for decades. It's great that some of them have found real-world
applications, but that doesn't mean a revolution is near. It will be just as
hard as it used to be.

------
Drabiv
Currently, decentralized technologies seem to be quite futuristic, but not
impossible. Benefits like better efficiency and resiliency over centralized
technologies are substantial and clear. Adding onto Sherlock quote – [If you
have something more efficient and] "When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" [and must happen].
The question remains – when this will happen?

------
090178
[http://www.peer5.com](http://www.peer5.com) is right on this trend.

Could bring a lot of value around file sharing, streaming and such. Plug-in-
less.

The demo page get to pitch in a couple of seconds.

[https://peer5.com/downloader/](https://peer5.com/downloader/)

Have a look at it.

------
cordite
I was hoping for a discussion of things in the same nature of Diaspora (which
is a somewhat decentralized social network which has faded in hype by now) or
Aether, but I was rather turned off by just talking about the blockchain
technology again.

------
melling
Hey, that's Gary, from Gary's Guide.

[http://garysguide.com/events](http://garysguide.com/events)

He's sticking with his "Guy with the Red Tie" branding.

------
jeffreyrogers
> And just last week, a couple at Disney World had the first block chain
> marriage, recorded forever within the block chain!

So how does a blockchain divorce work? :)

