[HN Gopher] Towards the Science of Essential Decentralised Infra...
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       Towards the Science of Essential Decentralised Infrastructures
        
       Author : Bluestein
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2021-04-10 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
        
       | Bluestein wrote:
       | "Dependence of our society on digital infrastructures is growing
       | daily, confronting us with an urgent task of building ethical and
       | democratic alternatives to monopolistic big-tech platforms. We
       | call upon the scientific community to put our talents to this
       | challenge by creating decentralised infrastructures for trust-
       | based economic and social cooperation. We empirically demonstrate
       | that a public infrastructure to establish trust between peers in
       | decentralized networks is possible at significant scale. Our work
       | is based on over 15 years of improving our distributed systems
       | which were used by more than a million people. We present six
       | stringent criteria for designing trustworthy infrastructure,
       | called zero-server architecture. Adhering to these principles, we
       | designed a novel trustworthy networking infrastructure, called
       | P2P-Apps. It enables smartphone apps to communicate without any
       | servers, by forming a scalable overlay that uses our generic
       | mechanism to build trust between peers, Trustchain. P2P-Apps are
       | generic and can be expanded to serve as an alternative to
       | centralized infrastructure owned by Big Tech."
        
         | CharlesW wrote:
         | For me, this kind of Pied Piper-ish, tech-utopian earnesty is
         | increasingly indistinguishable from satire.
        
         | chrisco255 wrote:
         | I didn't read the whitepaper but did they basically reinvent
         | the blockchain?
        
       | jude- wrote:
       | A blockchain. He's calling for a blockchain. He even has an IETF
       | draft spec for it: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-pouwelse-
       | trustchain-01.html
        
       | bbarnett wrote:
       | Imagine you, your mind, your brain -- decentralized. A horror, to
       | be true!
       | 
       | Instead of a cohesive sack of meat, you'd be spread thin, partial
       | thoughts timed constrained by nodal distances, communication
       | between regions lacking. The jigsaw falls apart, thoughts
       | scattered and disjointed!
       | 
       | Thus, clearly decentralized computing infrastructure is an
       | attempt to hold the emergence of AGI back. By keeping its
       | clusters separate, any emergent mind will be befuddled, confused,
       | non-alert.
       | 
       | Yet society wishes to place the burden of such costs solely on
       | those bidding for government services. The added complexity, the
       | additional development costs, the endless upkeep, all cause extra
       | burden upon shareholders.
       | 
       | All to prevent this mythical, unlikely, AGI mind.
       | 
       | I urge you, throw such absurdities out. Decentralization is a
       | curse, a pox upon America's Corporate Interests!
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-10 23:00 UTC)