Decentralizing the Internet's Root
Let me think out loud for a second.<p>Naming is solved by petname systems - just using a local address book that decides what name (if any) will be shown for what public key - it costs nothing, it doesnt need a blockchain. Unlike all other solutions, it actually _is_ secure. The only reason you&#x27;d ever arrive at something that is not petnames, after learning of the existence of cryptography, is because you are overengineering and falling for boogeyman SSL CAs want you to believe in. Commerce is not good or healthy in P2P networks, it is a last resort. Any time you hear about an economic model, incentivizations, etc, you can be 99.99% sure the company has designed it this way with money as their first interest, before utility. And not only that, but money will be practically their only interest. Thousands of P2P products and secure messaging have been astroturfed by people (corporations, and startups, which have no practical difference) &quot;solving&quot; Snowden&#x27;s problem since the NSA revelations.<p>Nobody actually uses blockchains. They go on whateverscan.io and lookup their transaction there to confirm they were paid.<p>If you visit a bank and sign up, they should be giving you a public key, not a domain name. Not a name in namecoin or whatever this article is talking about that you need to download a blockchain for and have a computer fast enough to keep up with on 24&#x2F;7. Also, you give them your public key. You shouldn&#x27;t be giving them a TWITTER (seriously wtf, this is like using Steam for chatting with your girlfriend), no not your facebook either, not even your Google. I should give them a fresh public key I can use to authenticate myself.<p>Any blockchain aside from a small few (like Bitcoin, early Bitcoin at least) are essentially a series of logos and nothing more. They have not contributed one thing to actual decentralization. A good giveaway would be that not a single one has a proper CLI aside from Bitcoin. Not even Ethereum does. They all want you to use a bloated, intrinsically insecure web browser for everything, which cannot even work on more than two pages without billions of man hours. Naming is NOT solved by blockchains - it is not known whether blockchains will ever be trustless. Aside from the trend towards centralization from pools, at some point the data moves too fast for an individual to run a validating node.<p>IPFS seem to friends with Cloudflare. I don&#x27;t what their relationship is (the former do truly seem to care about making something good, but are just naive on top of ignoring existing solutions), but I would not trust anything remotely related to Cloudflare ever. They have broke Tor for LITERALLY 10 years (~2011-2018, and after 2018 you still need to muck around with user agent and other headers) for no reason other than to market a snakeoil WAF (yes WAF, this is the WAF doing this shit. The Tor blocking was never about DDoS) to their users (aside from the possibility of them being NSA&#x27;d). If I was in charge of IPFS, I&#x27;d be writing blog posts explaining to Cloudflare while basic best practices for the internet include not blocking IPs for a decade. You know? You can&#x27;t communicate with Cloudflare and keep a straight face when proclaiming to be making the decentralized web replacement.<p>IPFS sucks. Multihash, multibase, multiaddr, multiwhatever is a TERRIBLE idea.<p>So what&#x27;s the alternative to IPFS? Freenet, another thing that has no use without webshit, as they forgot to implement a document format (which is also needed to implement petnames).<p>I have no idea why one would be enthusiastic about a tech company (not IPFS, the other crap) creating a P2P product, when tech companies in America have not produced a single good piece of software in 20 years.<p>&gt; but bro, you are not thinking about my wallet, everything you say is bad for business<p>No shit. I am speaking as someone who wants to have a pseudonym and exchange information online without dealing with corpocrap and webshit. I don&#x27;t need my services to send someone to my house to make sure it&#x27;s really me. I want actual real decentralized technology. I like exchanging information. I don&#x27;t give a shit about commerece. I like what the internet is actually for: Hosting a hacking blog, talking to people far away, sharing code, sharing cracks for stupid software that wants me to buy 10 copies of the game to have a 2 hour LAN copy, etc (yes, I have made all of these). Without laws and other things that only exist to serve stupid people. I should be able to code an entire conforming implementation myself. This doesn&#x27;t have to be user friendly. There needs to be something that&#x27;s actually good and secure for people who know what they&#x27;re doing.<p>Handshake? WTF is this? It&#x27;s named a verb. That means they have a whole actual marketer (or one of those &quot;hackers&quot; that is really more into fads and brand names than programming).