Decentralization for the web
I am an author of a distributed database (<a href="http://gunDB.io/" rel="nofollow">http://gunDB.io/</a>) and I thought this article was fairly good, but with one grievance. Hashes aren't the ultimate solution.<p>Certainly hashes will make things a lot better, but a lot of people I know (including some of the people referenced in the article) are heralding them as the second coming of the web.<p>I disagree because they present more problems, ones that are harder for humans and easier for machines. First off, in order to find the data you practically speaking have to already have the data. Second, if you don't have the data, then you have to know the hash, but how do you know the hash without having had the data OR trusting some authority for the hash? Now you are back to centralization.<p>Third, and most important from my perspective, a hash often times will point to outdated content because by the time you find it it might have changed (this of course is a good thing but can be problematic). I know they addressed this a little bit in the article but it is worth reiterating. The point is that it is hard to do synchronization on hashes and I would argue that sync is the more important problem and that is what I am trying to address in my open source database.