I think it is dumb to call something that runs on top of and requires the traditional internet an alternative to it.

I guess it could be an alternative to the web and DNS and such.

I think that like anything, it's exploitable. Just see the example of bitcoin where a mining pool had over 50% of the computing power. If the internet was driven by a block chain, with enough money and time, you could "control it".

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-ditch-ghash-io-pool-5...

Owning 50% of the mining infrastructure is not an exploit. The system is designed with that in mind - anyone in control of that much hash power has no incentive to use it, because the value of the currency would instantly evaporate. They in fact have strong incentives to avoid putting themselves in that position - because it devalues the currency (which they have invested so heavily in), and makes them a target for attack. And that is exactly what we saw when ghash hit 50 percent.

Anyway, it's a false choice. I'll take the hyper-public well described risk of a 50% 'attack' over the risks of counterfeit paper currency manipulated in secret by unelected officials any day. Similarly, it'd take much more time and money to control a blockchain based internet than the one we have now, and if it were exploited in that way, it'd be substantially more likely to be known by everyone, which in itself is a deterrent to exploiting it in the first place.

All that being said, there are probably reasons that other architectures on which to build an overlay network are better than this - but 'exploitability' is not one of them.

I don't think you can dress up the 50% thing as a deliberate design point. It may be a self-mitigating weakness, but still...

>It may be a self-mitigating weakness, but still...

I think this is a strange way of looking at things. What non-trivial protocol doesn't have known design limitations?

Moreover, what could you possibly hope for in addition to a self-mitigating limitation, i.e: a theoretical limit that doesn't matter in practice?

>> I think this is a strange way of looking at things. What non-trivial protocol doesn't have known design limitations?

It's still a weakness, not a feature, and when a blockchain is not a monetary thing the pressures and incentives to run infrastructure will be different, it's hard to say that a 50% attack won't be possible or desirable in that circumstance.

>> Moreover, what could you possibly hope for in addition to a self-mitigating limitation, i.e: a theoretical limit that doesn't matter in practice?

It's not theoretical though, pools have got there with BTC. There are incentives not to obviously mess with the currency at that point but perhaps subtle ways to operate to your own benefit could happen at that point.

It's a huge design flaw though. The original intention of the blockchain in Bitcoin was to make it so it was decentralized...except the increase in computational difficulty, the winner-takes-all payouts, and the electrical cost, of course means that eventually the only people running the blockchain are large centralized organizations.

At which point one can wonder, why bother being distributed when we're still ultimately invoking trust in several groups? Couldn't we do this a lot more simply and efficiently by just having everyone delegate a private key signing operation to these groups so that it's just based on maintaining consensus, rather then burning CPU time on computationally hard problems?

Wouldn't people notice it though ? I mean if you hold 50% percent of that computing power, wouldn't someone detect that a large portion of the network traffic revolves around one place ?

Also people would notice that the internet would be "off".

The blockchain's distributed consensus algorithm manages the network tokens (e.g. Bitcoins) very well. These tokens and their corresponding transaction data are small in size. Storing large web documents in the blockchain will blow up its size and consume significant network resources. If you wanted to mitigate those effects, you could restrict publishing based the tokens you spend - e.g. you can store 4kb per "coin" - but such a system would have nowhere near the capacity to publish at the rate of the internet today.

Bitcoin manages 7 transactions per second globally. The internet is...somewhat faster then that.

- Non-IP Based. I think that Dotcom refers to the fact that the "webpages" or whatever they're going to serve are not hosted on a specific IP but are instead distributed in the blockchain; and he talks about IP because either a) he doesn't know what he's talking about or b) he's oversimplifying a lot. In any case, the MegaNet would run over IP because no ISP is going to let non-IP protocols go through their networks.

- Using mobile phones. Even when on WiFi, that's going to eat batteries for breakfast: users aren't going to like that. And another issue: MegaNet traffic would still go through traditional ISPs, so they would probably be able to filter it.

Another point is that Android, iOS and Windows Phone have closed, controlled stores. That's going to make it difficult for them to implement.

- Using the blockchain. I don't know why would they use the blockchain, which is a method to ensure integrity over time (e.g., you don't spend two times the same bitcoin). What would would make sense to use P2P webpages, like BitTorrent's Maelstrom does [1]. Maybe they use the blockchain so they can keep a correct history of a certain webpage, who knows. Another option is that they are thinking of using the authentication part of the blockchain, but one could do that with Maelstrom using PGP signed pages, for example.

In any case, they'd face significant issues. For example, they would be introducing useless delays when creating/updates webpages (blockchain relies on proofs of work to avoid malicious nodes to insert duplicate/forged transactions). But if they make the verification process fast, they would be more vulnerable to malicious nodes.

Another problem would be how to store the information they want to transmit. The blockchain works because the information in each transaction is just a few bytes long. However, a webpage is way bigger than that. How do they store not only the current versions of the webpages, but the old ones too? I don't think the combined storage of mobile phones is enough to hold all that information. Maybe they could use deltas, but that's only going to make browsing slower (instead of one block, you'd need to retrieve several to reconstruct the page) and they would not avoid completely the problem: what if the difference between versions is too big? E.g., encrypted pages: deltas would be useless then.

- "New layer of encryption that will run through all digital communications". Well good luck with that.

- "We are going to use very long keys, systems that will not be reverse engineered or cracked by any supercomputer". Long keys imply long encrypt times too. With phones, and probably with several communications with several different nodes. That's going to be interesting.

- "If you have 100 million smartphones that have the MegaNet app installed, we'll have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined". Distributed computing doesn't work like that. You don't just "add up things". Yeah, you may have terabits per second of bandwidth combined, but using single nodes that maybe can get up to 1Mbps. You have a lot of processing power but have to distribute any computation through a lot of nodes because no one has enough single computing power to do complex tasks fast. And you have 100 million smartphones distributed through the world: good luck with the latency and reliability of the connections.

In any case, I think this is either going to be a Maelstrom clone or a complete bluff.

[1] http://project-maelstrom.bittorrent.com/

Edit: added a few points.

Great insights and thanks for the link. Extremely interesting and hot topic. What do you think of Project Maelstrom's chances of succeeding in what they're trying to accomplish?

I think they're going to make an interesting tool (I tried it a few months ago and it worked fairly well), but it's impossible to make it widespread, same as Tor isn't going to be widespread. The restrictions imposed by their goals are going to make those networks less attractive than the current, regular internet. And, let's face it, few people really need to use Tor or Maelstrom.

Maelstrom is going to fail because it's closed source.

The question is almost too broad to respond to. 'a blockchain-driven internet' . . . there are so many things that could mean.

My expectation is that we will see blockchains taking up role somewhere between servers and databases.

I recommend Janet Abbate's "Inventing the Internet". You will feel like a prophet after reading it.

I think you could call it an Internet of blockchains rather than 'a blockchain-driven internet'. But the blockchain really is a Pandora's box . . .

Ad hominems? He's a convicted fraudster and embezzler.

An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attack on an argument made by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, rather than attacking the argument directly.

I think the point is that ad hominem attacks are actually relevant in this case. The idea might (or might not) be good, but the fact that Kim Dotcom is involved is fishy.

Sure, I wasn't saying that ad hominems are irrelevant here. I said, "aside from ad hominems," because I'm actually curious what technical/social issues are interesting and/or challenging about the idea. In other words, I'm not saying anything about whether the ad hominems already in the replies were good or bad, I simply want to have a separate, parallel discussion about the actual proposal.

An ad hominem call is often a logical fallacy, as in many cases the person can be a very key point in the argument.

If some one is running for president for example then his personal views and life experience can and should be brought into question regardless of what his says in his speeches.

This case isn't different, he isn't talking about global warming he is talking about founding and funding a new company so his past, and current troubles are very much material to the debate and cannot and should not be thrown aside because it might appear to to be an ad hominem.