At the time, P2P architecture offered 2 primary advantages:

1. Since the infrastructure of a P2P system was provided by its users, it would be self-hosting and self-scaling.

2. Having no central point of control, P2P systems are difficult for law enforcement to censor or shut down.

Unfortunately, it turned out that P2P had one big downside, which was complexity of implementation. In theory everything would smoothly scale to millions of users, but it required some serious expertise and investment to achieve that in practice. As hosting prices dropped and AdWords was launched, the conventional client-server website approach reasserted itself as the most sensible way to build networked applications. Thus, P2P's only remaining reason to exist was for the evasion of the authorities. And even this had its caveats- law enforcement may not be able to shut down a decentralized system, but it certainly can shut down the company(s) that pay for the system's ongoing development and maintenance.

While decentralized technologies still have a lot going against them, I think the thing that has changed this time around is the presence of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies offer the possibility to fund the development of decentralized software using micropayments, but considering the amount of work required to design the architecture of such software before even being able to think about usability concerns, I am skeptical as to whether micropayments or even ICOs will result in the investment necessary to make decentralized systems appealing to the general public.

Just spelled out the specific conditions where crypto currencies are relevant as opposed to any of the other existing crowd funding platforms.

Famous last words.

Seriously though, this is the kind of thing people said about PCs, Microsoft, Linux, the iPhone, etc. (And today, about machine learning, blockchains, and VR.)

It's nearly impossible to tell what will disrupt the world, but typically it's the kinds of things that bring back the balance of power. All of these things are enablers, and allow your 3-person startup to innovate in spaces with huge powerful competitors.

Of course, VCs make their money by occasionally finding the one that breaks the mold. Picking winners is hard.

But that's beside the point. You can't make the argument that "most will fail" and conclude that "this category of tech will never bring success to any company". Fallacious nonsense if I ever heard it.

Microsoft's PC has disrupted IBM and created a new "monopoly". Same with the web and mobile platforms, which are now dominated by a handful of oligopolists that appear stronger than everything seen before.

I think incumbants can always be disrupted, but can they be replaced with something structurally less prone to centralised control or are we just headed for the next cycle of disruption and re-centralisation of power?

* Given they fail to recognize a technological tipping point

Microsoft won on the PC. Linux won (in the server world) on standards and open source. Google won on tracking and advertising. Facebook won on mobile.

In the past, people also said that the losers would fail.

There are many more losers than winners, that doesn't really mean anything.

Airing skepticism of a technology does little more than fuel forum fights after all.

Beaker is interesting because it's enabling things that aren't possible on the HTTP web, and (again) focusing on making it stupid easy for non-tech people do things. Meanwhile, the major browser vendors' idea of forward motion amounts to working on things that web developers can use to impress other web developers and maintaining existing barriers to entry.

The post by Beaker's creator, linked in this article, is also worth a look: https://pfrazee.github.io/blog/secure-ledgers-dont-require-p....

> Keybase's approach to server security: (1) each user has his or her own signature chain that grows monotonically with each announcement; (2) the server maintains a global Merkle Tree that covers all signature chains; and (3) the server signs and publishes the root of the Merkle Tree with every new user signature. This configuration strongly discourages the server from lying by omission, since clients have the tools to catch the server in the act.

Source: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...

"Big co's" most ALWAYS fall because of another innovative startup/technology because of innovator's dilemma.

That said, most of these technologies IMO won't succeed NOT because they're niche (You HAVE to be niche in order to succeed, that's how all innovative technologies succeed. On the other hand, all new startups that try to play the same game as the bigcos in the large field ALWAYS fail) but because they got the priority wrong.

Most of these pursue decentralization for the sake of decentralization, as in a philosophical sense. But most people don't care about some esoteric philosophy. If they did, Facebook wouldn't be this dominant.

What they should be doing instead is coming up with a clear use case that fills an actual need (not some philosophical appetite). A few of these technologies may have this trait so I tend to think in more optimistic way.

I agree. We need to come up with at one strong need that average net users have that is being poorly served by the present centralized system.

I think we are not there yet because the techies are still developing systems that work and are easy to use. Once we have that, then people who are more marketing-oriented will figure out what needs to appeal to and what particular technology would do it best.

Although for places with crappy centralized internet, mesh networks are cool.

It’s not a case of if, it’s when. These various technologies will eventually find there way into the mainstream for the exact same reason that the Internet did, because ultimately it has a democratising effect that the vast majority crave, even if they don’t think it’s possible yet.

I love that there are strong proponents of this tech,though. It's nice to have alternatives in case centralized authorities go off the deep end.

The only major one I can think of is BitTorrent. Bitcoin and Tor are still niche.

It's too bad there aren't more. It seems very difficult for anything as fundamental and important as HTTP or SMTP to gain traction when there's no incentive for large companies to adopt an open protocol. Are we stuck with walled gardens like iMessage/WhatsApp/Slack/Twitter/Facebook from now on?

Huh?