The big gorilla in the room is, how will servicenodes handle illicit / illegal material?
Suppose we have a decentralized app running on 2000 servicenodes that serves as a video-sharing alternative to youtube,
what if one of the users (or servicenode owner) decides to share some childporn?
If the service is truly decentralized then this illegal material will spread over most (or all) of the servicenodes probably without the servicenode owners even knowing that they have (fragmented or complete) childporn on their server.
So how does the community (users and/or servicenode owners) make it so that this illicit video is deleted as fast as possible network-wide, or can't even be uploaded in the first place?
A few options:
a) simple flagging mechanism (if enough users flag the publicly findable material it will be erased automatically by the system)
b) let the poor servicenode owner police every single upload and decide everytime if the material is acceptable or not.
c) create some form of sophisticated porn recognition algorithms that are able to recognize both nudity/sex and the age of participants
Hm, let's look at those options a little closer:
a) can obviously be abused, because how do we even know if a single user is really a single human being, and not just a bunch of bots.
Also, since the material is available for some period of time this will unleash the expected shit storm coming from governments etc...
b) would be hell on earth for servicenode owners and nobody would want to run such a dangerous filesharing app anyway
c) seems like the only viable solution, but is also outside of the technological possibilities of today... or is it?
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Another similar problem is ofcourse copyrighted material. And it would require a similar solution.