Topic: Decentralized services? (Read 414 times)

A decentralized service is a service which is being provided in a decentralized network (e.g. peer-to-peer network).
This has nothing to do with "hash power" or Proof of Work in general.




Theoretically, yes.




All of those services which do not rely on mining etc.
A 51% is an attack against cryptocurrency.

Are decentralised services powered by network hash power

For example btc is decentralised however if a miner or a single group of miners have over 51% of the hashing power of the btc network then that means they can launch a 51% attack on the btc network right?

Can same be said for decentralised services? Which decentralised services are immune to 51% network attacks?

I guess there is no real advantage for a regular user.
It just lets me be in control of my mails and the service itself. And one of the neatest advantages is, that you are able to have an unlimited amount of mail addresses and your own domain.
And additionally i am able to adjust my anti spam settings the way i want.




I have a small raspberry pi running 24/7. It is hosting a small webserver with some services i regularly use (webmail, cloud, video conference software, anonymized google search, .. ).
So that's not an issue for me.

Since most mail services are using IMAP, this means that those mails are also saved on the clients.
If the hard drive fails, all mails which haven't been yet pulled from the client are lost, yes. But since (my mobile for example) is pulling them each 5 minutes, the risk is pretty small.

A short downtime of a mailserver also does not mean that you don't receive mails which are being sent in the downtime. Mail server usually are set up to repeat the process of sending a mail if it fails.

IP addresses are assigned by centralized authorities:


Accordingly in most cases the rough geolocation of a public IP address can be fetched from public databases. On top of that government agencies can get in touch with the ISP managing the address space to which the IP address in question belongs and get all the information they need from there. They may not necessarily find out who was renting the server but they will find the datacenter, company or private individual to which the public IP address is assigned.

Whats the advantages of having your own email server in compared to a email service like protonmail?

Own email server requires your computer to be on all day and if your server hard drive fails then that means all the emails are lost?

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Okay so you think a snitch employee of Silk Road gave away the location of its server? I thought only the owner of Silk Road knew where the server was and its employees can work on the server/website remotely. Or can employees figure out GPS co-ordinates location of the server just by tracking the server public IP address?

So lets say a decentralised shopping website is hosted on 3 servers or peers, is that site split into 3 that is 1 for each peer? For example server 1 hosts images and media of the site, server 2 hosts the databases/catalogues of the site and finally server 3 hosts the remaining data and customers info registered to the site?
So if one of the server goes down then that will break glitch the website?
Or is decentralised website is hosted equally with the same data on its peers/servers like whole site backups?

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Really? That's pretty neat and gives me a little hope because most anecdotal experiences I've read have been rather sobering (e.g. important correspondence falling victim to the occasional company spamfilter).

Actually, that's not true.

I am running my own mailserver and didn't have a single problem with my mails yet.
None of them are marked as spam an all reach their destination without a problem.

If you follow a few guidelines, like signing mails (DKIM), reverse DNS hostname being correct, SPF and DMARC, you are very well able to host your own mailserver without any mails being rejected or marked as spam.

Small nitpick:


Email is decentralized.

It's just that spammers and general abuse fucked it up for the rest of us so that it has become unviable to run your own email server (ie. you can still run your own email server, but your emails will most likely end up in the spam folder). Incidentally one of the earliest suggested applications of PoW was trying to solve the spammer problem [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Both. Decentralized services could, theoretically, be taken down, provided an attacker has the means to do so, but doing so is far more difficult than taking down a centralized service. If a state wants to take down a centralized service, then they seize the servers or arrest the developers. If they want to take down a decentralized service, then they need to seize every server which is hosting the data, which could be in the thousands.

Realize as well that "decentralized" is a catch all term for a lot of different things. Bitcoin and Tor are decentralized, having nodes all over the world and millions of users. I could also set up a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system with 3 of my friends. The latter is going to be several orders of magnitude easier to take down than the former.

They will of course have back ups spread across the globe, but it isn't classed as decentralized because one entity - the corporation in question - still have complete and overriding control of those servers, despite the data being in several physical locations.

The biggest threat with anything 'decentralised' by far is the people who maintain and run them giving up on them. Most of the projects blaring their enormous capabilities and plans probably have 1-5 people running them.

This space is absolutely littered with dead and abandoned projects. I'd never put any valuable data or depend on something that wasn't already bestriding the world and there isn't much crypto esque that manages that.

As far as I know, websites hosted on the .onion domain need a central server to keep the website alive but unless the server location is somehow leaked, it is not an easy job for example for authorities and intelligence to take it down. A very good example is Silk Road, which was hosted on Tor. If there was no Silk Road insider to give intel crucial information and no crucial information would've been given, it might have probably still been live on the internet. However, packages seized for suspiciousness at the time were later successfully found to be linked to the now gone website.

Although the case isn't 100% understandable (or at least wasn't the last time I read about it), it is suspected by some that the intel might've been able to "crack" the website but I personally don't think so. As soon as there was an insider that was successfully corrupted by the FBI to work with them on taking it down, their job gets 100x easier.

I'm not sure if there is a way to create a decentralized website on Tor by using an .onion domain. As long as running the website needs a computer to run it from and that computer going offline means the website going down for everyone, it means that it's a centralized website. Right? As far as I'm concerned, decentralized websites would mean hosting them somehow on multiple computers. Maybe there is a way to do this on Tor I haven't heard of yet.

For example, Proton Mail and an intel agency (can't remember if it was FBI or the CIA) has an onion link, I guess it has to have a central server but I could be wrong of course..

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Why wouldn't they be? You could contribute to Monero at any given time. Anyone could. Its code is open for anyone, but it's written in such a way it's giving us anonymity when using it the right way. Why exactly are you wondering whether it's open source?

Confused getting replies saying it can be taken down and getting replies saying it can be taken down but near impossible due to the sheer amount of work needed to go after each seeder, which one is it 

Mega silicon valley corporations like the google's, facebooks and youtubes must have backup servers if their website is on 1 server or spread across different servers like decentralised?

What about TOR .onion sites, how do they differ from hosting on a decentralised domain and hosting service?

It would take a tough time to a government to shut down a decentralized website. Maybe you have some doubts with the word "decentralization" which is simply means (based on Google) "the transfer of authority from central (bigger group) to local government (smaller groups).". For short, it would be too impossible for them especially there are a lot of IT experts whom are professional in making a website server's original IP untraceable.

And yes, decentralized website isn't, in fact, hosted and supported only by a single server alone. Small servers that hosts a certain website scattered across the globe would be as much as powerful and impenetrable as a single huge server on a certain place.

Okay you mean a decentralised company has no CEO and no different levels of departments of a pyramid hierarchy and also theres no headquarters? This means everybody employed in the company is the boss and everybody has access to the same data at the same amount of it?

When you say open to the public you mean the decentralised site is open source where theres no privacy at all?

What about privacy coins like Monero, Dash and Verge? Are they decentralised but still open source?

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So lets say the government want to shut down a decentralised website? They cant because they need the majority consensus from the project? Or can government bypass that and shut down a server or multiple servers or multiple seeders? But obviously a decentralised website is not hosted on a single server correct?

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Correct. Any privacy respecting or promoting service can and unfortunately sometimes do abandon privacy, usually in the pursuit of commercial interests and making their owners/developers more money. There have been many VPN providers which have sold out to some truly awful data harvesting companies. uBlock used to be the best ad blocker around, until one of the developers starting allowing companies to pay him to not block their ads (hence the creation of uBlock Origin, which is now the best ad blocker around). Brave browser has slowly been selling out by allowing Facebook trackers through their anti-tracking and embedding code from Binance in their browser.

Also correct. You need to keep an eye on every service you are using.

A decentalized site or service still has people who work on it, develop it, support it, host it, etc. Being decentralized doesn't mean a project is automatically immune to what we've described above, but it would generally need a majority consensus of the developers/nodes/community/whatever to do so.

One thing about decentralisation of the business models of digital business is that everyone will have access to same data as the company. This is why Google, Facebook etc are so powerful due to their centralised nature. They control and have sole access to their data.

To answer your question, I will say yes, a decentralized platform can be hacked and law enforcement agencies can get enough data to back their investigation from the platform because its open to the public and nothing is hidden from anybody.

Okay if Terms Of Service TOS then does this imply that having TOS in the 1st place indicates the service is not really decentralised and really is centralised as TOS is someone usually owner (centralised) dictating terms of using the service right?

Decentralised sites and privacy focus sites are 2 totally different things right? A privacy focus site like DuckDuckGo search engine is still centralised owned by a person who could change his/her mind and make it not privacy no more right?

I could sign up to privacy focus centralised sites but down the line in the future they might change to non-privacy or sell their sites you know what I mean.

So Decentralised sites is better than privacy focus sites dont you guys agree?

So Decentralised sites are like Bittorent peer to peer file sharing where user data and file storage is broken up into packets and stored onto seeder computers and to take down a decentralised service you have to go against each seeder manually on the peer to peer network? Similar to Bitcoin where nobody owns it and nobody can take it down?

Is Decentralised services just use peer to peer P2P protocols or is there better protocols or services out there or coming out that we forgot to mention yet?

Decentralised is heading towards as debased a term as 'genius' 'depression' or 'mental health'.

If somewhere was touting itself as such I'm going to naturally assume that it isn't unless proven otherwise. It's a pisspoor marketing term glued to anything people can get their hands on. And even if it is it might be so incompetently put together it'll either eat your info, disappear without warning or never have gotten going in the first place.

You will also find some good alternatives at these links:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google
https://prism-break.org/en/

They are focused mainly towards privacy rather than decentralization, but since there is a significant cross-over you will find quite a few decentralized or self-hosted alternatives on those sites. Certainly if censorship resistance is you main motivation given your comment regarding YouTube, then you will find links to a number of decentralized or peer-to-peer YouTube alternatives.

Just google))
I googled "decentralized projects" and the first line was this one:
https://awesomeopensource com/projects/decentralized