Interesting article, something I have given thought several times as well. I agree a fully decentralized approach is a more fundamental and a harder problem than is often assumed and one that is still actively researched in academia.

A few interesting efforts that I rarely see mentioned in this context may add to your opinion on the matter:

- the creator of Kademlia, Petar Maymounkov, has been working on a successor on and off for years, his site offers some context and in 1 of his own comments there are a couple of pointers to his currents efforts in this area, you'll find it from here if you're interested, updates are a bit scattered throughout different media and time :)

- another field that is not that fundamentally different in what it wants to achieve is 'content centric networking' which is advocated by PARC and is backed by some of the oldschool networking guys/researchers. A wikipedia page is here but i don't really like it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

A presentation by Van Jacobsen of PARC on the subject can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zOLrQJ5kbU

the talk seems intended for a low tech audience at first and i can imagine staying concentrated is hard here but imo the talk does deliver.

The problems these two encounter and are trying to solve are of a different nature than what I see in most projects - which i think often get entangled in nonfundamental problems and eventually ending up in a unrecoverable mess because these fundamental issues were never addressed, because it's hard and may be impossible currently... In my opinion cooperation/adaptation in lower osi layers will be needed to achieve the efficiency, security and decentralization you mention, single purpose application may be easier to get away with. Whether this will ever be able to happen or not is maybe more a geopolitical discussion than a technical one, complicated stuff, we'll see :)

user:	retsevrah
created:	August 2, 2014
karma:	5