How decentralisation once brought you your favourite Britney Spears album
And how it can prevent world domination today.
The relatively recent uprising of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have propelled the discussion of decentralised technologies into the mainstream.
Working at a company that is building a decentralised communications platform has often attracted questions from my friends and family like:
‘What’s decentralisation?’
‘What are the benefits?’
‘Why should I care?’
I’ve become pretty good at answering these questions.
‘Oh, it’s liberation from the overarching corporations and governments, blah, blah, blah…’
‘We get data transparency, blah, blah, blah…’
‘It’s cool, blah, blah, blah…’
I’m always happy to answer such questions (even if it gets a bit repetitive), even if it seems as though the general public view decentralisation as some trendy, shiny new toy. When in reality, decentralised tech has seen widespread use since the early 2000s.
I mean, are you really going to tell me you bought ALL of your music back in the day? 😉
That’s right…
In 1999, Napster popularised the application of peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing. Songs weren’t downloaded from a server, but were instead stored on each user’s computer. Users would exchange music files with each other on a direct peer-to-peer basis, only relying on a central indexing server to connect those peers together.
This was an industry-shaking innovation and faced enormous legal opposition from monolithic music companies. As the technology was only semi-decentralised, the original Napster was able to be shutdown in 2001.
However p2p protocols continued to develop and improve over time. Napster’s original issues with scalability, efficiency and having a single point of failure were addressed. Two massively popular p2p file sharing systems that improved on Napster were then the Gnutella network and the BitTorrent protocol.
In 2007, the Gnutella Network was the most popular file sharing system network, with an estimated 40% market share. If you’ve ever used LimeWire, then you were also a participant in the Gnutella Network.
Gnutella was superior to Napster in the sense that it had no reliance on a central server. Instead of asking a central server for a peer that holds a particular file, your Gnutella software client would instead query other connected peers in the network to check if they have your favourite Britney Spears album.
If they did, then you’re one step closer to hearing Oops I Did It Again through your Sony Walkman (#throwback). If they didn’t, your request would be forwarded to other peers in the network until you were eventually connected to a peer who did.
This system prevented a need for centralisation, though was impractical in terms of bandwidth cost, and the constant connecting and disconnecting of peers could make this system unreliable. Not to mention, the speed of retrieving a file was severely bottle-necked by painfully slow upload speeds of regular computers.
BitTorrent made significant leaps in download speed by allowing a BitTorrent client to download a file from multiple peers at once. A file could be broken down into many little pieces, and separate pieces of the file could be downloaded from multiple peers at the same time. The file could then be reassembled all of the pieces were retrieved.
In the BitTorrent system, users who downloaded files are known as “leechers”, and users who serve files, are called “seeders”. Inspecting a .torrent file would reveal that a torrent file does not actually hold the file data, but only metadata about the file. The two important properties are:
1. Trackers. These are websites/servers that help peers find and connect to other peers who have the files they want. The highly infamous ThePirateBay is a well known example.
2. Pieces. Not the actual pieces of the file, but the cryptographic hash of each piece. Cryptographic hashing is a method that allows strong guarantees for data integrity. It allows a BitTorrent client to easily determine if data has been tampered with. It not only was important for data integrity in the BitTorrent protocol, but is crucial to how blockchain’s work today, as well as other decentralised technologies like IPFS.
It’s important to note that as trackers are public server, they are highly vulnerable to being taken down by governments or ISP’s.
However, BitTorrent eventually integrated a piece of technology known as a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). This can be thought of as a decentralised phonebook, though instead of mapping a person’s name to a phone number, it would map a computer’s IP address to a file it can serve.
Participating in the network improved the DHT over time, and the technology used clever algorithms to efficiently find other peers in the network. The DHT removed the reliance on any centralised server, as each peer could act as an efficient, lightweight tracker.
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So, it’s clear that decentralisation has been benefiting people for several years now.
However it’s notably unfortunate that perhaps its most famous usage has been for the illegal distribution of copyrighted data, i.e, pirating.
On a side note, pirating is quite a controversial discussion, but it’s clear that there are ethical concerns with being able to circumvent the need to compensate people for their work.
However, the benefits of decentralisation need to be viewed at a much broader picture.
Picture a scenario where it’s not music corporations trying to prevent you from getting a bootleg copy of Britney Spear’s Blackout album (her magnum opus btw), but instead a totalitarian government trying to prohibit free speech…
I imagine it would be much more difficult for any 1984 shenanigans to occur if everyone had access to a encrypted communications system, resistant to any singular points of failure.
This is where I think applications like Sylo come in. Sylo has been built on top of decades of prior thinking and bringing in its own improvements, in order to benefit society.
Some examples of these developments include:
1. Improved Privacy. The BitTorrent protocol was initially shipped without any encryption of data transmission. The content that you were downloading is essentially public knowledge.
Only a significant time later did BitTorrent clients offer encryption, though this would prevent you from being compatible with older clients, essentially kicking you out of the network.
Sylo uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging by default. Because at Sylo, we believe that data privacy is a critical human right.
2. Token Incentivisation. Previous p2p protocols worked on a tit-for-tat basis, or even completely altruistically. Not to say that these methods aren’t viable (BitTorrent has millions of daily users) — adding another layer of incentivisation can significantly boost the growth of the network.
How we do this at Sylo is by allowing users to be economically rewarded for sharing their resources (e.g. by running a node)
3. Usability. It’s hard to deny that the blockchain itself can be daunting to understand for the average person (technical or not). Actually utilising a blockchain network can be even scarier 😱.
The Sylo application aims to make these processes as painless as possible, naturally improving the growth of decentralised networks.
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Zoom out again however and you’ll see that ultimately, technology is a tool.
Decentralised technologies, just like all the other kinds, can be used for good or evil, selfish or altruistic purposes.
What matters is what you do with the technology in your hands.
We’re offering you the Sylo app. We’ve made our choice.
The question now is, what will you choose to do with it?
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Got a question for John or another member of Team Sylo? Ask on Twitter now :)
Or experience the decentralised future now by downloading Sylo for Apple or Android.