[liberationtech] Twister: P2P Decentralized Microblogging

[carlo von lynX]

On Thu, Jan 09, 2014 at 08:50:34PM +0100, Simon Rothe wrote:
> Here is another one: Twitter based on Bitmessage: https://bitchirp.org/
> 
> > Found this via Slashdot:
> >
> > "twister is the fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform
> > leveraging from the free software implementations of Bitcoin and
> > BitTorrent protocols."
> >
> > http://twister.net.co/
> >
> > Sean

The problem with the *coin platforms is long-term scalability.

First the popularity creates an amount of traffic to be broadcast
to all nodes that home computer users can quickly no longer
participate.. after a while it becomes too expensive also for
VPS and private server contributors.. in the end each of these
platforms will be in the hands of few cloud operators that can
afford to run the show. Another factor is the ever increasing
size of the history data base. In practice, these architectures 
lead to a point which is at best distributed over several political
shoulders, yet surprisingly similar to Facebook's current set-up.

Namecoin has a chance of lasting a bit longer, because transactions
are less frequent. Still Namecoin needs a caching front-end to serve
as a DNS replacement (and DNS itself won't do). At the 30c3 session
on Naming Systems that we had within #youbroketheinternet I kind of
came to the conclusion that GNS would probably be best suited for
distributing Namecoin information while also protecting the privacy
of name look-ups.

Bitcoin has a chance of lasting a bit longer, because there is so
much money involved with it. But once it gets to being operated by
a dozen different institutions in total, it starts looking very
similar to a bank cartel. In the end Bitcoin may become a thing
controlled by a cartel of banks whose only difference to paper money
is that the governments are completely cut out of the picture.

I guess we'll also see these platforms setting up servers closer to
each other topologically year by year, since having a shorter path
the signal has to travel can convince more other nodes to adopt your
transaction.. In the end we'll have a Wall Street for each of these
*coin platforms somewhere.

I presume *coin works better for small to medium sized user groups,
but there's already git for that.

Still, these technical limitations do not mean there won't be further
gold rushes and media attention.