"Dependence of our society on digital infrastructures is growing daily, confronting us with an urgent task of building ethical and democratic alternatives to monopolistic big-tech platforms. We call upon the scientific community to put our talents to this challenge by creating decentralised infrastructures for trust-based economic and social cooperation. We empirically demonstrate that a public infrastructure to establish trust between peers in decentralized networks is possible at significant scale. Our work is based on over 15 years of improving our distributed systems which were used by more than a million people. We present six stringent criteria for designing trustworthy infrastructure, called zero-server architecture. Adhering to these principles, we designed a novel trustworthy networking infrastructure, called P2P-Apps. It enables smartphone apps to communicate without any servers, by forming a scalable overlay that uses our generic mechanism to build trust between peers, Trustchain. P2P-Apps are generic and can be expanded to serve as an alternative to centralized infrastructure owned by Big Tech."
At face value, this sounds ridiculous. When I buy any device, what I am looking for is "available over LAN" and "HTTP API documented". It's either entirely documented and lovely, like Hue and LIFX. Or difficult and third-party like Nanoleaf. Or it's ridiculously impossible with deliberate Chinese cryptographic blockage and "Identity verification" at every turn, like Tuya. I'm happy to add a plugin or reverse-engineer an API if I need to. The latter I scorn at every turn. And my plugins are used by thousands of people every day, so hopefully the tide will turn.
... but am starting to think I'd rather we "overshoot" into the "utopian" angle / approach, in order to have -some- semblance of a concerted, mindful, organized, accountable effort and discourse about these issues / techs ...
... lest we are left with ad-driven, self-serving, data-absorbing monopolies setting the agenda and the de facto facts on the ground by default.-
It is funny that, some of the people involved here also have to do with a "cryto-Euro" system they are testing out ...
... and, within that, even though they admit to using the -term- "blockchain" to gain some traction, they explicitly disavow it tech-wise, using some sort of ledger, and digital signatures for consensus.-
