Bitcoin Forum

It may be useful to remind ourselves that Bitcoin is one part of the decentralized revolution.  The parts currently (or will soon) include:

• Cryptography – private communication
• Bitcoin - decentralized monetary system
• OpenBazaar - decentralized marketplace (a blending of the best features of eBay and Torrents)
• Torrents - decentralized document distribution
• Distributed websites - decentralized publishing. Distributed websites are not stored on a single server.  The parts (including images and even different words of each sentence) are hashed and reside on multiple servers worldwide.  Publish anything, without actually writing it.
• 3D Printers and CNC – decentralized production

The old model of buying pizza with Bitcoin is still possible, but the real utility of Bitcoin will soon become apparent.  There will be many new users, and a higher price.

I would add decentralised network infrastructure to that list of components. Inherently robust private & anonymous communication using a networking protocol designed that way should be a starting point (indeed, genuine alternatives to TCP/IP have existed for a while, but a truly ascendant standard is yet to emerge), but I believe that physical infrastructure under each user's full control will eventually be required to secure surveillance circumvention for the medium/long-term. Mesh networks operate now small-scale, but still largely depending on the corporate internet for content (as I understood the progress up to now), and still as islands rather than one larger self-sufficient alternative internet. That would need to change for a mesh-net to compete effectively with the corporate-owned internet.

A popular movement may well depend on 3D manufacturing to produce equipment that corporate manufacturers would never do commercially, but that's likely to simply happen given time: enough motivated experimenters will develop successful designs to fill the gaps (indeed, many already work in networking R&D may be tempted by the genuine liberty that decentralised network infrastructure offers).


Another essential aspect of decentralised living (to me) would be energy production. This is a fairly ancient principle compared to the others, but arguably just as important a cornerstone (and the technology behind it now is largely brand new of course).


Would love to hear any more examples. I would like to remove government/corporate services from my lifestyle altogether, but it's possible I'm being to narrowly focused. What else in life could benefit from a peer-to-peer overhaul?

Absolutely.

I want to see ICANN replaced.

Something akin to Namecoin could be used for domain names but I don't think Namecoin itself is it.

Within a decentralized DNS system I think there should be multiple TLDs with some TLDs behaving like .bit - where anyone can get a domain name, while there should be some TLDs that can be purchased for a large amount of the currency and require a signature from the owner of the TLD to register a domain name within it.

The one issue that exists is theft of private key would mean theft of the entire TLD and not just a domain.

The way that would work, .com and .gov etc. could still run their TLD the way they currently do and not need each domain on it in the blockchain.

I would really like to see DNS decentralized.

Viva the Revolution of decentralization! Government surveillance has become so part of our daily lives that we seem to start to accept it as being normal. They know your movement and they know what you do with your money and they know what you do on the internet and on your mobile phone. In the end, they will have a database of your whole life when you pass away. Some people seem to think it is insignificant and of no real importance, until they put all these things together and see how intrusive this is.

The scare tactic to justify all of this = Terrorism! Booooo 

I don't see how you could have a decentralised domain name system. The only way I can see it work is if you had a blockchain that recorded a domain name, and rejected any subsequent entries for the same name. So the first person to log it got to use it exclusively. Resolution would be horrific if you had to scan the blockchain for names and the corresponding latest address. What would be the format of that address?

you can add bitshares, a decentralized exchange, still did not heard anything about a decentralized forum

Not what I meant by infrastructure (I was referring to the classes of networking equipment available), but I can totally subscribe to your view of the TLD and DNS we have now; large DNS providers are a weak point and ICANN is overtly political.

As with mesh networks, alternative domain systems exist today, but do not currently have the momentum (or the incentive that drives it) to provide a widely acknowledged alternative. But it will only take just a little more movement in the present direction of the governance of the corporate internet to ramp up that incentive: I intend to go to all the hassle of configuring my system to use an alternative TLD/DNS system, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I have other things to handle first. But it's coming.

I'm 100% onboard with the concepts here, so I'm really sorry to be a curmudgeon, but:

The Internet is a centralized system, mostly controlled by corporations and governments. They control the spokes and hubs, therefore they control the network. Cryptocurrencies and distributed systems are benefitting (likely temporarily) from a combination of the following factors:

* crossing many jurisdictions with varying degrees of regulation and oversight
* technical lags in law enforcement and regulation, and massive traffic volume
* dependency on Internet for consumer-level commerce and communication (makes takedowns difficult)
* complexity of tracking users and sophistication of obfuscation techniques

If you believe that a world government is coming, many of these factors will change... personally I believe the MOTU have every reason to continue spying on the world in any way they can, and that spying is integral to their entire game of mass control. Almost as if they have no choice now...

On the optimistic side, torrent still "works", and it appears that in the "arms race" between "content licensers" and "pirates", "pirates" have won decisively. This is the best historical case for P2P winning. I can only guess how many lawyers, executives, and law enforcement people are still FURIOUS about this... perhaps we will add bankers to this list when cryptos really gain ground...

Wow, litecoin has finally been dethrone. It was second place for so long? Another altcoin fading away, making room for another hundred or so. Bitcoin is still king.

Hm... Guess you need  a second Revolution to really  decentralize the mining...

Perhaps decentralization it is not on the hands of Bitcoin only. If all altcoins get a good share of popularity, with effective exchanging between them, that would be decentralization. No mining centralization either, as there will be a lot of coins.

That is rather diversification, but does not really give us the wanted security that we get from proper decentralization.

That would be devolution. Because once upon a time, mining was decentralized.
As was pretty much everything else. There even was a time without governments or nation-states. But then man learned to use clubs and crude stone tools, and ...here we are :(

Nearly, if you d put down the market cap as well. Keeping that growing there needs to be a second evolution having better genes and better decentralization forces to ensure the trust given by capital.

Actually the term evolution does not preclude into adapting to gain a former trait that has been lost.

And bitcoin very well may do that.

Sure. Nor does devolution preclude gaining a former trait that has been lost.
The thing about evolutionary development tho, is it implies growing specialization and complexity. Give you an example, show you what I mean: Fish didn't evolve into bacteria, bacteria didn't evolve into molds, which, in turn, didn't evolve into elemental hydrogen.
*I know nothing about biology/evolution, so just guessing. But you see the pattern I'm driving at. The conditions which caused mining centralization haven't changed, so my guess is it won't change either.

Bitrcoin was the first one to start the DAC revolution. It also made the attention turn into the need for decentralization in several sectors of our society.
Cheers to bitcoin who marked a new technological revolution.

The Decentralized Revolution is exciting.  Great list and a great reminder of all of these components.  Not sure if it fits but I would add anything to do with Crowdsourcing.  Crowd lending gets rid of banks for example. 

Working great thus far :)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=65.0

No it doesn't. It simply implies adapting to different conditions.

Complexity often decreases in evolution, e.g. lizards evolving into snakes.

Sure. Snakes lost their legs, we lost our tails (which were rather articulate, to boot), mole rats lost their sight, etc. I said "implies." "Regression" and "devolution" are much more descriptive. And, of course, you deftly edited out the gist:

Actually it very well could change after the halving. Time will tell.

My suspicion is the less profitable mining is, the more decentralized it will become.

Bitcoin grew too rapidly in value for it to stay decentralized, but mining farms don't make a lot of sense when the payout is small.

Bitcoin can be considered the leader of decentralized revolution. Only because of its decentralized nature bitcoin has got such a great acceptance though it can only be used in the digital form. In future if everything gets the digital form with decentralized nature lot change can be felt in the world.

Sure, anything can happen.
Chinese electrical rates could go up around x10, so folks in Belgium can start mining.
It might become substantially cheaper to buy a single miner, instead of a warehouse full of them.
Bitcoin could get banned in China; factory mines become impractical due to Vesuvius-like IR signature (shoot a heatseeker,  randomly, up into Chinese sky, odds of it locking onto a Bitcoin mine: 100%).

And, of course, Mom'll never have the heart to mention electrical bill to her 30-yr-old Bitcoin enthusiast :-\

I really agree that it's the essence of decentralization... even if some dickhead says "it concentrate in a pole" I don't give a fuc* abou that... to me, at least where I live things are very hard and btc has come to arrive and to blow everything -- government, banks, etc. It's just a matter of "how" it will be used. Hey guys, let's use it for everything, please, please :D

How about two of the largest purveyors of government propaganda in the world decentralized news networks and education.

Evolution can go into any direction, also sometimes 'back' (example: whales) . It's all about best, quickest & superior adjustments to the Environment.

So if bitcoin want to be top & alive -> flexibilty / evolution is a MUST (decentralization & scalability are most critical points IMO).

Again, yes, technically it could, but since conditions which favored centralization remain unchanged, see