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I don't even care, so everyone get on my data, as long as I can play video games with my friends. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think they're missing a huge opportunity here though... I don't know about your Facebook, but mine is mostly dominated by my extended family, who are right-wing lunatics, and I would love it when there's some kind of political argument to just say "You know what, let's just take this to the first-p... |
**Alex Sexton:** ...to Counter-Strike. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, like "Let's take this to Counter-Striker, settle it there. Let's shoot each other for a while. I think that we'll feel better at the end of it than we will be commenting on this Facebook thread." |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I think that's really where VR helps, because then you're actually killing your uncle... Which is great, that's what you want. |
I wonder if it's partially because video games' social aspects are often such a Hellscape that no one wants to attach their actual identities to their avatars... Or maybe even further - many games ask you to assume the identity of a different avatar, like you become the person, so I wonder if it would kind of take you ... |
Interesting dynamics, but I doubt any of those reasons I just said were the actual reasons they didn't have a Facebook integration. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... And I think it's about time for a break with that. Let's have a little break now, and when we come back we will discuss the decentralized P2P web. |
**Break:** \[00:19:25.18\\\] to \[20:08\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back! Alright, let's get into the decentralized web. P2P web, decentralized web - I think it's best described actually as a movement. It's not like a specific set of technology; there's a bunch of technologies, a bunch of projects, a bunch of people... But a lot of different people are tryi... |
The interesting thing about this movement is that it has big bearded fellows like Max Ogden, and mad scientists like Feross, and Substack, and cyber hobos like Dominic Tarr... But also Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf and all these people that literally built the early web and the internet. So it's a very interesting mix ... |
WebRTC is the P2P protocol in the browser right now, and it's very different from how BitTorrent establishes connections, so there's a lot of work to try and bring different ideas from prior P2P system to it, and also building new P2P systems on top of it. |
**Rachel White:** Is WebRTC what you're using for that one site that you're actually working on where you can talk to people in the browser? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, Roll Call. |
**Rachel White:** Cool, awesome. So web P2P stuff isn't necessarily just -- I guess when I think of P2P I automatically just think of early 2000s' file sharing, or pirating stuff... This is more of a P2P type of sense where it's just data sharing in a lot of different ways? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. But even the file sharing component - that didn't really work on the web before. If you wanted to share a file on the web, you would basically upload it to a place, and then have it be downloaded to people. Now Feross wrote WebTorrent, which really ports all of the BitTorrent concepts ove... |
**Alex Sexton:** Let me interrupt - I used to send transfers via AIM all the time, \[laughter\] and it works fine, unless you had a router that didn't support UnP mapping, or something like that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That was also not on the web, though... That was not on the web. That was in the AIM client, right? |
**Alex Sexton:** You could put HTML into there, and it would change the text, so... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] So that counts as the web now. |
**Alex Sexton:** Mm-hm... It was the web; I don't know what you're doing. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. I think the file sharing example is kind of interesting, right? Because unlike the regular web where this network is just up and we kind of know how to get to things, and if you give it an address, it can figure out how to download that content... In decentralized systems you have to esta... |
We have now decades of file sharing attempts to do this, right? Everything from Kazaa and Limewire and Napster back in the day... And now BitTorrent is sort of like the best of breed of all of this, so if you wanna establish a network for transferring and keeping alive a large file, they've really nailed that, and WebT... |
**Rachel White:** \[00:24:03.19\\\] This might not be a relevant question, but does blockchain type of distributed database things - does that fall into web-based P2P stuff? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes. A lot of them aren't web-based yet, but there are a few that are, and we're getting much more web support all the time. BcoinJS is like a Bitcoin client library as well. I know that people are working on an Ethereum one... IPFF is working on some blockchain stuff that will work in Go and in... |
I think the best way to look at blockchains is that if you wanna have a transaction log, and you wanna have a distributed transaction log, that's the best way to build it. It's not the best place to store large amounts of data (it's actually really intense for that), but if you wanna just store a transaction log, 1) it... |
**Alex Sexton:** Would you build operational transforms on top of a decentralized blockchain web implementation? Is that what we're talking about...? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Possibly. You maybe could, but I'm wondering if -- well, we have so much other data on how to do operational transforms on top of Merkle trees and on top of all these other distributable data structures. I don't know if it's actually beneficial to do it inside of a blockchain. |
**Alex Sexton:** So if you wanted to do P2P Google Docs, you wouldn't need the blockchain, or anything like that... Which is an encouraging statement to me. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I think with the blockchain, or any time that you really want -- a transaction log where more than one person is going to agree on every transaction, so you want it to be not eventually consistent, but always consistent, you're going to sacrifice some performance, right? If you're editing a Goo... |
**Alex Sexton:** Got it. Where does Bram Cohen fall on the cyber hobo scale? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] I don't know. I mean, he has a company that's been around for like 10 years, and a salary from that, so I don't know if he's in in cyber hobo status... \[laughing\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Okay... Good to know. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I mean, Dominic Tarr chooses to just go and build a boat that he lives on for months at a time in New Zealand, so it's a little different... |
**Alex Sexton:** As you do... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and then he comes back with an entirely new implementation of secure scuttlebutt or something. |
**Alex Sexton:** As you do. A serious question... The web, kind of like when we talk about app stores and we talk about -- what else; we've even talked about it on the show... We definitely talked about app stores, but either way, we talked about if you go and you put your app in the app store, you're using a centraliz... |
\[00:27:59.12\\\] So we often refer to the fact that you can choose any server as long as you can get an IP address, like all the different things... There's no single internet server, and then you have to upload everything to the internet server, and then they can turn things on or off. |
Certainly, there are states involved, and censorship and things like that, but I don't think that's really what we're talking. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's part of it. |
**Alex Sexton:** Well yeah, but I think it's a different part of it. We're talking about the word "decentralized" a bunch, but in my opinion the web is decentralized; it feels more like pseudo-decentralized... I don't know. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So you're right and you're wrong... The web is decentralized; web services are not decentralized. Anybody can put up a web service, anybody can build something for the web. The people who engineered those protocols and built these systems really believed in that decentralization, right? But if I want... |
**Alex Sexton:** We have decentralized voice calling, right? That exists, I'm pretty sure. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, Skype is backing off of that, actually... So Skype isn't as P2P as it used to be. |
**Alex Sexton:** But we're not talking about P2P, we're talking about decentralization. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah... |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm talking about -- phone networks are decentralized. My service provider can talk to your service provider over an open standard. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes, sorry. Okay, you mean like real phone calls. |
**Alex Sexton:** Voice over IP has a similar standard; use IP addresses instead of phone numbers, or whatever, but it works. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, but it also falls back to -- okay, so to make that call though, I log into a service that's centralized, I tell them where I am, they tell me where another person is... We're entirely reliant on them. They store all of the metadata logs... |
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