Decentralized websites on Brave are a reality

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Not so many understand why or when is decentralization important. It became another buzz world, just like blockchain.

If the CEO of Twitter is a big supporter of decentralization, we are doomed. Either that, or he's just a puppet at Twitter, wishing he was in a different world.

The advantages of a decentralized system lie in their increased security over the centralized ones. Because there is no single point of failure. But also, from the resistance to censorship. That happens often at a loss of speed compared to centralized systems.

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Let's take them one by one.

Single point of failure

One can say centralized systems have improved a lot over the years. We now have "clouds" that store our data online with multiple safety levels and redundancy.

Ok... But what happens if there is an internal sabotage? How about a successful hack? These two are not even so rare.

This one probably is, but it happened: natural disaster. Remember the biggest data center from Europe (in France) burning down, I think it was last year? Many were affected. Blocktrades was affected, but they had a backup solution. Other projects on Hive were affected as well. I think one of them I was trying to use at the time was down for weeks before they found a solution.

None of this would be possible in a truly decentralized system, with decentralized governance.

Censorship Resistance

I suppose Twitter is taking a lead on arbitrarily suspending accounts without giving any real reason. Last case we know very well: Splinterlands. Which is a collectible cards game. I'm sure promoting your game is against Twitter TOS. Look right there, at paragraph $%@^%#, it's obvious!

I'm sure Youtube and Facebook won't let it in the lead for too long. They're used to being the first.

Now, sarcasm aside, we've been practicing censorship resistance widely on the Hive blockchain. We should be proud of that. We are already ahead of times and having a track record. And times are catching up with the need of censorship resistance.

Two other points of failure and potential points of censorship are slowly becoming decentralized.

  • data storage
  • domain names

If most data is stored on clouds provided by a few top giants, what's stopping them to censor it in a similar manner as Twitter and the likes do? Well, one thing that's different and which doesn't make this practice widespread as far as I know is that fact that YOU pay for hosting services, unlike on the centralized social media platforms, where you are the product.

But still, this is a central point of failure which can be used and I'm sure it is already used, but not widely.

Luckily other people feel the same way and decentralized data storage systems (Akash is a pioneer in this field I suppose) are being worked on.

The other potential point of censorship is at the domain level. Your domain can be taken down by the domain provider.

Well, guess what? Decentralized domains are being worked on as well.

They are not the standard DNS, but they are expanding as we speak.

I've just read an article referring to a press release from May. Looks like the Brave browser will turn on support for decentralized domains created by UnstoppableDomains.

These domains are not standard DNS, but unlike those, they are sold, not rented. Once you buy such a domain you have it for life, or until you decide to sell it.

It's also one of the current use cases for NFTs, besides for gaming. Each domain is represented as an NFT. The domain name can be used in multiple ways. Here are a few they listed on the website:

Universal username across apps and websites
Website URL
Payment address for wallets
and much more!

SPK network is getting close to making decentralized video platforms a reality.

These are all developments that will make censorship hard to impose. And maybe the push for decentralization on all potential points of failure/censorship wouldn't have been as serious if the threat were only theoretical or in isolated cases. But it appears many heads high up the hierarchies of the centralized world lost touch with reality a long time ago.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta



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