On Friday, May 29, 2009 David Barrett wrote: > The only practical benefit I can see to a "pure" decentralized design > is protecting yourself from forced shutdown. But even that can be > mitigated by having servers in different jurisdictions.
Shutdown is not an only unreasonable request that one could imagine. Craigslist had to endure all these sex ad removal requests from the other state attorney. Microsoft Messenger had to selectively black out Cuba, Iran, Sudan, etc. I fail to see how having some servers in Europe or wherever would allow Microsoft to avoid doing that. As a matter of fact, I fail to see how having such extra servers would have protected Napster 1.0 from shutdown, either. Of course, you can design your system in such a way that the servers in different jurisdictions would be operated by different legal entities. But that is quite an endeavor - setting up multiple legal entities across the globe is not for the weak of heart. If you as much as even suspect that someone might dislike what you are doing, going fully decentralized might be a pretty reasonable choice from the business standpoint - it might prove to be a deterrent for the lawyers who have nothing better to do. Plus, you don't have to pay the hosting costs for the central servers in that case :-) Best wishes - S.Osokine. 30 May 2009. -----Original Message----- From: p2p-hackers-boun...@lists.zooko.com [mailto:p2p-hackers-boun...@lists.zooko.com]on Behalf Of David Barrett Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 2:33 PM To: theory and practice of decentralized computer networks Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Question on VoIP Kademlia based solution leviant Leviant wrote: > > I do not want (at least yet) to implement any central component for such > purposes. I guess I'd ask: why this design constraint? The only practical benefit I can see to a "pure" decentralized design is protecting yourself from forced shutdown. But even that can be mitigated by having servers in different jurisdictions. Basically, if you're saying "I just want to build cool tech and that sounds fun", that's a totally valid reason. But if you're trying to build a scalable, secure, high-performance, real-world usable system, I see no reason to avoid central components. -david _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
