A little digging gives a bit more info: https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/04/why-t ... -too-late/
I suspect this has already been addressed somewhere else in some way, but I had a few notes/concens:
- Some amount of what they're describing could be taken 1:1 from everything "cloud" was supposed to provide and just replace it with "P2P". Scalable websites, persistent storage, distributed access, etc. all sound familiar.
- Data loss is a serious issue (we deal with it on the site frequently), but I didn't see anything addressing the problem of bad/useless/outdated information. Just because X exists doesn't mean anyone should spend time or energy to maintain X.
- How exactly they're going to address demand for high quality video, which is THE bandwidth hog for as long as I've been on the Internet and only ever gets worse.
- I'd like to see any discussion of maintaining a persistent web involve some discussion of archive.org, which has been doing it for a very long time. Maybe that's been explored, but I haven't found it.
- A lot of the discussion I'm seeing on this topic is fairly pie-in-the-sky and reminds me a bit of early discussion of an Internet utopia. The vague explanation around blockchain doesn't help.
Website: https://ipfs.io/
On a related note, I'd really like to see someone solve the problem of endpoint distribution or local caching. Meaning that if 50 people in a small area are all accessing the same thing (let's say for a class or because someone sent out link explaining a local event), that's 50 downloads that could get cached in part or in whole to a local distribution point, saving loads of time, energy, and network latency. Some shrewd network admins can build local caching into a given area, but that's absolutely all traffic and doesn't help with encrypted services. Peer to peer was supposed to help solve that but that never seemed to materialize.