TOC.md

Table of Contents

1. Table of Contents
2. Definitions
3. History: The Cycle of Centralization and Decentralization
   1. Mainframes and Thin Clients (1960s to mid-1980s)
      • The Internet: Designed to Survive Nuclear Attacks
   2. The Personal Computing (PC) Revolution and the World Wide Web (WWW) (1980-1999)
   3. Innovation Retreats to the Datacenters, aka. the Cloud (1999-2020): Web 2.0, the Peer to Peer Winter, the Social Web and the Cloud
      • The Peer to Peer Winter (1999-2014)
      • "Web 2.0": The Servers, not the users, are the Peers
      • The "Social" Web: Forming the modern Attention Economy
      • Mobile Computing and the Cloud: Mainframe by Another Name (2006-present)
   4. Re-Decentralization of the Web (2014-present)
      • Early Rumbles of a return to P2P
      • The Role of Bitcoin and Blockchains
      • The New Generation of Peer to Peer technologies
4. Isn't the web already decentralized?
   • Who gets to be a peer?
   • Possession
5. Why Decentralize?
   • Possession is Nine Tenths of the Law
   • Restoring Social Interaction and Social Institutions
   • Resilience: Making a Library that can't burn
   • Offline-First:
   • Meeting the Demands of VR, Machine Learning and Internet of Things
   • "Web Scale" implies Participation
   • Resisting Monopolies
     • Resisting Data Monopolies
     • Resisting Monopolistic Control of Connectivity
   • Security & Privacy
   • Protecting Civilian Infrastructure from Cyber Warfare
6. How to build a Decentralized Web
   • Preface: Overlay Networks
   • "The Wires" Physical-layer Connectivity
   • "The Receivers" Application-layer Connectivity: Networking Stack
   • "The Languages" - data structures and encryption
     • Content-Addressing and Immutable, Authenticatable Data Structures
     • Encryption: Controlling Access to Data
     • Merkle DAGs
     • Interoprable Data Formats
   • "The Signaling Network; The Rumor Mill" -- passing the data around with DHTs, Data Interchange (bitswap) & Routing
     • Updates (aka. Mutable Data) -- allowing data to change over Time
     • DHTs - providing and seeking pieces of the web-scale puzzle
     • Bitswap and Routing - passing the bits around
     • (Mavens and Connectors)

• Protecting People: Public Speech, Private Communications, and Malicious Actors
  • Reader Privacy
    • Writer Privacy
    • Censorship: Allowing, Denying, and Reinforcing Information

7. Managing the Commons: Stewardship of Data and Networks
   • Finding Stuff: Search Engines, trustworthiness, search indexes as datasets
   • Keeping Stuff: storing a copy of the data you rely on
   • Stewardship: Reinstating the role of Libraries and Archives
8. People, Networks and Incentives
   • Incentives, Game Theory, Nuclear War and the Internet
   • Networks Tend to Become Monopolies, and are prone to become Regulated as Utilities
   • Economic Models on the Decentralized Web (Economic Patterns in Decentralized Context)
   • Open Source
   • Cryptocurrencies and Protocol-incentivised Networks

• Trust and Reputation