I'd like you to offer your own suggestions for in-use next gen technology, in return for having read all the above. Whatever you have your world stage set with, your assumed knowledge about the state of play that you use to project forwards, is not commonly held. Get off the fucking soapbox and present a damned case, man.
Tribler,http://www.tribler.org/ is, to my knowledge, nearly the only assemblage advancing p2p & which is in use at the current moment. It's half academic stomping ground, one quarter experiment, and one quarter earnest direct directed software, yet this loose assemblage of different interests is, as far as I know, the only ones doing anything like what you're talking about, making systems where for example even search can be done p2p. They call this 4G P2P: http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P .
Tribler was one of the services I had in mind, though I couldn't remember its name and I have limited access to search for such things where I work.
But, yes, thanks for the share and the response.
I also remember reading about something called CryptoSphere on HN a week back. While it's also still in development and not currently useable, my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established (e.g. FreeNet, TOR, etc). Now it's a matter of finding creative ways to use these technologies to serve P2P's purposes.
It's not that far off, and with takedowns like these becoming more common I think it will only serve to catalyze next-gen development. Five years is an eternity in technology. The iPhone just turned 5, for instance. I can barely remember how I lived before I had a smart phone.
> my point is that the technologies for strong crypto and decentralization have already been established
My point is that the technologies of your point are useless and irrelevant without means to create connections between people. Existing P2P and cryptoware hides stuff for all but the participating parties, but creating those groups of participation has, thusfar, always been the domain of centralized easy-to-take down services.
The mold you set, of speaking of this oncoming future, waving your hand about "next gen," is a massive dis-service and harmful uninformed PR against the work that needs to be done. The change you hope is in the wind isn't going to be a part of the technical evolution and flow of progress, it's a deliberate technological revolution, making the fickle changing mesh of us all self assemble in a behaved fashion to permit us to shoot content queries to everyone on the planet in search of a copy of XYZ audiobook, and find the two people who have it. That requires huge amounts of caching of the libraries available content out there (so we don't actually have to go ask everyone), or what Tribler calls their megacaches, which at this stage are far more local than global.
So we have steps. BuddyCast3, the social overlay that underpins much of Tribler, gets some of the way there, but it's far far from a global search, and most of it's content is populated by existing trackers. Magnets, DHT, PEX, these were all invaluable core decentralization tools, but finding what it is you want, searching through whatever content is out there, is a huge problem which, unlike better lithography technology, no one has a roadmap for achieving, and saying otherwise builds a false sense of comfort that betrays the cause.
Good points. I see that you are well informed and care a great deal, and I really appreciate your thoughts.
I think you may be overstating the degree to which my optimism in our ability to advance the technology is harmful, or a disservice.
I look at technologies like TOR, and FreeNET and I think to myself "Wow. Human ingenuity is such a beautiful thing. We are rapidly approaching the day when we can freely speak and say and share whatever we want. We are building a world where every voice has an equal right to speak and cannot be silenced, but only amplified by curation and consensus. We are approaching a truly digital democracy, and its effect will reverberate across the world. Old authoritarian regimes will collapse - and have already begun to do so, thanks in part to these new technologies."
I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that we can achieve whatever we set our minds to, and perhaps it is premature to say these technologies are 'available', but the pieces are mostly there, and roads have a funny way of being formed without a roadmap. Sometimes they start as a path, with footprints that wear the ground.
Sometimes you need to believe you can do something in order for you to work up the energy and motivation to make the attempt.
I don't think betrayal is an appropriate word here. And I don't think it's necessary to solve every problem or point of attack to make major progress.
Tribler, http://www.tribler.org/ is, to my knowledge, nearly the only assemblage advancing p2p & which is in use at the current moment. It's half academic stomping ground, one quarter experiment, and one quarter earnest direct directed software, yet this loose assemblage of different interests is, as far as I know, the only ones doing anything like what you're talking about, making systems where for example even search can be done p2p. They call this 4G P2P: http://www.tribler.org/trac/wiki/4thGenerationP2P .