DWeb

Decentralized Web group

Principles: https://getdweb.net/principles/ (too many?)

DWeb

DWeb is a space for builders and dreamers, activists, and artists to come together to build a better web

A goal in creating a Decentralized Web (DWeb) is to reduce or eliminate such centralized points of control by building alternatives where many players are involved in the building, hosting, and maintenance of networked communication. That way if any single player drops out or tries to control the entire system, the network can route around them. Such a system could better help protect user privacy and ensure reliable access. The DWeb could even make it possible for users to buy and sell content directly, without having to go through websites that now serve as middlemen that collect and sell personal data in the process.

The current internet ecosystem creates honeypots of valuable private information.

There is also the issue of lost digital data. (linkrot

Decentralized databases could allow information to ‘live’ in many different places, so information cannot easily be blocked or erased.

A distributed authentication or identity system (proving you are who you say you are) could end the need for centralized usernames and passwords

The hope is that new Decentralized Web components will gradually be integrated into new and existing servers over time.

Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin because, as he said at TechCrunch SF 2017, “with Bitcoin, the protocol is in service of the currency, but with Ether and Ethereum, the currency is in service of the protocol.”

A challenge, Buterin says, is that a blockchain is vastly less efficient and more costly, in terms of using energy and computing time, than centralized Web offerings. Approaches that could make blockchain more efficient might do so at a cost to privacy or security

There are many decentralized protocols that are not based on a blockchain. But in the overheated publicity over blockchain technology, the public has started to conflate blockchains and the Decentralized Web. The two are related, but not synonymous.

Net neutrality is the principle that no data online is advantaged or disadvantaged, in terms of access or flow. The closer you can get to net neutrality, the better it is for a Decentralized Web. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to have full Decentralized Web access under an authoritarian government that controls and censors the internet.

In the short-term, component parts of the Decentralized Web are already starting to become available online, via the existing Web, and may eventually be integrated into browsers. For example, Protocol Lab’s IPFS has just been built natively into the Brave Browser, making it possible to use decentralized tools more seamlessly from the current web.

Some apps and programs, built on the decentralized model, are already available and you can sign up and use them at will. But the Decentralized Web, as an ecosystem, might not be fully functional and integrated for another five or ten years.