On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 6:12 pm, Salman Abdul Baset wrote: > >>>> Usability, security, decentralization. Pick any two. >>> >>> For Skype, can we pick all three? :) >> >> Skype isn't decentralized. They have central bootstrapping, central >> authentication, central billing, etc. If Skype says you don't talk, >> you >> don't talk. If Skype blows up, you don't talk. And as happened last >> year, if their pointless rendezvous mesh gets destablized due to >> massive >> reboots, you don't talk for a long time. > > If MSN, or Yahoo says don't talk, then you don't talk either...
Er... yes. Like Skype, they are centralized. And secure. But not decentralized. ... Like I've been saying. ... Show me a single usable, secure decentralized system. Even just password protected identifiers will do. Just a hotmail level of security where if I change my password, you can no longer impersonate me. >> Anyway, just pushing back on the religion that P2P has developed. >> It's >> fun. It's sexy. It's really hard. But it's often pointless. > > The advantage of p2p is that it reduces cost of entry in a certain > market > space. No one denies that anything p2p cannot be done central. However, > sometimes economics justify using p2p as a solution. And in Skype's > case > experience gained from Kazaa was no doubt helpful. What economic argument could possibly support the avoidance of central rendezvous? Servers are cheaper than engineers. By orders of magnitude. Building and maintaining complex p2p systems requires hundreds of engineer hours, billed at high rates. A server costs $50/month. Even if you only value your time at $5/hour, if it saves you 10 hours a month, it saves you money. Economics are unquestionably on the side of appropriate use of central services, bootstrapping, authentication, and rendezvous being the big three. What numbers are you using that oppose this? > To completely rule out non-server p2p as a possible solution for a > problem > is also naive, and amounts to a no-p2p religion. No, it's called experience. -david _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
