[talyian]

The year is 2050. You are reading this comment from a compatibility layer in your open-source browser that translates HTML from the 2010s into Thought-Interface Language 3.2, which was an open standard ratified in 2045 by a global consortium of content and browser developers.

Back in the 2010s, web access was peculiarly gated in a dendritic configuration as ISPs provided all the single-points-of-failure interconnections between end users (including both content providers as well as consumers) and the true "internet", a multiway resiliently-routed interconnect of servers. As we know now, extending the peer-to-peer core of the internet down to the consumer has had lasting impact, including breaking up the routing monopolies of the ISPs as well as making it possible for anyone willing to spend a few grand a year on server capacity to host a new peer-to-peer router for nearby Internet users.

Many of you may not remember the origins of Google as a "search engine", a monolithic index of "every reachable page on the internet." Such a quaint idea has long since joined even further historic concepts such as Yahoo's "human-curated list of pages on the Internet". Ever since the Searchtorrent protocol was introduced and consumer searches were conducted on one of several competing distributed hash tables across the internet, no one entity has had to shoulder the responsibility of storing all the web content on the internet. This author gladly pays a small monthly fee to a local search cache provider for reliably fast localized caching of search results.

The web is here to stay. Remember your history next time you visit the local Homo Sapiens preserve and give thanks to the carbon-based beings that invented the Internet.

[QAPereo]

I think it's more likely that we'll be talking about "Guzzaline" and eating each other.

[gm-conspiracy]

Brawndo? It's got electrolytes.

[Cshelton]

DNS through a massive distributed ledger. The blockchain. I can't wait.

Individuals' devices will be the backbone of the web/internet, not massive server farms owned by Google and the likes. A small group of smart phones distributed across the region will be able to handle massive amounts of traffic with additional amazing cache protocols.

[devrandomguy]

You can use it now, as IPNS, for the IPFS network.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmdPtC3T7Kcu9iJg6hYzLBWR5XCDcYMY7HV685E...

There are browser plugins for IPFS, if you don't want to use the ipfs.io gateway. That gateway is free to use, and fairly transparent to people who do not have IPFS set up.

[t3soro]

This was the first fork of bitcoin.

namecoin.org

[scotty79]

Cool twist in the last paragraph.

[icebraining]

Searchtorrent

So, they renamed YaCy? http://yacy.net/en/Technology.html

[RonanTheGrey]

The future better look like that.

The alternative is... dystopian.

[nsxwolf]

Another example of the "Singularity" ruining even "near-future" sci fi.

[talyian]

My apologies for the machina ex machina. I needed a clean end to the post and got lazy.

[127]

Only thing worrying about such decentralization is all of the extra tons of CO2 that it produces. Of course to robots, such concerns wouldn't be nearly as acute.

[adrianN]

If we aren't carbon neutral way before 2050, it doesn't really matter anymore.

[devrandomguy]

Hopefully, the power grid will also be decentralizing and mostly transitioning to renewables over that same time period.

[jstoiko]

> anyone willing to spend a few grand a year

sounds like there has been a lot of inflation in only 33yrs. what caused this?

[talyian]

The value of a high-throughput network interconnect slot from your peers is tied to the current value of all the cryptocurrencies the DHT routes, not just the cost of running the server and the physical links.

[jugg1es]

I really hope this is the future and not the OP

[cortesoft]

Wait, you WANT to be in a preserve?