Ignoring the prediction that everything will be decentralized in the near future (it probably won't), how about this scenario: you want to see if the voting activity (recorded in your events) correlates with the number of times you went to the doctors in the year prior to election (as recorded in your health records). If we want to be able to run such a distributed query, we need to be sure that each node stores the data in predefined format ("tables") and that one of their services run a service that will receive the distributed query request, decide whether or not it wants to participate, and then execute the business logic of the conditions (healthevent.year > getdate() - 365), probably defined in some programming language ("SQL").
seph-reed|11 months ago
I may be optimistic on this one. But it feels like dead internet is encroaching everywhere. There aren't many centralized services I can think of that people actually like. Perhaps Steam, but most of them are hated by their users. Currently, I'm imagining that more and more of our digital interactions are going to go through AI helpers. Agents that will filter out ads, and likely also hold onto our information for us. At a certain point, centralized DBs just become an unnecessary middleman with privacy concerns. If I want photos of my friends, why not just have my assistant ask their assistant?
> how about this scenario: ....
It seems like all of this data could easily fit into a 10MB of text. This is the kind of thing an assistant would be likely to churn through without issue. It could also search for other interesting correlations while it's at it.