[kylebrown]

> In a hypothetical cyber-utopia or something, this could all just be a simple protocol (say, um, combining aspects of Direct Connect, BitTorrent, NNTP, Gopher, Bitcoin, GPG)

The article does mention p2p and decentralization, but the browser isn't whats holding that back. The client-server development paradigm is.

Currently, every dev making a p2p app has to roll their own platform because there's no standard (i.e. no LAMP, rails, or Heroku for deploying p2p apps). Some projects are working to change this, namely BitTorrent Maelstrom (which is a fork of Chromium with native support for magnet URLs, so it auto-renders an html/js package distributed via torrent); and http://ipfs.io (a sort of content-addressable p2p filesystem, or bittorrent on steroids).

[mbrock]

Yeah, that's super interesting stuff... Also Etherium, which as I understand it is a way to do distributed algorithms in a very general way.