[capableweb]

What does "virtually certain" mean here anyway? And on what scale are you imagining things?

Let's say the entirety of YouTube was decentralized in a way that every internet connected device plugged in to the wall starts sharing watched content to other viewers who want to watch that content. If it's your neighbor, they'll download it straight from you, via the closest router/hub. Suddenly the company's hosting is more providing a "core archive" of data, and every user becomes a edge node of that content. Internet providers can, if they chose, pre-share content they think will be popular, in order to speed up their own infrastructure, and so on.

I'm not saying this is bullet proof or anything, I just think you're too quick to dismiss it without really saying why you think it's impossible (or "virtually certain").

[benlivengood]

Youtube (and most other streaming services) is already decentralized into thousands of edge caches. Decentralizing it further doesn't make much sense because the network cost is about the same if individual homes or their nearest ISP DC has the cache.

Most home networks are wireless only at this point which is pretty bad for throughput, latency, and reliability if serving other homes. Maybe ISPs could start building some storage and IPFS into modems? I think handling the metadata of a p2p system might still be too costly. Imagine every neighborhood having to run a torrent tracker for every media file produced in the last ~year.

[wmf]

I love P2P and I have been into it since the Napster days but it isn't feasible any more. The value of a random Internet device is actually negative because the complexity of wrangling it outweighs what little resources it could contribute. (See Spotify and Joost for examples.)

I assume all these decentralized storage systems are datacenter-based so I'm comparing random Chinese datacenters vs. FAANG datacenters.