Positive example of a distributed system that works and keeps working well: I'm downloading Ubuntu's latest installation ISO from BitTorrent at 300+ Mb/s; that's three times the speed of their nearest HTTP mirror.
Down with centralization, we need moar distributed systems.
@gabrielesvelto
I'd counter that with the fact that torrents waste a lot of electricity on hashing things that might seem redundant — just last week I've stopped seeding Ubuntu image with ratio over 2000 and I'm not even an Ubuntu user, now my seedbox that seeds over 2Tb of other stuff sits mostly idle, but, you know, in the days of crypto and huge server farms burning electricity just on training neural networks that seems really insignificant 😅
@m0xee compared to the energy cost of the transfer I think that the cost of hashing the data will be minuscule
@gabrielesvelto
Yeah, sure, it comes from my personal perception back from the days when having Azureus running was a noticeable hit on performance, so using something slightly more optimized (or at least not written in Java 😉) made sense. Nowadays I barely notice transmission-daemon running, except for when someone tries to utilize whole 100 Mbps of my connection 😅
Still, if you multiply that by tens of thousands of nodes running in p2p network — and that's what you want to achieve acceptable…
@gabrielesvelto … levels of availability, it might become be something.
You're right of course, it's still nothing compared to what running network equipment uses, but that equipment has to be running anyway, distributed or not. Hashing overhead is directly related to being a distributed system.
Of course in our perfect scenario, we might want to remove the encryption part too, but in the days of surveillance and spoofing, it might not be a good idea.
@gabrielesvelto
Anyway, my original thought was that no tech is just greater good, they all come with pros an cons, by today's standards p2p file sharing overhead is acceptable, two decades ago it didn't seem so. So maybe some of the tech that we consider "excessive" today will become acceptable tomorrow 🤷
