Everybody keeps talking about decentralized networks yet there hasn't been any progress past the blockchain and smart...

Everybody keeps talking about decentralized networks yet there hasn't been any progress past the blockchain and smart contracts.
Why doesn't somebody just make a chrome/frefox app that turns .torrent files into websites?
It doesn't sound like it'd be difficult at all.

Attached: i-feel-like-im-taking-crazy-pills.gif (353x251, 1.13M)

what would be the point you crazy fucking nutcase?

It'd be a website that's hosted by seeders
In other words a decentralized website that not one person has control over hosting

It's called IPFS

And how would you ever change what's on it?

Well like for instance, let's say you make a torrent file with your "Facebook" profile.
You'd be the host and other people would seed it.

>host
Centralized as fuck

For static sites its possible but would also be fucking huge unless you do partial chain verification and people dont need to host the entire chain. If you are actually running a server that does anything besides just serve conent i.e something useful then it becomes hard.

How would you ever modify it and propagate the changes to the other seeders? How would you invalidate the previous version? What would prevent someone from pretending to be you and editing your profile?

Distributed systems are hard, user. There are decentralized social networks that actually fix these issues somewhat, it's just that no one uses them and it's REALLY hard to change the protocol once everyone starts using it, so it will stagnate quickly.

Besides the web isn't really a protocol designed with peer-to-peer in mind. The goal is not to band-aid fix the web, it's to create something new.

This takes time and resources, and time and resources cost money, and investors expect returns. There's more money to be made with decentralized networks in other fields. This is why you see applications of the blockchain and smart contracts in things like decentralizing power grids, smart appliances, verifiable elections, verifying official documents and smart trading, and not much money being applied on researching a decentralized web.

>>How would you ever modify it and propagate the changes to the other seeders?
Why would you need to do that? Just make it immutable and use a distributed persistent data structure to store the content. To update it, you create a new version with changed content.