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RE: The future of Steem. What's coming and what I want to make happen.
The problem, however is that the internet's infrastructure is not completely decentralised. With internet providers stake in the network they have the power to completely shut people off. In my opinion if a decentralised society will succeed, the network infrastructure has to be independent of any corporation or governing body.
Sure, in the case of an internet blackout, there can be connectivity issues. But they can't shut down analog PTSN's and yes, this is why I talk about a new routing protocol as well, something like Tor but more flexible and able to charge users for access to a hotspot, for example. A system that works over TCP/IP, but only has to make a few links to a couple of nodes and then the routing is happening in another network system. One in which you have cryptographic public wallet keys as addresses, and you can rent a name from the network...
Which is why it is doubly interesting that Steem witness nodes are going to be running essentially the basis of a DNS system. Names will have public keys attached to them, and these could also be used to connect to logged in nodes. Just add an underlying agoric obfuscation network, underpinning it, and you also enable pay-to-use hotspots without any damned captive portal, or ability to filter your traffic, and every node running this finds all the others and whoever controls the secret key of these router nodes, can send out traffic through them, configure the way they trade traffic routing with other nodes.
No DNS system required. All connections are encrypted, and can be multi-hop obfuscated.
It only needs TCP/IP connectivity.
I agree, this is a necessity. We have to obsolete IANA, and all that US federal government centralisation. With a system like this, including the routing system I just mentioned, you don't need no stinking permission, and the network is completely decentralised, and transparently can be surveillance resistant as well. Even web servers will be obsoleted. You will be able to download pages from a Maidsafe style network, after querying the Steem DNS system for the location of the file that opens it, then it downloads it (if it didn't happen to already be cached) and runs your javascripts etc that query remote databases to load other content.
You get the idea. We are only a few steps from this becoming a reality, and it's going to shake up the internet in a way that 'cloud' pretends to be. You only need an internet connection and everyone can participate, and be paid for participating, in the operation of this network system. It is encrypted by default. In theory you could even back up your home folder on your computer to this, but not keep all of it locally online if the device has space constraints. So no matter where you are, or what hardware you are running, you can open up a client that links you into this network.
One more thing that I think about this, is the possibility of using a Maidsafe style storage network to enable software distribution (or any kind of data you want publicly available). Instead of webpages, you download docker-style applications, which query a distributed database system as well as filesystem. Your 'browser' could run python apps, ruby apps, native linux apps inside a windows machine, or vice versa. There could be different versions for different types of interfaces, touch, small, big. Instead of just this crummy javascript DOM HTML5 interface, you could run anything. It would help with the problem of disparity between hardware running these applications. Native apps would work far faster than these interpretive, reflective environments. There is compiled, introspective systems now anyway.
Well, those are further thoughts anyway. You bring up the very good point about internet connectivity and attachment to the centralised regulation based in the USA. This is moving towards an independent name system for seeing web content. Like the early days of HTML, only links and pictures. But with a URL on the blockchain. You don't need no stinkin' IANA Bind network to find that. Just an IP address of a witness node RPC endpoint.
By adding the ability to rent these names, and issue currencies under them, it is just a little step away from an internet that does not require Bind DNS systems at all. These other things are a little further into the future but we already now have a kind of other web content namespace here at steemit.com. It can be found at other sites, who also do this by talking to a Witness Node, not querying the network.