If you are using Orion, Siderus’ IPFS desktop client, you might have noticed that the app has not received any update during the last year.
Around a year ago, after noticing an extensive amount of misusage of our IPFS Gateway to share illegal content, I have decided to redirect the traffic to the official IPFS Gateway. We took down the servers and IPFS nodes and gateways from every continent.
All static websites meet a hard limit when a comment form, “like” buttons, or any interactive content is required. These extra components force people to build an API, host a server, a database or pay for any SaaS product that does that… we could write a blog post about that, but it would be too easy! 🤣 Instead in this article, I wanted to challenge myself a little more and explore how to make a decentralized like button: We will try how it is to not be hosting any server or database, and instead use a p2p networks and a decentralized database to count the likes. 👍
I have always been in love with the concept of distributed and decentralised services. Those two concepts are aligning almost perfectly to my political an philosophical point of view. And this short note is not much about software, but more as a note to remember myself how much spoiled by centralised services we are.
On the airplane to Stockholm, It was hard to explain to my boyfriend how much we are relaying on centralized services, without talking about the centralised fallback and backup solutions. I made a simple “question-game” to explain this concept and try to find a fungible solution to solve the main problem. It is a series of “what if… ?”. With that question, any action is in not possible anymore, until a fungible solution is found. The goal of the game is to find something easy to find and replace, and that would make the action possible. Here is a simple example we made:
I have my own clear vision of what it would be the future of value exchange. At the moment I am running a Bitcoin Classic, full node. This is because I want to keep a copy of the blockchain to verify my payments and make the Bitcoin network stronger. I have also a p2pool mining node and 2 miners, to be able to express myself with the bitcoin “consensus” (without thinking of profit).
Since when I was little, I always loved peer-to-peer technologies… I even tried to create a GNU/Linux distribution based on that. .. but recently I have discovered a brilliant project that is combining the power of asynchronous cryptography, using Bitcoin private and public keys, with BitTorrent technology. This project is called ZeroNet and it is a new and interesting way to provide websites and real-time services in a p2p network.
I am in the world of bitcoin since 2012 when I opened my first bitcoin wallet on blockchain.info… and a lot of things changed since that moment: new services, growing communities, new alternative crypto currencies, ATMs, Credit-Debit cards, and a larger diffusion of people accepting bitcoin in their shops.
Finally, I moved my blog to wordpress.com. The reason is really simple: time. I have a blog that had been for years and years hosted on my own server. This helped me a lot, because is cheaper and it allows me to use custom plugin and design my own theme. But everything is fine until you get hacked! …and sadly I don’t have enough time to find a solution to this… by paying!