The internet is very vulnerable. Entire countries have been cut off with the snip of undersea cables.
And it gets worse. If a local exchange goes down, you won't even be able to send an email to your next door neighbour. You may be able to pass a note under their door, but your digital letters will not send or arrive.
This is the vulnerabliity of a centralised computer system. Any data must goto a central node before being passed onto its destination.
You can think of it like the postal service. If i want to send a letter to someone in my street I have two options. Firstly I could buy a stamp, put it on the letter and post it.. It would arrive at the central sorting office and be sent back out to the neighbour in your street.
The alternative is, that you could go and post it into your neighbours mailbox yourself. This is the decentralised solution.Its clearly which is quicker, and the way in which the internet needs to work.
The decentralised delivery system is incrediby robust. Unless your neighbours house is demolished, the letter will be delivered. If a central mail hub is destroyed no letters will be delivered.
So the question is why are we all using a centralised internet. The answer comes down to money and convenience. Building our modern internet infrastructure isn't cheep. Companies have built massive business models by harvesting our data and selling it on. Centralised systems generally have an ecenomic incentive to work as the more data that flows though its servers the richer they become.
The benefits of a decentralised system are not instantly obvious to the consumer. However that could all change.
Virtually every man, woman and child has a mobile device capable of accepting and transmitting ultra fast WIFI signals. Most households have a broadbnd contract. This could be argued to be as important as electricity, gas and water. This is not a cheap monthly outgoing.
In theory it would be possible for a comunity to link up all of its WIFI devices to create a decentralised local area network. Any information could be passed from on phone or wifi router without the need for an ISP or mobile phone provider.
Now imagine if we could scale this up, to an entire country, or even continent. And then maybe even the world.
If the data needed was not available on the local network, the file system could interrogate the network and find a route to locate the data. In theory a single mobile phone could provide a data route for an entire country. The reality is that hundreds of thousand of hosts would be sending tiny pieces of the data back.
If we wanted to reward the people that were providing the most infrastructure we could by either increasing their own traffic speed on the network or some form of cryptocurrency.
This would be a completly simple scaleable system that would be robust and negate the need for centralised servers.
I wanted to write this as an example of the future that i see.
I'd interested in others comments.