[freehaven-dev] Re: another distributed project

[Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>]

David wrote:
> Right under my nose...
>  
> "The World Beyond the Web"
> http://www.deas.harvard.edu/~wbw/wbw-design-99.ps
>  
> is it just me, or is everyone trying to invent the next Web
> successor these days?

Nope it's not just you.

The thing which concerns me these days though is that sooner or later
some of these people will reach a clue threshold and make a viable
distributed replacement to the web.

The worry part of it is that they won't include anonymity,
decentralised control and censor resistance.

Thats why we (collective term for people with interests in
crypto-anarchy, or perhaps less ambitiously just censor-ship
resistance -- don't know everyone's politics) must get there first
with a system which solves both problems well enough to win out of
security-free competitors.

Therefore strategically, I think to win on the deployment vector a
censor resistant distributed control publishing system should try very
hard to meet the performance requirements for people who don't care
about security, privacy or censor resistance, which are after all 99%
of people and of web traffic.  This means tunable security, and focus
on usability to carry the security properties.

Anonymity loves company anyway, so if we're lucky we can use some of
the users who don't care about security to gain some cover without
hitting them with noticable performance or usability problems.

Adam