I think social media can possibly be taken over by cryptocurrency/decentralized/blockchain technology. Think about it... Facebook has a market capitalization of 266.3 billion. What if a portion of their net profit was distributed to its users instead? Which service would you use... one that makes money off of you providing you nothing in return, or one that pays you to use its service? There are likely a few projects attempting to capitalize on this space. The only one off the top of my head I can name is Synereo and I am on the fence as to whether it is is a legit project or a P&D... I am waiting on the sidelines for now.
http://www.synereo.com/One of the foundational technical challenges is decentralized, permissionless file storage (and databases); otherwise if a corporation is providing centralized file storage then they control the content and can monopolize.
Afaik, the current attempts such as Storj and Maidsafe have a fundamental economic flaw. That is they are selling for free that which is not free the bandwidth (and most saliently the asymmetrically more expensive upload bandwidth) of the ISPs. I had warned Bittorrent about this flaw in their economic algorithm and had suggested a fix in 2008:
Did Bittorrent become popular without MSM coverage?
I'm not really sure.
Yes, it did. The Bittorrent whitepaper was a breakthrough in p2p not matched until Satoshi came along.
All the cruft of Gnutella (anti-leech arms race kludges, supernodes, etc) was swept away by Bram's brilliantly elegant tit-for-tat algorithm.
Well someone did come along before Satoshi in 2008 and that was me (Shelby), but I was apparently ignored. I basically predicted the Net Neutrality shit we have now and was trying to improve Bram's concept:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130401040049/http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=178#p178Did Bittorrent implement my proposal? I never followed up (my life went on a tangent).
You can detect some more coherence in my writing back then because that was before I became so ill. I am amazed in hindsight that I understood the concepts of Bittorrent so well having absolutely no experience whatsoever as a developer in P2P.
Now what is really fucking amazing is that the link quoted above worked correctly a few days ago when I issued it. Apparently someone in the Monero thread communicated to Bittorrent folks and had the entire archive of the Bittorrent forum removed from the archive.org. I am not joking and I am not hallucinating.
What I had written there in 2008 (which luckily I reread a few days ago so my memory is refreshed) was I explained to the Bittorrent developers that their tit-for-tat algorithm was orthogonal to their
optimistic unchoking algorithm, and that they could improve the tit-for-tat algorithm by have the two peers that exchange a shard of data to encrypt those shards. Then after the shards had been received by both peers, the decryption keys could be exchanged. The economic benefit is that the bandwidth has already been exchanged before each peer can use the data. Thus neither peer has any bandwidth cost reason to cheat. The reason this was important is because typically download bandwidth is much greater than upload bandwidth, so by forcing all peers to trade equally, it would mean that peers could only download as much as they could upload. Bittorrent didn't like this suggestion because they preferred to leech the upload bandwidth of those who have higher allocations with their ISPs thus forcing those ISPs to pay for the upload bandwidth that the other peers at the ISPs with lower upload bandwidth allocations do not incur.
I warned Bittorrent that without my suggested fix, then the ISPs would end up blocking and rate limiting Bittorrent, which is exactly what has happened as I predicted:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/145786/isp.htmlhttp://guides.wmlcloud.com/windows/how-to-bypass-torrent-connection-blocking-by-your-isp.aspxhttps://www.quora.com/My-ISP-has-blocked-all-the-P2P-downloads-Is-there-any-way-I-can-bypass-themNote that any solutions to the problem of ISPs blocking P2P apps that involve a TURN (when STUN tunneling fails or is blocked), VPN, or other server in the middle, defeat the entire point of extracting the value of the bandwidth allocation of users provided by their ISPs, because then one is paying for the bandwidth of the server to relay the shards.
If Storj and MaidSafe max out the consumption of each user's upload bandwidth (thus leeching off users with higher allocations charging the costs to those users' ISPs), they will also be blocked by ISPs. Additionally STUN tunnelling often fails and thus a TURN relay server has to be employed (or using the other peers as relays thus leeching the upload bandwidth of those ISPs who don't block tunneling).
In short, P2P for bandwidth consumption between ISP hosted user accounts is not going to be reliable. Many users will have frustrations when trying to be a storage provider. It will not be the case that every user in the system can also be a storage provider. And it will probably end up being the case that the most efficient storage providers will be hosted on dedicated servers.
In other words, it is a fantasy to think we can get decentralized file storage without paying for it.
We can try to design decentralized, permissionless file systems that correctly incentivize the storage and bandwidth providers, and the users of the system need to pay for it somehow. Whether or not these can remain permissionless given the need to host these on servers is open to further contemplation and study. Most all hosting providers include in their Terms of Sevice a restriction on hosting illegal copyrighted content, so unless one can provide a mechanism for which illegal content is removed from the system, it seems to me that hosts will be forced to ban the protocol (system).
So where I am headed with this line of thinking is that we ought to just give up on illegal content and illegal uses of anonymity. It isn't going to work. It is a fantasy.