Bitcoin Masterclasses in Slovenia: What are distributed hash tables?

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In the first session of the second day of the Bitcoin Masterclasses in Slovenia, Dr. Craig Wright talked about distributed hash tables, how they can help create robust, truly decentralized networks, and how the kind of networks we’ve been talking about could break out. take back control from the Silicon Valley giants and return it to the individual.

Distributed hash tables

Dr. Wright begins the morning session with the concept of distributed hash tables (DHT). They act as a method of distributing information across many servers and are usually associated with companies and individuals who operate various services.

Dr. Wright then asks the participants if any of them have worked with DHTs. A participant answers that he has worked on Hadoop. He elaborates that this is a standard key-value style database spread across multiple nodes. You push information to it and it is distributed based on the hash. Dr. Wright raises this point to emphasize that decentralized does not mean what people think it does; in a sense, he uses the word, DHTs are decentralized in that they are stored on multiple nodes.

Robust, decentralized networks

Then comes a hypothetical question; what if you are in one of the multicast groups discussed earlier and want to have all the information sent to you but you are not online 24/7?

Straight up, you won’t get it. You can ask another group member to update you or set up machines to stay online. Dr. Wright compares this to setting up FNet or IRC programs to continue receiving information when you are offline.

He emphasizes that this is what a robust, decentralized network means; if you have one node and it goes offline, it’s not good, but if you have two or more, the chance of losing information becomes much lower. More nodes are better, but there are diminishing returns after the first few.

Envisioning an alternative to Twitter, Dr. Wright rightly says that we don’t want to ask our group to give us all the information we missed while we were away. Instead of doing this, we have our listener respond and say we’re gone, but request that the information be sent to it anyway. We then connect to this machine with our phone when we are online and retrieve the information.

Such robots will be very cheap and affordable to run. They will be run on micropayments. Furthermore, they can be encrypted so that the information in them is only accessible with your key.

“Now we’re getting to the point where we have a better, more robust version of Twitter,” says Dr. Wright.

“How many servers do we use at Amazon? How many at Google or Bing?” asks Dr. Wright. The answer, of course, is no one, which is why neither of them want to talk about this kind of thing. They don’t want users to do any of this because they want to be in control of all the data. He points out that Twitter or Google ( NASDAQ: GOOGL ) can join open groups and soak up all the information anyway, but it’s much more difficult when there are so many potential groups.

“See how this is going to be a different model?” Dr. Wright asks rhetorically, smiling as he describes how Silicon Valley firms like Meta and Twitter won’t be able to collect data and snoop on us. This is what he meant by decentralization when he spoke as Satoshi Nakamoto.

Access to distributed data, promoting competition and restoring privacy

With distributed systems like the ones Dr. Wright outlines, there are solutions to many of the problems big Silicon Valley companies created today. He says that having standards for data access and access to them in several ways can improve things.

For example, people can create competing apps that can access the data stored on the blockchain, allowing users to migrate from one to another while still having access to the data provided they have the keys to unlock it (such as using a seed set to switch between wallets).

This competition between app developers will foster innovation, something Silicon Valley hasn’t seen in a long time because a few monopolies literally own the networks they operate on. With DHTs, we have a new way to distribute and hold information in a truly decentralized way.

Dr. Wright then delves into how two parties can use peer-to-peer networks like the one he describes to communicate securely and even pseudonymously. Once again, this cuts out data harvesters who want access to our communications for various agendas. “Privacy means giving back to the individual,” says Dr. Wright, driving home the point.

Dr. Wright harkens back to his previous talks at the London Masterclass, and outlines how we can share certain information with interested parties without divulging unnecessary information. This will also restore a level of privacy the world has not seen in a long time.

See: Bitcoin Masterclasses Identity and Privacy

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