Bitcoin Masterclasses Slovenia: The structure of distributed systems and search for information

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In the third session of the second day of the Bitcoin Masterclasses in Slovenia, Dr. Wright delved deeper into the structure of distributed systems and addressed how we can connect, index and search for information about them.

What should distributed systems look like?

Dr. Wright begins with a demonstration of how BTC works today. He shows how nodes do not act in a true peer-to-peer fashion, but rather send information to ISPs who forward it.

“It’s not a mesh network with multiple connections, but we can still do it,” he says.

What if one of our links goes down? We lose the connection. That’s why we might want more links. Dr. Wright says that the more links we have, the more it will cost, but the better the overall resilience will be.

“As Bitcoin itself is distributed, your individual node can also be distributed,” he says.

Looking back at an earlier lecture, Dr. Wright reminded the participants that we discussed applications in different locations, such as data centers and cities. This makes them far more resilient.

In addition to the physical location of nodes and the infrastructure they run on, we also need to think about how they connect and communicate with each other, says Dr. Wright, adding to his diagram. In a three-node setup, we can use multicast, ensuring that the information the main node sends goes to the other two.

As Dr. Wright said in his first Masterclass series in London, with User Datagram Protocol (UDP), if the information doesn’t reach the other nodes, it just doesn’t, and any detection of information that is missed will have to be at the application level. However, with Reliable Data Protocol (RDP), the packets will be retransmitted (including by anycast) until the other nodes receive them. We have to think about all this when we design the systems that will work as part of a corporate network or as part of applications.

“If we start thinking about a decentralized distributed system, it is not about avoiding legal responsibility [like the crypto bros]; it’s about making something that will continue to work, even allowing disaster zones to continue to work,” Dr. Wright tells us. The most important thing to think about is how they should be structured.

Connect, find and search for information

Looking at the bigger picture, Dr. Wright says all of this could be the birth of a new type of data center. Maybe Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ) won’t run everything in the future.

When we build applications and sort information, we need to be able to find it, connect it, etc. “Why do you think Google searches for information? What is Google delivering?” asks Dr. Wright. It is an index.

When we have these multicast groups that we’ve been talking about, we have to find ways to link information between the groups so that people know it’s there. The groups must also have ways to respond and allow people to join. While we may have some traditional approaches, databases of databases are the likely outcome, Dr. Wright tells us. We need to leave behind the idea that there is “one big Google out there”.

Speaking of accessing all of this, this is where payments come in. Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) doesn’t do what they do out of altruism; everything is about profit. Likewise, any alternative will be driven by the same profit incentive.

Despite being the biggest search engine, Google isn’t very good, and as a result we have a “terrible internet”, according to Dr Wright. He outlines how we can have search that only shows what we’re looking for, such as the name of a band and the music, since the band will have paid to host their music on a node and will receive micropayments when it’s played.

Watch: Bitcoin Masterclass 2 with Craig Wright on Multicast and IP2IP

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