The general idea of decentralization is a reasonable one, until you realize that it would make most websites that handle thousands of users a day utterly useless. Websites like banks, insurance providers, healthcare, automotive, etc. (not to mention retailers, streaming services, etc) all handle many thousands of transactions a day, and the only reason they can handle all that traffic is through widespread use of CDNs. And CDNs are the polar opposite of decentralization. Any change to the underlying internet protocols would still need to be supported by the likes of Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS, etc. There’s simply no way the modern internet would work without them.
This isn’t entirely true, some of these systems are simply not speed optimized, and even then there still always has to be one source of ground truth.
I want people to mail me letters but you can’t know my address. Hmm
Not to necessarily defend the idea in the article, but that comment screams that you just read the headline and not the article.
If you had read the article, you would know that the author doesn’t want to get rid of routable addresses, they want to replace the current system of IP address assignments with an automated cryptographic address system, allowing network size to rapidly increase, and self organise without reliance on a central address authority. So your analogy of having no address at all is massive misrepresentation of the authors idea.
Wildly misrepresentating ideas is never good. Even if you dislike it, by wildly misrepresentating the idea, it just discredits your own stance, because it’s (seemingly) based on falsehoods.
Pretending like the author just wants to just abolish all types of routing addresses is dishonest.
So… just the P?
Let’s face it, even if he managed to get it working for himself, he’d still have to fight to get it adopted. The way I see it, most people won’t care and simply think it would be too much of a hassle to switch to anything. The ones who do care cannot wait to have everything in IPv6.
And given how “fast” IPv6 adoption has been, switch to something non-IP based is not going to happen any time soon.
Also, while I kind of get the idea author is talking about, pulling random addresses out of thin air and managing routing for that, even on a small scale, is going to have a crapload problems. Without subnet hierarchy with routes, gateways and stuff would mean something like globally broadcasted ARP packets and absolutely massive routing tables on endpoints. Plus with that approach the reslience of IP-networks would be lost (or routing tables would need to grow even more).
Also there’s some pretty big issues with malicious actors on the network, incompatibility with every router on planet and a ton more. What that kind of approach working globally would need is some scifi-level networking without latency or bandwidth limitations.
You still need some way of identifying individual devices on the Internet, if not an IP address, then something that may as well be.
Every network card has a MAC address, but those aren’t routable.
There’s nothing saying that you can’t have a global decentralized network, but the Internet Protocol is pretty central to the network we call the Internet.
But full decentralization would break every major website, not to mention countless smaller ones. There’s a reason CDNs like Cloudflare, Akamai, etc. exist. Websites for retailers, banks, healthcare, etc. would all be useless without them. You’d be lucky to load one page an hour on your banks website if they didn’t use a CDN.
Edit: whoever gave the drive-by downvote care to explain why I’m wrong?
