I read the post, thanks, it was very interesting. It didn't address at all the concerns about a malicious user inspecting the IP sender field, however, but I suppose one could argue that because availability is high the network can incur the costs of malicious users as long as they do not get above a certain percentage of the entire user base.
Now, one problem with his math is this: the assumption is that any node that goes down will eventually come back up. However, this isn't the case. Say I get a new laptop and throw my old one out or otherwise wipe its drive. Well that's no longer part of the distributed network anymore. Of course, you can add to your file storage protocol by shifting files around as nodes go down, but that adds a lot of complexity.
Ultimately, the problems that are trying to be solved here are very difficult and I think a satisfactory solution via distributed computing is unlikely unless you are willing to make severe trade-offs (such as the ones I suggested, use trusted servers).
Now, making trade-offs doesn't make it useless. It just means the system isn't useful in all cases. Realistically, the data you have on your laptop probably isn't so important that it needs to be replicated across the globe, encrypted, and stored in such a way that the government can't access it. And if it is? Well, it's probably much simpler to just encrypt it on your end, send it to AWS, and get on with whatever you were doing that's so important.
Now, one problem with his math is this: the assumption is that any node that goes down will eventually come back up. However, this isn't the case. Say I get a new laptop and throw my old one out or otherwise wipe its drive. Well that's no longer part of the distributed network anymore. Of course, you can add to your file storage protocol by shifting files around as nodes go down, but that adds a lot of complexity.
Ultimately, the problems that are trying to be solved here are very difficult and I think a satisfactory solution via distributed computing is unlikely unless you are willing to make severe trade-offs (such as the ones I suggested, use trusted servers).
Now, making trade-offs doesn't make it useless. It just means the system isn't useful in all cases. Realistically, the data you have on your laptop probably isn't so important that it needs to be replicated across the globe, encrypted, and stored in such a way that the government can't access it. And if it is? Well, it's probably much simpler to just encrypt it on your end, send it to AWS, and get on with whatever you were doing that's so important.