As a tech illiterate, what makes DAT superior to the standard p2p and blockchain technology? If my understanding is wrong, can someone explain in laymen term why DAT matters for the future?
It seems closer to bittorrent than anything blockchain related.
Specifically it seems like a better version of bittorrent. It seems to be more resilient that bittorrent, better able to do updates than bittorrent (they apparently promise to have live updates by multiple writers, implying one could host for example a live database in a dat URL), better able to find optimal peers than bittorrent, better security around discovery, a flexible datamodel (e.g. the data being shared does not have to be files and folders, where as bittorrent would require wrapping that in a file, this can allow the transparency through the protocol layer)
Say you have a 1 GB file that you want to share with everybody in this thread. How do you do this? What if you have thousands of such files? In theory, DAT and similar DHT-based file sharing protocols, can enable us to implement something like YouTube, but without the enormous costs for running the datacenters. In practice, ISPs won't let this happen and DAT-like protocols will be limited to the world of VPSes that have static IP addresses.
My hope is that asynchronous swarm based applications ("dweb") will work so well without ISPs (e.g. on dynamic local networks and mesh networks) that they will pose an existential threat to ISPs.
>Say you have a 1 GB file that you want to share with everybody in this thread. How do you do this?
You'd just create a dat feed for it and share that address in the thread. You can do that directly from Beaker Browser easily.
If everyone on the thread was getting it, you might only have to upload slightly more than 1Gb data, as all the chunks could be shared between the other people.
Same as bittorrent, but even better because you can easily add more files to the feed later.
When you read "blockchain" always think "decentralized: cool; wasteful: not cool". I think it was designed like this on purpose, but besides creating a value store it's not a reasonable choice. Also it's a list structure, which inherently does not represent reality. E.g. if you and I both agree about the blockchain until September 13 2018, but afterwards have different opinions about how it should go on, there is not way to present that misunderstanding in the technology. (It's possible if you put an abstraction layer on top, but that's another topic. You can put almost all protocols/algos on top of each other.)
So it's wasteful and can't represent reality well. So it's quite limited to how far we can use it as a whole species.
It's less the Amazon of algorithms and more the Myspace. In 15 years it will still have some impact in the abstract sense of how it influenced technology, but blockchain itself is unlikely to still be there.
