Aether: Distributing social networks without distributed consensus

[nehbit]

Aether: Distributing mass-communication networks without distributed consensus

Description

The ongoing discussion about decentralisation has been dominated by the talk of blockchains for the past year. While they do work in certain fields, in mass-comms networks the bottleneck and restrictions imposed by the distributed consensus render it challenging to build a usable mass-communication platform on a blockchain that does not suffer from speed issues.

This talk explores a different way of building networks that does not depend on distributed consensus. By making a small number of tradeoffs, it is possible to build a network that can scale to 10^3x the speed in inserting new data and distributing it. Aether is one such attempt, and both it and the underlying protocol is open source. This talk will focus on how it ended up coming to be, why, and how it works, and what you can build with the underlying protocol.

Type: talk
Length: 30 minutes
Additional considerations: N/A

Session Objective

• It is possible & easy to build distributed apps outside blockchains, and it is much more rewarding / useful to do so
• A possible way of structuring your apps to not need distributed consensus
• How an app of this form works in the backend as a case study

Material and Technical Requirements

Projector. Otherwise N/A

Presenter(s)

Name: Burak Nehbit
Email: burak@getaether.net
Url(s): Aether, GitHub
Twitter: @nehbit
GitHub: nehbit

Interested in attending the sprint July 16-18: N
Interested in a community billet: billet

Presenter Bio

Burak is an engineer and designer. He worked at Google for 3.5 years, and afterwards, at Facebook. Since February, he's been working on Aether full time.