This article describes the process and idea of designing a decentralized github (what with the China DDOS attack and other benefits of a decentralized project like this). Toward the end of the article, Chris Ball talks about using the bitcoin blockchain (or just the technology) as a project to decentralize username registration. I thought that this was a great idea!
@dirvine, you might appreciate this one. Don’t take too long to read it though, I’m still waiting for a MaidSafe beta to play with!
It is funny that I see every tech discussed now like they would be on the SAFE level. GitTorrent sounds brilliant to me and is just begging for a motivated person to make it happen.
I found a link to this on safenetwork.io and it was an absolute
pleasure to read. I am in the process of building a couple of projects
on github and had never considered your thought provoking discussion.
You should immediately see the value in Project SAFE (maidsafe.net)
and I highly recommend you consider building gittorrent on top of that
network. In my naive understanding it seems you guys are are building
in the same direction and could have a very symbiotic relationship.
Well Github was indeed down for hours last year.
But everyone (all devs) has a validated copy on their local disk.
What does copying it around in a decentralized achieve and at what cost? GitHub.com can go down, as we saw before, but is 100% free for the users (no need to keep your PC up or do anything in particular) because it’s so efficient to have one central copy.
If the idea was so great, can someone tell us how successful this decentralized Git project is today?
@janitor I think it will be a critical feature to store code repos on safe network… I was just thinking about how that Nest acquisition went down with Revolv… One day something somewhere can eliminate github.com
If relying on the local copy of a repo then this makes availability difficult.
I plan on building a git remote helper for safe:// once structured/immutable data and self encrypted data are supported via the launcher API. Git remote helpers are real easy to build. For example, here is one for ipfs: GitHub - cryptix/git-remote-ipfs: git transport helper for ipfs.
I’ve already said this is a silly idea and I’m not changing my opinion, but I just wanted to add that people are already doing this on ZeroNet. You simply publish code as Web content.
Content on ZeroNet is already signed by the publisher, so if you trust the publisher (or can get the checksums from a trusted source via email or other way), you can clone a repo by simply pointing your git client to a ZeroNet HTTP site.
Also, ZeroNet has decentralized user registration. Although it’s not required to register per se. Each publisher is identified by a bitcoin address and that’s used to sign code. There’s no need to register for anything.
And if the host allows other users (identified by their bitcoin address, respectively) to make changes, multiple people can edit code at the same time. This feature relies on multisig and is currently buggy but it’s already built in.