[Din] Re: next steps for DINRG

[William Lehr <[e-mail]>]

Yes to this and Christian Huitema's comments.

On 10/22/24 2:55 AM, Jon Crowcroft wrote:
> what if 90% of those blockchain/cryptocurrency nodes are running in 
> the same country on a network powerd by a single electricity provider? 
> with a single state controlled border to the rest of the world, for IP 
> and people? or indeed we could have a decentralised phone-based 
> currency that requires SIMs from a specific provider and government 
> regstraton of users of those SIMs/phones with national id 
> cards/passports ....
>
> note the other way around, many cloud service providers are 
> administratively/economically/politically (e.g. subject to laws from 
> one dominant jurisdicrtion) centralised, but use decentralised or at 
> least distributed or federated techniques to provide resilience - 
> hence replicated state machines/consensus algorithms, conflict-free 
> replicated data types all allow systems to scale across multiple data 
> centers so that we get fault tolerance and continuous operation, but 
> they are not organisationally decentralised in any way.
>
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 8:33 PM Thomas Hardjono <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>     Just some quick thoughts on the “What’s next” question.
>
>     One of the things DINRG could focus on is the standards
>     (architectures, protocols, etc.) and tools to measure the degree
>     of decentralization of systems and networks (notably those
>     DLT-based offerings that claim to be “decentralized”).
>
>     Let’s say a DLT network (e.g. blockchain) has 100 nodes and the
>     network claims to be operating in decentralized manner.   What if
>     it turns out that 90% of those nodes are actually VMs running in
>     the cloud, and what if it turns out that 90% of those cloud-based
>     VMs are running on the same Cloud Provider? (worse, what if
>     they’re running on the same  Zones, like US-West and US-East). 
>     Would you accept their claim of decentralization seriously?
>
>     Some possible future work for DINRG:
>
>     -- Could DIN look at protocols that report on which nodes are
>     running on bare-metal, versus physically separated VMs, versus VMs
>     clustered in a given zone.
>
>     -- Could Device-ID and device-stack identifiers be useful
>     (building on protocols defined in the RATS WG and TEEP WG).
>
>     -- Could DIN leverage the work already being done in the IEF WGs
>     (e.g. RATS, SCITT, etc), and also from other industry bodies (e.g.
>     TCG DICE; OpenCompute; Confidential Computing Consortium; etc).
>
>     -- Could DIN be the funnel/filter into which near-mature proposal
>     can be fed into working groups in the IETF. An example of this was
>     the Group Security RG (GSEC) that funneled some ready items into
>     the MSEC WG.
>
>     https://www.irtf.org/concluded/gsec.html
>
>     https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/msec/about/
>
>     PS. Yes I’m aware of economic papers/analysis stating that
>     efficiency and cost-savings favors centralization.  In contrast,
>     I’m referring to future so-called Web3 systems that bake-in
>     decentralization patterns to avoid these concentrations of power.
>
>     Best
>
>     --thomas
>
>     *From: *Chad Kohalyk <[e-mail]>
>     *Date: *Friday, October 18, 2024 at 12:41 PM
>     *To: *[e-mail] <[e-mail]>
>     *Subject: *[Din] Re: next steps for DINRG
>
>     Thanks Dirk.
>
>     One possibility is to discuss “What now?”
>
>     I think that was one of the conclusions of the IETF120 discussion:
>     who should DINRG collaborate with in order to effect change?
>
>     In other words, what is DINRG’s theory of change? Where does the
>     research go once it is complete? Is DINRG’s role purely
>     observatory? On who’s behalf? (merely the IRTF?)
>
>     Possibly these were answered when DINRG was stood up, but based on
>     the conversation in Vancouver it didn’t seem like the community
>     understood what’s next.
>
>     So I submit this as a topic suggestion.
>
>     Thank you,
>
>     Chad Kohalyk
>
>     On Fri, Oct 18, 2024, at 1:41 AM, Dirk Kutscher wrote:
>
>         Dear all,
>
>         in Dublin, we are planning to continue our discussion on next
>         steps for DINRG.
>
>         To that end, we are soliciting suggestions, interests
>         indications, and questions here. If you have a suggestion,
>         please feel free to share it here or by personal e-mail.
>
>         We will collect everything and then prepare a summary before
>         the meeting.
>
>         As a bit of background:
>
>         As chartered, DINRG has different objectives:
>
>           * Investigation of the root causes of Internet
>             centralization, and articulation of the impacts of the
>             market economy, architecture and protocol designs, as well
>             as government regulations;
>           * Measurement of the Internet centralization and the
>             consequential societal impacts;
>           * Characterization and assessment of observed Internet
>             centralization;
>           * Development of a common terminology and understanding of
>             (de-)centralization;
>           * Interaction with the broader research community to explore
>             new research topics and technical solutions for
>             decentralized system and application development;
>           * Documentation of the outcome from the above efforts via
>             different means (e.g., research papers and RFCs) as inputs
>             to the broader conversation around centralization; and
>           * Facilitation of discussions between researchers,
>             organizations and individuals involved in Internet
>             standards and regulations.
>
>         Let us know, which of these objectives should be emphasized in
>         your view, and whether you have specific interests within
>         these topics that should be discussed more.
>
>         Best regards,
>
>         Dirk and Lixia
>
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  Dr. William Lehr
  Research Associate
  Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
  
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