# Please, do not decentralize the Internet with (permissionless) blockchains!

## TL;DR

This paper critically examines the limitations of open peer-to-peer and permissionless blockchain systems, arguing they are unsuitable for a decentralized Internet and proposing a shift towards trusted, permissioned networks for edge computing.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of the failures of peer-to-peer systems and analyzes the constraints of permissionless blockchains, advocating for permissioned blockchains to enable practical decentralization.

## Key findings

- Peer-to-peer systems have historically failed in naming, social networking, and storage.
- Permissionless blockchains share many limitations with peer-to-peer systems, such as security and performance issues.
- Permissioned blockchains can facilitate trust and decentralization through trusted third parties, especially at the network edge.

## Abstract

The old mantra of decentralizing the Internet is coming again with fanfare, this time around the blockchain technology hype. We have already seen a technology supposed to change the nature of the Internet: peer-to-peer. The reality is that peer-to-peer naming systems failed, peer-to-peer social networks failed, and yes, peer-to-peer storage failed as well. In this paper, we will review the research on distributed systems in the last few years to identify the limits of open peer-to-peer networks. We will address issues like system complexity, security and frailty, instability and performance. We will show how many of the aforementioned problems also apply to the recent breed of permissionless blockchain networks. The applicability of such systems to mature industrial applications is undermined by the same properties that make them so interesting for a libertarian audience: namely, their openness, their pseudo-anonymity and their unregulated cryptocurrencies. As such, we argue that permissionless blockchain networks are unsuitable to be the substrate for a decentralized Internet. Yet, there is still hope for more decentralization, albeit in a form somewhat limited with respect to the libertarian view of decentralized Internet: in cooperation rather than in competition with the superpowerful datacenters that dominate the world today. This is derived from the recent surge in interest in byzantine fault tolerance and permissioned blockchains, which opens the door to a world where use of trusted third parties is not the only way to arbitrate an ensemble of entities. The ability of establish trust through permissioned blockchains enables to move the control from the datacenters to the edge, truly realizing the promises of edge-centric computing.