[tahoe-dev] One Grid to Rule Them All

[Callme Whatiwant]

Dear Distributed Secure Storage fans,

The time has come to shed our conspiratorial pretense of being nothing but
small disparate bands of neighborly do gooders sharing storage with their
friends.  It is time to reveal to the world our true conquest of world
domination and announce our intent to create The One Grid to Rule Them All!

What on earth is he talking about, you may be asking?  I'm talking about
extending the Boring Old Web (BOW) with the ossm-sauce that is Tahoe-LAFS
so that we can spring our despotic vision of provider independent security
on the unsuspecting subjects of our new world order!

Capabilities should be universally shareable in the same contexts as URLs
in general!  This is our vision!  Dissent on this manner is heretical (but
we will still openly accept mailing list posts, ticket submission and
herding, documentation help, patches, and any other contributions from such
counter-revolutionaries).


Ok, enough thespianism:

I personally want to be able to email or tweet or inscribe on papyrus a URL
containing a read cap, and anyone who sees that and has Tahoe-LAFS version
Glorious Future installed should have a reasonable chance to retrieve the
content.

How could this be designed and implemented?  There are myriad trade-offs to
consider:

Non-global use case:  A fair number of users probably want a *non global
grid* such as for their own enterprise or collective, so it would be nice
to avoid dumping more complexity on them.  On the other hand, if the
features were opt in, that adds configuration complexity.

Storage Management Policy: Some schemes would automate share placement
using some fancy DHT related technology, but that would interfere with
individual users and storage operators from deciding where their data lives.

Efficiency / Latency / Reliability:  Some schemes would add a separate
global resolution system, but this adds round trips (latency), reliability.

Incentives: A non-global grid often has "natural incentives" (same company,
same friend group, etc..)  A global system has different incentive issues.
 See [1].

Mental Models: Some schemes may be complex to understand, reducing the
ability of many users to anticipate the effects of their choices or whom or
what they are relying upon and for what features.

Implementation Cost: Some schemes may be complex to implement, increasing
the time to implement, the chance of bugs, etc...


There are probably many other tradeoffs I fail to account for, I just want
to get the ball rolling on this.  Let's be really clear about the costs of
various approaches.

As a concrete step, I propose a new ticket keyword: "globalcaps" for any
ticket related to making capabilities globally usable.


Regards,
Comrade Nathan
Grid Universalist

References:

[1] The Tahoe-LAFS community has a great awareness of incentive issues.
 This is a good starting page:

https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Ostrom
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