On this episode of Venture Stories, Erik is joined by co-host Tony Sheng to interview John Backus (@backus), founder of Bloom and Cognito, two companies working on decentralized lending and identity.

Co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) leads product at Decentraland. He also publishes analyses on the business and strategy of crypto at tonysheng.com and is one of Village’s Network Leaders.

John recently wrote a popular post about the history of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He joins Erik and Tony to expand on the post and talk about what that history can teach us about decentralization today.

He takes us through the history of file sharing apps from Napster to Kazaa to BitTorrent. He explains why the way BitTorrent is architected “doesn’t make sense” from a technical point of view and why the legal system has had such an impact on the way BitTorrent works.

John explains some of the legal challenges to peer-to-peer sharing and how they’ve adjusted. The push to decentralize is often considered a recent phenomenon but he describes a number of projects from many years ago that are actually pretty similar to what people are attempting to build today. He even talks about an early version of a token that was created by a decentralized file sharing service back in the early 2000s.

He concludes with why a number of these projects didn’t succeed and what lessons they have for decentralized projects today. He explains that the UX of decentralized services is often very poor, which makes it “an order of magnitude harder to find product-market fit.”

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Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.