Bitcloud proposes nothing less than an entire shadow internet, built using a heavily modified version of the bitcoin protocol

Programmers famously have to balance their technical concepts with the needs of the human beings on which their projects rely. Too often, an engineer's tunnel-vision means they end up focusing on the stuff that can be fixed, and abstract away the rest.

The latest example can be found in Bitcloud, a software project announced breathlessly to Reddit as aiming to "replace YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, ISPs, and more with decentralised apps".

Nobody can accuse the Bitcloud team of aiming low. Their proposal – which currently exists only in draft form – is nothing less than an entire shadow internet, built using a heavily modified version of the bitcoin protocol.

Where bitcoin uses a "proof of work" system, requiring users to demonstrate that they have spent processing power before they can verify transactions, Bitcloud proposes a "proof of bandwidth" equivalent, rewarding users for providing capacity to the network.

The Bitcloud project is in such early days that it has yet to decide quite what proof of bandwidth actually entails, but the team is confident they will flesh out the white spaces.

In principle, there's little reason why they shouldn't succeed. The biggest leap has already been made by bitcoin, which demonstrates that a network with no centralisation can work even without any trust between members.

Bitcloud promises to "replace many of the centralised applications on the current internet, such as YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, Spotify, and others with decentralised, open-source alternatives.

Decentralising the internet

"We will have to start by decentralising the current internet, and then we can create a new internet to replace it. If you're interested in privacy, security, ending internet censorship, decentralising the internet, and creating a new mesh network to replace the internet, then you should join or support this project."

But Bitcloud isn't the first to attempt to replace major aspects of the internet with a decentralised network; in 2010, Diaspora raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter to build a peer-to-peer replacement for centralised social networks. Anyone can run a disapora "node", hosting their data on a server under their control, neatly sidestepping issues of copyright and monetization. Users can also join nodes run by others.

But Diaspora solved an interesting technological problem without dealing with the people at its heart. The project is still ongoing – in fact, version 0.3.0.1 was released on Tuesday – but has been struggling to scale. It turns out that people prefer social networks which all their friends are on, and that innovative technological solutions to problems of privacy are rarely enough to overcome that hurdle.

Bitcloud has the same problem but magnified tenfold. Diaspora nodes are, at least, accessible to those who aren't on the network, so that if you were to share photos there, others could see them, although they couldn't interact unless they also joined a Diaspora node. By contrast, Bitcloud nodes are invisible unless the user is also running Bitcloud.

We now have the technology to build a fully decentralised, impossible to censor second internet with no content on it and no one using it. But the future's going to be some time coming.

• eBay clamping down on UK bitcoin sales