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Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

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Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#21

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

mabbo wrote: post #6
cjslep wrote: post #3

Decentralized infrastructure with federated transactions describes many successful technologies such as email. I think federation is just a design tool meant to solve a specific problem, much like decentralization, programming language choice, data structures, etc are more concrete software engineering ones.

Certificate authorities seems to follow the same pattern. I wonder if we might see a crytocurrency someday follow that same pattern: the chain is decentralized and public, but the miners are each replaced by authorities that a user can choose to accept (or not). The downside to this would be disagreements over who actually owns what. You'd only be able to make a transaction if both the buyer and seller agree on who o…

Those "authorities" could still be expending energy, be it marketing dollars or actual compute time, to jockey to be "the authority" trusted by users, though.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#22

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

smilesnd wrote: post #11

Decentralize does work when state doesn't matter. Look at tor for a example. When state matters federation is a better match such as emails. The real problem with executing decentralize/federate is it runs on the backbones of a centralized design network. IPv6 helps with that problem, but still at the end of the day dealing with all the complexity, headaches, and unknowns it is more simple to build a centralize solut…

"The real problem with executing decentralize/federate is it runs on the backbones of a centralized design network."

This is the crux of the current landscape exactly.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#23

Post by moviuro »

pjc50 wrote: post #13

I think you're looking in the right direction - governance. The problems of governance are real. There's a libertarian tendency to just try to define them away, but this underestimates the extent to which abuse questions are important and how a few bad actors can overwhelm a distributed system, requiring considerable dedicated central effort to fight. USENET had its cancels ( http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/…

> Similarly Linux has "Linus decentralisation": there's an elaborate decentralised version control system, but nonetheless Linus has effective final veto in practice. And Etherum has "Vitalik decentralisation": disasters such as the DAO can be reversed by code changes, because even if the blockchain is immutable the code required to interpret it isn't.

There is nothing but "sheep mentality" preventing most people from (hard) forking.

Don't like what Ethereum did with the DAO incident? Don't patch. See https://ethereumclassic.github.io/

Don't like what Linus did (not) merge? Fork the project, and patch it like you want. See https://grsecurity.net/features.php

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#24

Post by ryanlol »

smilesnd wrote: post #11

Decentralize does work when state doesn't matter. Look at tor for a example. When state matters federation is a better match such as emails. The real problem with executing decentralize/federate is it runs on the backbones of a centralized design network. IPv6 helps with that problem, but still at the end of the day dealing with all the complexity, headaches, and unknowns it is more simple to build a centralize solut…

>Look at tor for a example

Is tor not a federation of onion routers?

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#25

Post by imbokodo »

The US Treasury department says trading in Petro cryptocoins would violate US sanctions against Venezuela. So Bitfinex will not trade in it. Coinmarketcap.com lists over 1500 cryptocoins, but not the Petro.

This sort of things shows up the myth of decentralization. Only one cryptocoin with elements of decentralization has been truly challenged, and has basically collapsed under US government pressure. It shows "decentralization" only exists until one powerful country challenges it. Which effectively means all cryptocoins may as well be directed by the US Federal Reserve. Which means you might as well buy dollars if that is the case.

While this is all the case, it can not be proved, so can be dismissed. What it does portend - the complete collapse of Bitcoin at some point - can not be dismissed though.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#26

Post by y_molodtsov »

kuschku wrote: post #8
skaul wrote: post #7

About federation in particular: Moxie wrote about why Signal is unfederated a little while back: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ It has some interesting insights into when federation works and when it doesn’t. “Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is poss…

Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead. You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system. Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibilit…

And how many consumer users does that project have? Federated clients lost.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#27

Post by smilesnd »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #18
smilesnd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything started to use blockchains then we could all be decentralized by 2035.

What do you feel about this statement/observation: If everyone started to use hybrids then we could all be in electric cars by 2035.

Truth just for the fact most people buy a new vehicle every 10 years or so mattering different things. Plus I hear in certain places they getting rid of the gasoline so people will be more in a rush to purchase something running electricity sooner then later.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#28

Post by y_molodtsov »

cjslep wrote: post #3

Decentralized infrastructure with federated transactions describes many successful technologies such as email. I think federation is just a design tool meant to solve a specific problem, much like decentralization, programming language choice, data structures, etc are more concrete software engineering ones.

Email is a relic of an old era and isn’t a very good example. It wouldn’t catch on if it emerged just now. More and more modern email clients starts to add things on top of the protocol turning their apps into walled gardens (Polymail, Spark, Gmail too actually). Not because they’re evil, because it’s impossible for some players to update the protocol itself.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#29

Post by kuschku »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
kuschku wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead. You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system. Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibilit…

If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.

Marketing, marketing, and amount of money that goes into that development.

Give me a few thousand developers, a multi billion dollar ad budget, and the ability to signup every facebook user on the planet to my messaging service, and I'll also win against XMPP. In fact, with those resources carrier pidgeons would've won against XMPP.

Re: Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

#30

Post by TeMPOraL »

smilesnd wrote: post #12
bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #4

I will say it: Decentralization has definitely been overhyped by certain fringes - that doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bath water, though. The cry to “decentralize all the things” does include moving things incrementally from single choke point to multiple choke points to multiple choke points working together with a byzantium consensus mechanism to a truly decentralized model without a single point of fail…

If everything started to use blockchains then we could all be decentralized by 2035.

If by "decentralized" you mean the 10% of us who wouldn't starve during the first month would be running around the ruins of our civilization with spears, hunting animals and each other, day in, day out.

We couldn't survive the loss of efficiency that would happen if "everything started to use blockchains".

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