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What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

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Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#71

Post by DoctorOetker »

jodrellblank wrote: post #48
specialist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Added to reading list. Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable. I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome. I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations. Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System. -- I joined a FOSS…

Have you read anything by Pieter Hintjens, the creator of ZeroMQ? He wrote quite a lot on organising people, particularly software development, but instead of focusing on how to make people efficient, he focused on how to organise the group to protect from opportunistic outsiders / psychopaths coming in and taking personal advantage and destroying the group in the process. After having his early work ruined several t…

you guys are rediscovering the birth of "in-group socialism"

just make sure that anyone who wants can join (by complying), otherwise if people are left out by definition from joining (can't change property X) you're just recreating "national socialism"

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#72

Post by jacques_chester »

jodrellblank wrote: post #48
specialist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Added to reading list. Also, nice tidbit about SAIC. It seems that many coops get coopted. Suggesting there's some as yet unknown magic sauce that makes some coops more durable. I'm very interested in comparative governance models. All tips, links welcome. I just want someone to point at some real world working organizations. Kinda like how QA obsessives study the Toyota Production System. -- I joined a FOSS…

Have you read anything by Pieter Hintjens, the creator of ZeroMQ? He wrote quite a lot on organising people, particularly software development, but instead of focusing on how to make people efficient, he focused on how to organise the group to protect from opportunistic outsiders / psychopaths coming in and taking personal advantage and destroying the group in the process. After having his early work ruined several t…

The story of life on earth generally and human civilisation generally is one of constant adaptations between parasites and predators and the defenders against parasites and predators.

Ecology and population biology are fascinating sources of ideas in this regard.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#75

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably have huge moats to competition. I've heard lots of comments along the lines of "I wish Amazon had more competition!", but then those same folks will choose a service if it's 10c cheaper or if a product can arrive an hour faster.

On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is not huge consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation. E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business.

As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and consolidation of services.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#76

Post by jayd16 »

marknadal wrote: post #70

Idk what the author is talking about. Bittorrent was 40% of the world's traffic, more than Google's at that point! And we, my decentralized protocol, just grew from 2M to 15M monthly active users. ( https://github.com/amark/gun ) It seems to be working.

Torrent links are centralized in trackers and you'd see a single tracker site dominate if the legal atmosphere allowed for it.

And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#77

Post by pjc50 »

zelly wrote: post #34

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace…

> torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.)

This is one of those things that can only exist so long as it's a minority interest; whenever piracy becomes "mainstream" action will be taken against it, such as your ISP portscanning for it and banning you.

> personal Bitcoin node (replace banking

Likewise the minority safety, and has all the disadvantages of keeping cash at home as well as still needing a centralish interface to the real financial system.

Also, who's going to fight the spam? That was the crippling problem for both SMTP and USENET; SMTP built a mountain of filters for this, including centralised blacklists. USENET never quite fully solved it until it went obsolete. Anyone attempting to return to that world would do very well to look at the problems of those two and all the attempted solutions.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#78

Post by bjornjaja »

zelly wrote: post #59
humanrebar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud is probably a harder problem than discoverability. You can always exchange (maybe through an automated pairing) IPv6 addresses if nothing else. Supporting chargebacks, eliminating spam, blocking phishing, etc. if both harder and more important to a functioning culture.

Agreed. More broadly, decentralization is less equipped to counteract bad actors. You really are on your own, but isn't that what you asked for when you wanted to abandon Facebook/Google/government. A decentralized network cannot be trusted by nature. Anyone can join and lie. Successful decentralized networks need some cryptographically-secure checksum to verify its inputs: BitTorrent uses SHA-1; Bitcoin uses Merkle…

The dialup era makes more sense actually—services are designed more bandwidth-conscious and ad networks don’t masquerade on every website in existence.

As for streaming media, well people consume too much media to begin with so less is more.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#79

Post by xiphias2 »

zelly wrote: post #34

Decentralization the way the crypto crowd wants can only happen if everyone has a server at home, some consumer-grade ARM box that you plug in and forget. It should be configured to work out of the box without the customer ever having to use the shell. • your own Nextcloud server to replace Dropbox, GCal • email server (replace Gmail) • torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.) • personal Bitcoin node (replace…

,,You verify your own monetary transactions on your Bitcoin node without having to rely on a third-party service''

Although that's the decentralized way to recieve Bitcoin transactions, the fact that people have a way to check centralized hubs and opt out from centralization of transaction checking easily is enough deterrent for those centralized hubs to cheat.

As an example I'm using my own Bitcoin node just for checking the relatively bigger transactions.

Re: What to do once you admit that decentralization never seems to work (2018)

#80

Post by zrm »

Jasper_ wrote: post #51
zrm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud and spam are two separate problems. One of the best solutions for spam for a new system is to impose a proof of work requirement on sending the first message between any pair of users, or any (new username, hosting service) pairing for federated services. For any normal pairing that happens only once, but for a spammer they have to pay the cost for every message or else you can trivially block every message fro…

Spammers have large networks of computers they aren't paying for (botnets), so they aren't paying the cost of sending messages. Proof of work really doesn't solve spam anymore.

What makes it work is the asymmetry. With normal human communication you talk to the same person thousands of times, or send thousands of messages from the same account, so spending computation equivalent to something like $1 worth of Bitcoin for that is totally reasonable. Spending the equivalent of $1 worth of Bitcoin to send one spam to one person, isn't. Even if you had access to a large number of computers, you'd make much more money by using the same computational resources to mine cryptocurrency. The opportunity cost makes spamming uneconomical, and if it doesn't then you raise the cost until it is.

You can also allow users to pre-approve each other to avoid paying anything so that most legitimate communication doesn't require proof of work, which makes it a lot easier to put a high price on the remaining instances.

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