The importance of decentralisation • Hacker News Board

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#61

Post by dmwallin » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decentralized. A counter argument is that intelligent design changes the relative value of these different forms but I'm not sure whether there's enough evidence to support this.

My theory on the matter is that the trend towards centralized forms in our current society has a lot to do with Conway's Law (organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.)

We live in a society that currently has a very hierarchal, centralized and structured systems of power. This means that the subsystems (eg Corporations) and the artifacts of those systems are subtly pushed towards a similar form.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#62

Post by helpPeople » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

blamestross wrote: post #28

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

The centralization-decentralization cycle is about efficiency vs robustness trade-off at a system level. When we have a decentralized system that feels safe, we centralize it to increase efficiency. Eventually we have a disaster that convinces us that decentralization was worth it and we re-create it. Then eventually we grow complacent and repeat the process. When I design a decentralized system now, I just assume it…

I've been warning people of a certain 1T$ tech company that abuses customers and developers under the guise of centralization.

Our worst fears have become true. Banning apps, anti consumer technology, anti competitive practices that effect non users.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#63

Post by xur17 » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

hippich wrote: post #59

telmich wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how does a DNS entry to 10.0.2.2 help to be reachable?

Assuming it is not trolling. Every time you get new IP from the ISP, you update DNS record for that domain. And browsers can connect to it to the exposed 80/443 port.

I believe GP's point is that some providers don't provide a publicly routable ip address.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#64

Post by jka » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #58

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

> See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization. Exactly. It's not a technological phenomenon, it's an economic one. It's actually present in all markets, but traditionally there is a "local" effect that allows variation to exist (if it's not free to ship goods to anywhere in the…

Regarding your point about spam and bad actors: even though it's not the solution we've ended up with (i.e. training spam models, creating rulesets, sharing blacklists etc), this problem space always makes me think of Microsoft's 'Penny Black':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)

There are further economic problem there; people won't want to pay anything for email, for example, now that they're accustomed to having it for free.

But if sending a message came at the cost of a few smartphone GPU cycles -- or some other widely accessible but difficult-to-hoard resource -- and as long as it didn't affect a person's mental perception of their bank balance -- perhaps there'd be opportunities for something like Penny Black again.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#65

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

nindwen wrote: post #26

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

While decentralized protocols don't entirely prevent centralization, they're still better than if the protocol was centralized. While Facebook and Google exist, we can still make websites. While most people use Gmail, we can still run our own mail servers. Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10%. And as long as the 10% keep the protocol open,…

>as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest.

This is the avenue we should be traveling. This is what makes the internet a better place.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#66

Post by miguelmota » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

So long as ISPs are centralized, it doesn’t matter if everyone has their own IPv6 address because ISPs are gatekeepers that can censor requests.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#67

Post by cy6erlion » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

socialdemocrat wrote: post #39

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

Here is my counter to these thoughts: Decentralized internet was not created by a myriad of decentralized decisions. A centralized authority came up with the idea and created TCP/IP. Just like centralized decisions were made to create the decentralized/balance of power democratic systems we have today. Capitalism itself is naturally centralizing. That is why we have anti-thrust laws. We don't just leave it to consume…

> Capitalism itself is naturally centralizing. That is why we have anti-thrust laws. We don't just leave it to consumers to make sure centralization does not happen in the market. It is the job of the government to prevent it.

Centralized social systems such as Governments, Banks etc exist mostly because we need someone we trust (Bank) to arbitrate interactions between two peers, if you remove these kind of trust with the help of tech (eg cryptography) the bank and governments become obsolete because we can now verify things for our self without a 3rd party.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#68

Post by F00bart » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

dmwallin wrote: post #61

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decent…

This.

The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#69

Post by maram » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 5:09 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

>See the trend? Centralization is a natural outcome of millions of people not

Agree

>This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits.

Exactly! This week I tweeted this old clip of Steve Jobs praising decentralization https://twitter.com/maramesque/status/1194136650500255744?s=... then it hit me how Steve worked so hard to make Apple centralized.

Sure, Apple was great during his lifetime, but what happened to this very centralized company after Jobs passed away?

Did Apple live up to Jobs legacy and promises from protecting users privacy to building great products?

I think we will always live in a world full of centralized products used by the mainstream.

The mainstream will eventually get smarter and founders will always face the pressure to improve products, respect users privacy and attention.

The days of launching an app from your college and watching people downloading it from all over the world are long gone.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#70

Post by didericis » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

dmwallin wrote: post #61

jasode wrote: post #16

It's sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do: talk about the ideals and benefits . However, I believed what's rarely discussed but more important is the economic forces that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists' vision. Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche…

Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decent…

Completely agree.

I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well.

Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could.

I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart.

I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.