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The importance of decentralisation

ungleich.ch

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Re: The importance of decentralisation

#71

Post by christiansakai »

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,…

Yup this is my thinking as well. Also this opens up for smaller niche communities to entirely setup whatever they want. I.e, their own social media, their own youtube, etc. Small rural communities can setup their own email server, chat, without dependencies on Slack or Google.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#72

Post by organsnyder »

Merrill wrote: post #42

Is there an effective way to suppress denial of service attacks in a decentralized network? Given that there are DNS root servers, isn't the internet actually centralized?

You have to centralize somewhere—IP address assignments are also centralized.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#73

Post by netcan »

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…

sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization. - Reading list/blogrolls please :)

Idk is one state is necessarily more equalibrium-ish, in general. I tend to think it's more of a khaldun-esqu cycle. Decentralisation is often stronger at creativeness & flexibility, so is necessary for innovation. It's good at finding solutions to unarticulated problems. There were multiple centralised/proprietary attempts at inventing the web, but I don't think anything but a decentralised www could have become what it did.

Ceentralised systems have their own strengths.

I agree that Facebook is easier than html, and that the easiest option will win. The interesting (imo) question is "why?"

One reason is undoubtedly economic. There was/is massive incentive to centralize & own chunks of the web. Decentralised www doesn't have that.

Another reason is (imo) related to the "OSS UI" problem. When programming problems are specific and legible (add multiple language support, fix crashing bugs, etc?), OSS works really well. When the problem is "create a fun and intuitive UI" OSS can really suck. IE, Facebook beats www the way osx beats Linux.

Lastly, what level of centralised or decentralised are we looking at.

The www's uses (sites, users, code...) is decentralised but the protocols, browsers, DNS and such are very centralised.

If you want to invent a way of sending a proprietary way of sending a new type of online wink, go ahead. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Getting something new into the official protocols OTOH..... near impossible.

So... In some senses, Facebook was/is the nimble decentralised actor. One of many. The www (the protocols) is/was the monolithic sloth.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#75

Post by telmich »

hkjhreiou wrote: post #14

So what's the latest deal with IPv6? IPv4 was supposed to run out and the Internet come crashing down 5 years ago, yet here we are, and everything seems just fine, while a billion smartphones were added.

That was a really bad miscommunication - especially as we are running out of IPv4 in Europe this month. - see https://ungleich.ch/u/blog/when-does-ripe-run-out-of-ipv4-ad...

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#76

Post by jasode »

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…

>Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form

The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant national corporation that builds every house in America. Even Jeff Bezos' Amazon can't conquer 1000 different local building codes and construction techniques to build homes. However, the realm of information technology seems to behave differently.

I like to use the decentralized-Git-to-centralized-Github example because:

- programmers are the ubergeeks that would conceivably be the vanguard of decentralization because they are already predisposed to understand its benefits

- programmers (unlike mass consumers) have the technical know-how to implement their own git server if they wanted to and overcome any challenges of ISP NAT router.

And yet, the vast majority just think: "Hmmm... there's a free service that can host my repo which means I don't have to spend _time_ or _money_ to mess with any of that home setup?!? Sign me up!!!"

There is no "evil capitalist monopoly" that forced Git centralization on to resistant programmers. Instead, the programmers willingly put their code on Github because of the benefits. The economic forces overwhelm the ideals of the decentralized protocol.

As mentioned before, a git distributed protocol can't stop an actor from spending more money on that protocol than others. Github Inc spent extra money on Ruby programmers to create extra features such as issues tracking, web landing page, hosting disk space, reliable backups, DDOS protection, etc. Unequal spending by actors makes one node with better features more desirable than other nodes (such as a personal home node) and this starts a feedback loop of centralization.

To restate the claim earlier: decentralized computer information systems that need to share data is an unstable equilibrium because it depends on having free-will actors not spend extra money on a protocol to gain an advantage which is also an unstable equilibrium.

Even if this thread's article's vision of IPv6 improving direct connectivity were to happen, I still claim the overwhelming majority of programmers would continue to choose something like Github rather than host their repositories on personal home servers. Personally, I wouldn't want my repo to be traced back to my home's ip address. I don't want China DDOS'ing my home ISP connection if they don't like my iPhone app that monitors Hong Kong. If I was a female, I wouldn't want my home git repo to give away my ip address and invite digital stalkers. I'd use Github just for the ability to shield my IPv6 address.

If the programmers -- which we can think of as technical thought leaders -- aren't leading by example (with git) for decentralization, why would we realistically expect other mainstream consumers to adopt decentralized setups? Yes, there will always be decentralized communities but it will always remain niche.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#77

Post by boomlinde »

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…

> E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github?

If cooking is decentralized, why is there so much concentration of food at the mall?

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#78

Post by solatic »

mdtusz wrote: post #36
solatic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ironically enough, people do not live year-round in centralized hotels with cleaning services provided. They live in their own decentralized homes, and make an economic decision whether to take care of their cleaning needs by themselves, or to out…

This isn't a very good comparison though for looking at technology. The problem of washing dishes, cleaning a kitchen, vacuuming, making a bed etc. Is O(n) in _economic_ complexity. Managing data and technology services is somewhere around O(log(n)). Managing 100 servers is much more difficult than managing 1, but managing 200 is not much more difficult than 100.

It belies the point though that people at large prefer decentralization, just not the costs involved, until a model comes along which reduces the costs to a level which people can afford.

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#79

Post by carapace »

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…

Yes, exactly. Is the human body centralized or decentralized? The ego could be said to be the central "pivot" of the system, but then you have the phenomenon of "multiple personalities", and so on.

Once you start to think of biology as the study of billion-year-old self-optimizing nanotechnology it makes sense to look to life for models for designing the structure of our own artificial systems. There's the question of what do we want to be like? A starfish? A meta-human?

A decentralized system that depends on each or most of its elements to function is a single "point" of failure for the whole. (E.g., a relatively small wound can cause death by exsanguination.) On the other hand, consider the radical indignities that the lowly planarian will endure only to placidly regrow a tail or a head or whatever. (See "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 Which, incidentally, adds a whole layer of complexity and nuance to the concept of intelligent design, since the whole of Nature has now been scientifically shown to think...)

It remains to be seen whether Humans + Internet = Self-Organization or along what lines. (What's the news out of Hong Kong this week? Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state?) Governments everywhere are waking up and smelling the data coffee. The major players already have databases on the bulk of world population and are collecting (exponentially) more every day. What kind of cyborg-state shall we make?

Re: The importance of decentralisation

#80

Post by ignoramous »

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…

https://sandstrom.io solves this problem but I guess they had trouble with traction as they set out to build a two-sided marketplace for a market that wasn't ready. Selling to consumers and SMBs is a huge hurdle, as they'd settle for convenience and cheap when given the choice. And due to SaaS' economies of scale, a decentralised solution is never going to be able to compete with that.

I'm currently building a VPN mesh network for personal use, and the more time I spend thinking abt it, the more https://zerotier.com 's model makes sense. What if consumers, SMBs can create VxLANs over the internet and then host apps and services in that space (Sandstorm Oasis) that are completely private and only accessible to devices enrolled to participate in that VxLAN.

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