Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

cdixon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#61

Post by Chris2048 »

amelius wrote: post #31
babelchips wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others can run the nodes. The point is the network of nodes are distributed and no node is more important than any other. They are all just peers.

You mean like e-mail? Sadly, most people use gmail now and there are whitelists so you don't get to write your own email server.

I feel email could really do with disruption.

Least of all: require escrow-held-micro-payment to send an email to some location. If the item is marked as spam, the sender loses their money (perhaps to the spam-filter maintainer).

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#62

Post by [deleted] »

Ygg2 wrote: post #30
m_eiman wrote: post #3

Decentralization is good, but there's no need to bring cryptojunk into the discussion since that's far from decentralized. IMHO. Bring back the use of open protocols, add IPv6 support throughout and add a sprinkling of peer-to-peer.

Why is everyone talking about decentralized. Current internet is decentralized. People seem to be clamoring for distributed. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58727b5a9de4bb...

[deleted]

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#63

Post by Zababa »

nobody9999 wrote: post #60
Zababa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.

>What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places. Not single points of failure, but a few major (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure. Take any one or more of these down and there are major disruptions in commerce, connectivit…

According to wikipedia:

> A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.

Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. People that depends on X with X being the major clouds may be considered a point of failure for your specific application, but that's just your application, not the internet itself. Internet is already decentralized by nature.

> Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.

Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.

> Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.

Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.

What Web3 seems to be trying to do is to have the convinience of centralization with the resilience of decentralization. For example, distributed authentity and payments. That's a great and noble goal! But I wish people would come forward about that and the tradeoffs involved instead of just talking about decentralization. Internet is decentralized by nature.

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#64

Post by nobody9999 »

Zababa wrote: post #63
nobody9999 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places. Not single points of failure, but a few major (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure. Take any one or more of these down and there are major disruptions in commerce, connectivit…

According to wikipedia: > A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. People that depends on X with X being the major clouds may be considered a point of failure for your specific application, but that's just your application, not the internet itself. Internet is already decentralized by nature. >…

Note that I said:

   Not single points of failure, but a few major 
   (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.
And I most certainly didn't say or imply that such failures would "take down the internet." Rather, I said:

   Take any one or more of these down and there are 
   major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and 
   communications.
That's very different from what you appear to think I said.

>Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.

But there are costs to that centralization too. Not measured in dollars, but in freedom, creativity and choice.

>Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.

Do they? If that were the case, we wouldn't have these behemoth tech corporations.

Decentralized solutions exist, but aren't currently viable for a variety of reasons. I chose to pick on asymmetric network links (the asymmetric part is the important bit, not necessarily total bandwidth, although that's important too) as a blocker to decentralization.

Feel free to disagree, but decentralization needs to be about more than just distributed block chains and services hosted on centralized server plantations.

Edit: Fixed usage: Asymmetric, not asynchronous. Sorry, still drinking coffee here.

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#65

Post by gjulianm »

fsflover wrote: post #54
gjulianm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't change things. There were federated alternatives to most centralized sites you see today. I remember Mastodon for Twitter, I'm sure there are more. The point is that web3 is not adding anything new here. We could always have gone to federated environments, but turns out it's more complicated than it seems and people don't care too much about what's inside as long as it works.

Did you read the article? The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them. Centralized platforms often come bundled at launch with compelling apps: Facebook had…

I do not agree too much with that part. The fact that there are compelling use cases at launch is independent of centralized/decentralized only depends on who's launching. Google Wave was a centralized platform and the use cases were a mess, and blogs with RSS were a decentralized platform with a pretty clear use case. I don't think the percentage of half-baked use cases is too different between centralized/distributed. It also conveniently forgets several issues:

- Building a decentralized platform is technically more complex than a centralized one. So it requires more developer resources for a feature that users don't care too much about. It's also harder to iterate, because you're spending much more time in building a design consensus for new features instead of just rolling it.

- Centralized platforms also have to work out the product-market fit between platform and developers. Mobile? Twitter apps (the Twitter API was a big reason that drove adoption at the beginning)? WP blogs?

- Decentralized platforms will have technical limitations and hurdles that will probably hurt user experience. For example, harder discovery, diverging features, delays, data consistency...

So when he says "The question of whether decentralized or centralized systems will win the next era of the internet reduces to who will build the most compelling products", that's true, but avoids mentioning the fact that, resources being equal, compelling decentralized systems will be considerably harder and slower to build. And this is not new, which is the point I made in my comment. Nothing about crypto changes these facts.

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#66

Post by brightstep »

87329868723 wrote: post #57
brightstep wrote: post #32

The author says "democracy isn't perfect but it's better than the alternative," then overlooks the obvious corollary with regard to "GAFA" and other powerful corporations: we should have democratic control over our economy. Crypto and web3 are an attempt to solve a political problem with a technological tool; a cop-out to avoid a political fight. We're not going to make a better, more just or more democratic world by…

What does "democratic control over our economy" mean? Does it mean surrendering control to ostensibly democratic state monopolies that respond with violence to any attempt at competing with them? I prefer 'consensual' to 'democratic'. Most blockchain-based systems are consensual in that they operate based on rules that enjoy the unanimous consent of everyone they apply to. If I and everyone I want to interact with vi…

It means worker-owned and -run companies and actually democratic government to regulate them. You're absolutely right about political fights, and it's clear that centralized authorities (e.g. FB, Google, the US Gov't, others) have won/are winning the political fight against you and me. A technological solution realized under their authority will not be allowed to succeed unless it can be bent to their own purposes. I don't wholly disagree with the goals of crypto/web3, but I fear that pursued alone, i.e. without a political movement to back it, those ideals will be corrupted by our existing power structures.

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#67

Post by ChainOfFools »

babelchips wrote: post #20
senko wrote: post #9

What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this: 1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop. 2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc. Ba…

Others can run the nodes. The point is the network of nodes are distributed and no node is more important than any other. They are all just peers.

decentralization of mechanical infrastructure is irrelevant. decentralization of human control over said infrastructure is all that matters.

one does not correlate with the other.

if anything, the strongest incentive is to mask centralized ownership behind a screen of decentralized infrastructure.

a culture of anonymity helps discourage inconvenient questions about transparency and thwarts attempts to formally analyze the relationship between agents and principals in a blockchain network.

all cryptocurrencies are thus fundamentally based on deception, as the blockchain is designed to expose activity statistics that demonstrate 'decentralization' of agency, but anonymizes the linkage between agent and principal, making those statistics worse than meaningless.

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#68

Post by MrMan »

senko wrote: post #9

What I find curious in that web3 scenario is this: 1. Today's internet is decentralized because people can't run their own web, smtp, nntp, xmpp, servers, WP blogs. Which is true, we can't expect people to run this the same way we can't expect every car owner to have a mechanic shop. 2. The proposals for "web3", to the best of my understanding, require people to run their own blockchain nodes, manage wallets, etc. Ba…

the new generation of middlemen surrounding this have already been funded by VCs and have started putting themselves in the midst of all crypto stuff, it already happened

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#69

Post by PeterisP »

aaa_aaa wrote: post #10
summm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.

Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.

No, you in El Salvador you can buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Chivo, which is a local payment scheme with a centralized ledger that's just denominated in BTC.

You can send money to/from Chivo using Bitcoin; but the settlement of that beer purchase would not involve Bitcoin network at all.

Re: Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

#70

Post by treestumpquiet »

brightstep wrote: post #32

The author says "democracy isn't perfect but it's better than the alternative," then overlooks the obvious corollary with regard to "GAFA" and other powerful corporations: we should have democratic control over our economy. Crypto and web3 are an attempt to solve a political problem with a technological tool; a cop-out to avoid a political fight. We're not going to make a better, more just or more democratic world by…

Software is trying to virtualize a left-government. But without addressing the underlying problems of ownership in the real world, every virtualization is ultimately a zero-sum game.
Post reply on HN