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

Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

subconscious.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 158 posts

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#61

Post by lob_it »

efsavage wrote: post #57
somenameforme wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since somebody chose to downvote the above comment, I think it bears elaboration for those who might not understand. A contemporary example is domain names. The current domain system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay companies a never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do literally less than nothing. A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. You're paying never-ending rent to them for the…

I'm not defending registrars/registries per se, but... > A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. No, it's often a huge investment and important part of security approaches (certificates, validation, email, etc.) > You're paying never-ending rent to them for them to not go out of their way to delete your entry. Yes, you're paying them to not update that value to point to someone else's serv…

SIM swap attacks happening at every level of the mobile industry would probably invoke cool rebuttals as well.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-swap-sc...

You are not going to be able to pay extra to make rotten to the core pretty.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#62

Post by cdata »

Plug: I'm working with the author on a decentralized protocol for networked thought and a companion browser called Subconscious. We're a very young project and just getting off the ground.

If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on Github or our Discord (link in the README): https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#63

Post by kkfx »

Centralization means easier driver for those who centralize and SPOFs. We centralize anytime we want an easy path even if it's fragile, and always resulting consequences are bad after a short "honeymoon" timeframe.

My conclusion then is different: we need common ideas, common tools not centralization. What's wrong with the classic web? Well that information access without search engines was a nightmare, but there is no need of "central" search engines as network hubs. YaCy offer an example FLOSS implementation of a distributed search network whose effectiveness much depend on numbers of indexing peers. In a fully "common web" all who host html pages also participate in the search distributed network and search quality became excellent, than some argue we can also distribute webpages like the ZeroNet idea and a new VERY FAST and VERY EFFECTIVE web is here. Oh, it's utopia just because of big players interests against the most and ignorance of the most, witch is not a technical thing. And that's just an example.

Logistic networks are another example where the centralized free scale network is easier than a hub-less network, but fragile, while a hub-less network is hard to keep, especially if not all nodes cooperate, but far more resilient.

The same happen in politics with historical absolute monarchy vs democracies and pretty anywhere else.

My final reminder: in winter is cold, in summer is hot, sometimes is too dry, sometimes too wet, we human as essentially any living being have tried our best to "mitigate" such natural phenomenon to live better. If certain free-scale networks are a natural thing that does not means we have to accept them without trying to made something better for us.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#64

Post by mistermann »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #23

"Inevitable" is the last desperate cry of those who have given up thinking.

It can also be caused by people who think in an imperfect manner. Most people think according to how they have been taught to think, not what is perfect.

A critical component of a well designed trap: consider all suggestions that you are trapped in an imperfect methodology to be conspiratorial/etc, and therefore false. Checkmate.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#65

Post by Retric »

robocat wrote: post #54
Retric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunbars number relates to remembering relationships between people which is 150 * ~149 things not 150. You might not remember what everyone in the group thinks of everyone else, but keeping track of grudges is often relevant.

It is nowhere near 150 * 149 because people in human networks have different amounts of connectivity, “influencers” with many connections, and others with few connections, as well as cliques with high internal connectivity but low external connectivity. And relationships between influential individuals matter way more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network

Influencers are more a function of very large social networks, they don’t really represent small tightly knit communities very well.

Consider something like a thanksgiving dinner you have what looks like central figures say a grandparent that everyone is related too, but the grand kids have tighter bonds to their parents than the grandparent.

Extend that to a village and you get more social people with more connections across the community, but those aren’t even close to the strongest bonds.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#66

Post by PontifexMinimus »

somenameforme wrote: post #60
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A contemporary example is domain names. The current domain system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay companies a never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do literally less than nothing. A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. Is there any legal or technical reason why someone can't set up a DNS server that resolves domain names to different IP addresses than those traditionally used?

Beyond network effect, nope. This is one of the more convenient ways to block in-app ads on mobile. Set your DNS to something like AdGuard's servers, and they'll resolve ad delivering domains to a no-op. And suddenly all major third party ads in apps or the web alike are gone.

> Beyond network effect, nope.

So why does no-one do this/ Obviously people do do it for ad-blocking, so why not for other purposes? Too difficult to get traction, perhaps?

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#67

Post by lob_it »

BirAdam wrote: post #46

Centralization and decentralization happen in waves as a natural result of ossification and complexity growth. As an example, IBM was once the dominant market force in computation. As the business grew and became increasingly byzantine, it was unable to respond to market changes or market demands in any meaningful way, and therefore the market became decentralized. This happened to Microsoft. If Apple continues on it…

"Most things are not forever"

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas

There.. Fixed that for you

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#68

Post by pjkundert »

snapcaster wrote: post #40
pjkundert wrote: post #3

That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and abusiveness of the current centralized offerings. The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such as Holochain https://holo.host is breathtaking.

This seemed like a cool project that actually had a use for a cryptocoin that wasn't pure scamming. Shame it was a scam ponzi anyway

Hmm? SDK reaching 1.0.0, almost ready for public beta, and capable of deploying global-scale full-stack Apps without server infrastructure?

Perhaps you have it confused with another project.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#69

Post by somenameforme »

efsavage wrote: post #57
somenameforme wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since somebody chose to downvote the above comment, I think it bears elaboration for those who might not understand. A contemporary example is domain names. The current domain system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay companies a never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do literally less than nothing. A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. You're paying never-ending rent to them for the…

I'm not defending registrars/registries per se, but... > A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small database. No, it's often a huge investment and important part of security approaches (certificates, validation, email, etc.) > You're paying never-ending rent to them for them to not go out of their way to delete your entry. Yes, you're paying them to not update that value to point to someone else's serv…

Keys don't "leak" but of course they can be stolen - like any real product. If you spend $40 million on your Van Gogh, and it's stolen - that's not going to be a happy moment. Fortunately keeping a key safe is much easier than keeping a physical asset safe. And you'd only need to access your archive the times when you need to change the IP for your domain or are otherwise transferring/selling it.

Re: Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind it

#70

Post by k__ »

nico wrote: post #52
npc12345 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, Binance could run off with your money tomorrow if they wanted you, but if you keep most of your money in your actual Bitcoin wallet and only deposit what you need to, your money is 100% safe.

Big lesson learned from Mtgox. Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives and thus access to their crypto. No silver bullet.

Web3auth/Torus and Argent trying to solve that problem.

But yeah, the moment you have key recovery, even if it's decentralised and requires multiple parties, you aren't 100% in charge anymore.

But, it's probably a good alternative to being 0% in charge with custodial wallets.

Post reply on HN