Yea, not really. The wild west was wild. People used to make up their own banknotes, there were fraud and schemes everywhere. We take for granted that our bank won't steal our deposits, that's a new concept. Most of that is derived from some degree of 'centralization' - that said - it's definitely not this 1-to-many scheme that the language implies. The Fed has immense power, but is not really in your business. You c…
But also, the wild west was founded upon the US wars with the native americans (centralized) and railroad monopolies (centralized).
Good point, except neither of those were as centralized as you're implying.
I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. I would, in fact, be only mildly surprised to see e-mail become much less federated than it is today (which is much less federated than it was 20 years ago). Spam (and other bad actors) is one huge, and obvious, reason why; it's led to a significant consolidation in e-mail as well; SMTP delivery is hit-or-miss t…
> I'm beginning to suspect that we will not see a federated protocol as successful as e-mail in my lifetime. This is one of the smartest things I've read in a long, long time. It seems deceptively simple or shallow, but it's not. At least once or twice a year, for the past ~15 years or so, I reflect on how the email protocol has survived and thrived despite numerous attempts at "reinventing email" and such.
.. and it's funny how a system where there are no guarantees of delivery (people email to reach their inbox in seconds, but the delivery time is not guaranteed at all, nor is delivery!), no privacy (IMHO most emails are transported in plain text and one only needs to sniff the traffic..), and no guarantee of authenticity (you can send an email with any "FROM" address, pretty much), well how a system like that can in fact be incredibly useful. Of course, the layman thinks all these things are in fact guaranteed...
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.
My issues with the project aren't related to the technology, but the rapacious insiders and victims who got ripped off. I know, i know, they're greedy and stupid for getting ripped off but I still feel bad for them and don't like people that do this stuff
> A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing field for a would-be monopolist. At first I thought "email seems a good example of this: most people don't want to leave Google, I don't want to leave FastMail"... but then I remembered that I could just leave FastMail and take my email to Google. Which proves the upthread point about the open protocol being a safety net for users. Can you talk about so…
Email is the paradigmatic example. You can export your mailbox and use `pine` if that's your jam. But in the real world, most users of Gmail will depend on at least one feature of Gmail that isn't easily replicable elsewhere.
> Email is the paradigmatic example
But there's no monopoly. There's feature-based lock-in built around the open protocols, and it's very effective, but it's not a monopoly.
I think what's happening here is selection bias. The people who proudly have no Meta accounts are replying to each other saying "me too". The hundreds of others who were reading did not reply.
Sample bias is a thing, sure. I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope. We don't have a way to test those hundreds of voices comprising the supposed silent majority. I'm saying that when/(BIG if) one does - via some hitherto undevised ingenious experiment which always yields truth - we find that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but mostly going along with what they think the majority view…
I see what you're getting at. I do know that many people, when asked about Whatsapp (especially parents complaining about the "obligatory" school Whatsapp groups), wish they didn't have to use it. I'm not sure how serious that sentiment is, or if they really would wish that if they understood the consequences, but as an experiment I have been attempting various community organisation projects that explicitly do not use Whatsapp. They've been quite successful, so far! We have just started co-ordinating a monthly kid's play session in our street, and I have a regular biking group.
The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can happen on margin. Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is reasonable.
Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing neighboring kingdom. To bring the topic back to networking, it has been said that decentralization is the worst form of networking except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
I bring up open protocols because I think they is necessary, if not sufficient, to keep the switching costs low.
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.
> Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies or ecosystems does not. Take the set of all systems conceivably used by human beings. Email providers, social networks, parent-teacher associations, dungeons and dragons campaign groups, neighborhood watches, everything. Now, classify each of those things into one of two groups: either "more like the USPS" or "more like national economies". What is the r…
If you want to define centralization as humans gathering in groups, I guess. A large portion of human social interaction is peer to peer though.
Centralization is a property of systems. And yeah, as participation in a system increases, centralization becomes increasingly necessary.