I think the correct statement is "why SOME decentralized apps don't work"
Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
161–170 of 311 posts
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#162All I can really say in response to this article is that I expect it to age poorly. 2021 is just a bad time to make confident pronouncements about decentralization. The vast majority of the population is living in Facebook/WhatsApp/Discord/Visa&Mastercard land, sure. But I'm a heavy Matrix user, it works great. I torrent all the time: it works great. I'm also on urbit, and it works great. I don't use Mastodon persona…
Hey, author here. I hope it does age poorly. I tried to make it clear that I’m a prolific user of decentralised applications, and that I really want them to succeed. I just pointed out my feelings on why they usually don’t, in the hope we can do something about it.
> I just pointed out my feelings on why they usually don’t
I think this part of the article, instead of just being the last four paragraphs, should have been almost all of it. As it is, you make some very strong claims with no supporting argument whatsoever:
"the solution has to be political"
"The current system of profit motives, one might call it a market, was designed to optimise the process of extracting, refining, and transforming physical resources."
"some like to idealise the aforementioned market as a free and unregulated system, the truth is that it optimises rather poorly under those circumstances, and needs heavy regulation to align profit motives in the direction of efficient processing and distribution of resources."
And this in a footnote:
"I’m not convinced we should [keep these profit motives at all]"
All of this needs a lot of justification.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#163All of the mentioned things work just fine. In life, nothing is perfect. For example, I can't use a CPU based on an open ISA as my daily driver. Does that mean that CPUs "don't work"? Of course not. The fact that something is used for illegal purposes means that it doesn't work? Does LSD "not work"? The fact that something is hard to set up or maintain mean that it doesn't work? Does Linux not work? Do airplanes not…
I think the author's underlying point is that all of the decentralised applications she's talking about rely on their having a large number of users communicating with one another in order to do what they're supposed to do, and that decentralised systems often perform poorly in terms of getting enough users for them to achieve that goal.
Imagine you came up with a technically superior version of email, and it functioned technically perfectly, but you were unable to convince anyone else to use it. Sure, it would "work" technically in a narrow functional sense, but it wouldn't "work" in terms of doing what it was actually designed to do. My taking LSD isn't really affected by other people doing so or not: it's a private thing. But my sending an email is: it's a network interaction.
The author's claim is correct in the sense that, if you hold a party and no-one comes, the party didn't really work.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a coincidence. Most people have no idea what XMPP was, never even cared, and joined the change.
Most ordinary users have no idea. But there's a cultural generation of developers who tried to use Jabber in their high school / college years, found out how much it sucked, and carried that experience consciously or unconsciously into their programming careers.
Sure, but that isn't important in any way. Programmers have much less influence on business decisions that that, and practically none on the society at large. If it was so good we'd be using it now.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#165Another reason it doesn't work is that networks used by humans need policing to be usable by anyone but the most advanced and psychologically resilient users, and there isn't an economic model that funds this at scale with completely open networks.
Mail is only usable because of spam filters, the best of which are completely opaque, and paid by ads. The web is open, but the search index isn't, and it spends a significant amount of time fighting search indexing spam / farms of autogenerated, low-value crap. Social networks need moderation to not become porn or terrorism supporting platforms, and the incentives or scale aren't there in a fully decentralized model. Phone networks are super open and right now in the US there's a nontrivial number of people whose inbound calls are almost all spam. Etc
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#166> You get given a problem spec. You design a decentralised system to solve it neatly. You get told “This doesn’t work, $COMPANY doesn’t have any way to monetise it”.
I do believe the author ran into this problem, especially in the VC world, except the author likely pointed this out herself.
I work for a major L1 project and never ran into this problem directly.
I've mostly witnessed less well funded projects bend towards their binance masters' desire for yet another pumpable token.
If you run into this problem, then you should spend their money building the fundemental components under a permissive or free software licensee. After some sunk costs then maybe they'll accept a more open business plan.
As an aside, VRFs are really amazing cryptographic tools for building distributed systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyiG_JNxvIw
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is downvoting you cause it makes zero sense to use blockchain to do IOT. IoTA is also largely a scam, the technology doesn't work
I cant seem to edit my comment. I think my comment was misunderstood. Firstly, I wanted to say that the writer seems biased, and due to this they disregarded the technology of blockchain. They mixed up bitcoin and blockchain and the use cases are completely different things As for IOTA being a scam. I honestly do not know, I liked their use case but perhaps I am uneducated...If you have any papers or links to back up…
It is true, they are different. Blockchain can be used for many other things than only cryptocurrency (although cryptocurrency is one thing that can use it). A blockchain includes blocks each with the hash of the previous block, and many things do that including Fossil version control system (the P card has the hash of the previous block), and I also had the idea how it could be used for a restricted class of card games, and there are probably many other uses too.
I cannot properly comment about IOTA since it isn't something that I am familiar with.
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#168All I can really say in response to this article is that I expect it to age poorly. 2021 is just a bad time to make confident pronouncements about decentralization. The vast majority of the population is living in Facebook/WhatsApp/Discord/Visa&Mastercard land, sure. But I'm a heavy Matrix user, it works great. I torrent all the time: it works great. I'm also on urbit, and it works great. I don't use Mastodon persona…
> The one I'm really betting on is Matrix, though. They have reliable income from the French and German governments, and plenty of motive to make a really good platform. I fully expect them to be as slick and featureful as Slack and Discord within a couple of years, and start to eat those company's lunch. I don't think it even needs to be that. Most people (in the west) are tired of all of these apps, and their data…
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Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I see the point though? For 1-to-1 transfers, Magic Wormhole is the system to beat, and I struggle to imagine how it could be improved. https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
I really wish magic wormhole worked conveniently on windows without obliging me to install python and pip and such. It's my go-to when sftp isn't an option, but for sftp not to be an option almost always means that one of the computers I'm trying to transfer between is a windows box.
Magic Wormhole has a good implementation in Go. It has windows binary.
https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william
Windows binary: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william/releases/downlo...
There's GUI: https://github.com/Jacalz/wormhole-gui
Android app too: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william-mobile
The author is on HN as psanford
Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish magic wormhole worked conveniently on windows without obliging me to install python and pip and such. It's my go-to when sftp isn't an option, but for sftp not to be an option almost always means that one of the computers I'm trying to transfer between is a windows box.
That's reasonable, it's a great candidate for a rewrite in Go.
It's already a thing: