Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#201

Post by 3np » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:19 AM UTC

rapnie wrote: post #189

3np wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix where the server-to-server protocol is decentralized/peer-to-peer but clients interact with the network through designated servers are generally considered "federated" (which can be either considered as distinct from or a subset of "decentralized") So the author seems to take "decentralized" here to mean "fully decentralized and peer-to-peer", which is indeed an unconvention…

> Protocols like e-mail, Mastodon and Matrix I must correct you here on "Protocols like Mastodon". The protocol that underlies the Fediverse is the W3C ActivityPub Recommendation [0] and making that distinction is really important. Not doing so would encourage centralization in the same ways as discussed elsewhere in this thread for Email vs. Gmail. Mastodon is just a fediverse app that was an early adopter of Activi…

Great clarification - thank you for calling it out.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#202

Post by Jiejeing » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #41

Counterthesis: decentralised applications are losing popularity because XMPP was so awful that it poisoned the view of decentralisation. Pre-XMPP everything was decentralised and federated. Post-XMPP decentralisation became synonymous with less-good clones of centralised systems, and both new systems and existing decentralised systems started moving towards centralisation. Decentralisation will come back again when t…

This is… an interesting take. You mean that everything before the 1999 XMPP PoC was decentralized, and XMPP killed it? (despite the actual situation at the time being split between closed and centralized networks, like MSN, ICQ, etc). And XMPP is to blame for the failure of all the other decentralized systems (that have nothing in common) that came between then and now?

Additionally, considering several hundred million people use XMPP on a daily basis (and even more use something that started out based on XMPP, e.g. whatsapp), saying that XMPP is so terrible that it killed everything is so weird that it would need some facts to back it up.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#203

Post by dvh1990 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

robrorcroptrer wrote: post #184

dvh1990 wrote: post #183

"Bitcoin launched with the stated goal of providing an alternative financial system,2 and other blockchain projects followed with all manner of lavish promises. Bitcoin failed at the stated goal (unless you count the dark net markets). It has instead defaulted to pyramid scheme, with the added externality of wasting a stupefying amount of energy." This is not true.

Please elaborate.

I am simply saying that it is early to tell if Bitcoin failed in any way. Is it subject to price manipulation? Of course. But that's the result of a free and mostly unregulated market, which is inherently a good thing because it fosters long term robustness at the price of short term stability.

In other words, what Bitcoin may or may not be today does not define what it is going to be in 2, 5 or 10 years.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#204

Post by indigochill » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

The title doesn't really represent the article. The thesis of the article is that

> there’s someone who stands to make a large profit (or avoid losing their large profit) from ensuring decentralised systems fail.

But you can't actually make decentralized systems fail. Email's still around despite Google's abuse of spam filtering. RSS is still around despite Google's manhandling. Git is still around despite Github. IRC is still around despite Discord.

None of the truly decentralized options are as popular as the centralized-ish alternatives, but that seems entirely inevitable in an internet where most users have near-zero technical proficiency and want someone to hold their hand, which is just not viable without commercialization.

I think just like the world needs both a Linux and a Mac OS, it also needs centralized and decentralized options and while the decentralized options will drive actual progress, lots of people will get rich profiting from centralized bastardizations.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#205

Post by cromwellian » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

Making Issue Tracking, Pull Request, and other UI integrations with Git sound bad is weird to me. I don't think the "profit" motive has anything to with it. Whether free or for profit, I want integrated solutions, and integrated solutions tend to be more centralized.

Think of the watering hole analogy, developers who want to collaborate will eventually find some common location to assemble. If the features of this location are superior, or it has more popular projects, more developers will assemble, in a positive feedback loop, eventually this site will become a large, popular place for people to collaborate -- free or not. This behavior use to happen long before commercial activity was on the internet, back in the pre-Web listserv/majordomo/bitnet days. Certain people would become powerful gatekeepers purely by the size of their audience and the positive feedback effects of having a large audience.

That makes the central proposition that some kind of regulation is needed somewhat troublesome. I mean, take a large open source project like Linux or FreeBSD. A small group of maintainers, or a single dictatorial maintainer with veto power, wields enormous control over API and features that are included. If the maintainer gods decide not to support your hardware and refuse patches, does the government have to step in because it puts you at a disadvantage?

Levels of centralization in all things is probably inevitable. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there isn't some mathematics in network theory about scaling and hierarchy that would probably show it's inevitable -- even if you start out with something completely flat and fully connected graph, and without unequal incentives.

Basically, people with large audiences have larger power, whether it's commercial power, or even just social popularity.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#206

Post by taaha47 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:27 AM UTC

carlosrg wrote: post #196

I stopped reading when the author claimed that Bitcoin failed. If you think a virtual coin that has reached 1T market cap recently has failed I don't know what to tell you. Your definition of "failing" or "don't work" is flawed.

The point was it has deviated from it's original purpose which is a decentralized, identity free financial system.

Dark markets apart, it has almost no practical use today. I've read some comments on people sending money cross borders using bitcoin, the author might have overlooked this. Anyways, without numbers it is mere speculations... What is interesting in his article is the fact that decentralized solutions are deviating from their original purpose, becoming less powerful, and centralized.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#207

Post by pnt12 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #115

All 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…

"But I'm..."

A specific user from a niche geek website, a rounding error, an anecdote.

I'm glad for those fighting against these walled garden overlords, but let's keep in mind we're talking about a side with thousands of people VS a side with billions of people. Numbers matter, and the fall of these giants is still far away.

If anything, the battle is starting from recent anti-competition and privacy concerns in the public sphere, which is a good thing, but the public remains unaware of these niche distributed tools.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#208

Post by colordrops » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:32 AM UTC

casmclas wrote: post #55

thesausageking wrote: post #12

The author's definition of what makes a "decentralized application" is too strong and I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server. To me, "decentralized" doesn't mean every user has to run their own node. It means it's an open network, anyone can join, and there's no centralized control / censorship. You can bu…

> I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

She'd be wrong about that too. Just look at how much better email is than instant messaging. It has succeeded infinitely more at being a decentralized application than IM.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#209

Post by G3rn0ti » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #122

samatman wrote: post #115

All 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 big elephant is the cybercoins, and it's just a weird time to declare them a failure. It's like no one remembers 2017, this has practically been a carbon copy" Exactly. This has been a re-run of 2017, and that is plenty enough reason to declare them a failure. What happened to all the 2017 projects that raised billions during the last hype cycle based on breathless promises of decentralized wonderlands? They d…

> "DeFi" is bullshit leverage products for speculators

No. With Compound, Aave and dydx you have DeFi-Dapps that allow you to borrow Dollars (I.e. stable coins pegged to the dollar) and earn interest between 2-15% APR (there are no savings accounts out there that will get you that rate, at least in Europe with negative interest rates). All apps are integrated in the Coinbase wallet. In contrast to speculation on rising Bitcoin or Ether this is a rather safe investment. It’s only still hampered by the Ethereum transaction fees which are currently really high (but not all of the time).

Furthermore, there are decentralized exchange Dapps that seem to have been going on well so far even through the current dump.

If I were you, I would invest a little bit of your savings in Ether and just wait what happens. It’s got a huge potential to disrupt the banking business and change finance forever.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#210

Post by casmclas » Mon, May 24, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #121

casmclas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree that email isn't an example of a decentralized application. She argues that it's not because it's really hard to run your own mail server. I don't think this is a fair characterisation of the article. She argues that email is an example of something that is failing as a decentralised application: Google's power over email is too strong. This is very different from claiming that it isn't an example of…

Then the argument can better be characterized as “ The final result of a free market is an eventual monopoly. ” It is not about centralization but about one player winning and beating the competition in that case.

I think that's a fair characterisation of her premises. For instance, she argues that these outcomes aren't happening because of any systematic quality difference in the products: many centralised products that win significant marketshare are a bit ordinary. I'm not in a position to judge that claim; I tend to avoid products that make gratuitous demands on my personal data so I have less material to compare, but the idea that a universal Electron app is better than a variety of independently developed native apps is certainly not one I would rush to accept.

Her actual conclusion is that in order to create a market whose average members are free, we need more regulation.