Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#91

Post by bombcar » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

______- wrote: post #76

It's interesting that this mentions the Signal fiasco and specifically the scamcoin that is MobileCoin. Is that the fate of all messaging apps? Once they get some traction, they sell out their users? I can see things like Matrix as a good alternative, but then what happens when that gains traction? MatrixCoin anyone? When does it end?

The coin mania will end once Bitcoin crashes back down for awhile and it’ll migrate to something else.

The underlying problem is paying for things. So many of the successes in decentralization come directly from universities where cost wasn’t really a factor.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#92

Post by jackcosgrove » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:36 AM UTC

Economies of scale, which are huge in computing, lend an almost irresistible force to centralization. The only countervailing force is communication costs. The most successful decentralization effort in computing, the replacement of mainframes with personal computers, occurred because networking infrastructure was immature and lagged behind advances in miniaturization.

The notion that the internet would decentralize information is completely wrong. The internet restored the client-server relationship from the mainframe era, with the real power being with the databases. The internet recentralized computing after the PC era.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#93

Post by catchmeifyoucan » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

> Wrangling with domain registration, DNS configuration, hosting, building the actual damn site, and deployment, that is a lot. Not to mention that for much of the world’s population, the costs of hosting and domain registration are prohibitive.

There is an entry cost to building decentralized tech, and it’s way too high and confusing IMO for mass adoption. The “cloud” is the easiest way to get up and running for both consumers and developers. But I don’t think it means dApps don’t work.

The beautiful thing about decentralization is that it doesn’t have to be profit aligned - it should be significantly cheaper to compute on your machine. We just need a better user experience to cross that barrier. I don’t think a decentralized platform that can overthrow the cloud experience exists yet. But that’s the hot opportunity and why it’s still emerging tech.

It always blows my mind that 1mb is 500 pages worth of information. Why do we pay $10/mo to store information that can fit on a thumb drive?

[0]Amna -https://www.getamna.com/blog/think-local-first/

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#94

Post by _carbyau_ » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

mr_luc wrote: post #48

quelsolaar wrote: post #29

Whats the biggest downside to having all the data? You are responsible for it. Google, Twitter and Facebook, store and link to data and are therefor responsible for all kinds of things, like keeping porn away from kids, securing data, dealing with privacy, verifying age, dealing with local laws, managing the needs of rights holders, moderating discussions, deciding if Donald trump should be banned or not and so on, a…

> A smart designer of a Decentralized application could see not storing data in a centralized storage, as an advantage because it lets them side step all of these problems. I agree, and I'd love to see Our Decentralized Future happen -- though I worry that 'smart designer' might end up implying one of the following in practice: (a) smart enough to stick to a design so limited, in terms of P2P communication, that it'l…

Regarding (b), I often wonder whether Satoshi of Bitcoin fame is deliberately anonymous for this reason.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#95

Post by shmerl » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

So what's the political solution? Someone has to force interoperability on greedy walled gardens that hold back progress?

The idea isn't unlike competition / anti-trust laws. But would it require making new ones?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#96

Post by ezekiel68 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

I get to say whether I (the customer) am abused by [insert corporate name here]. For the majority of insinuations of this nature made by the author, I say that I am _not_ abused by them.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#97

Post by bombcar » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

kevindong wrote: post #18

> Proprietary centralised services like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc. dominate, most likely because they have the marketing budget for it. They dominate because they're better for end users who don't mind giving up compatibility/freedom to implement their own client, which the vast majority of people don't want to do. Slack/Discord/WhatsApp are far better instant messaging/voice or video conferencing software than I…

Exactly. IRC is old, perhaps not as old as DNS, but old. Slack et al took off because the UX of IRC is shite. If someone had built a slack-like IRC client and worked on getting people to use it, maybe IRC would be the common protocol. Heck, it could still happen - people really have no loyalty to slack or teams; it’s just what they currently use.

I think we’re only a few years out before Google uses it’s gmail monopoly to forcefully change email.

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#98

Post by yellow_lead » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

This post is very lazy. Nothing is defined strictly, I can't surmise a concise argument. I guess the author is an expert though since they worked on a blockchain project?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#99

Post by eloisius » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

0xCMP wrote: post #80

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…

Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking. Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could nev…

I’ve occasionally wondered why the responsibility to mitigate abuse can’t be pushed all the way out to edge nodes (individual ISPs and data centers) instead of relying on centralized abuse prevention. I imagine this does happen for certain kinds of abuse, but wouldn’t the threat of others not peering with your node be good motivation for ISPs not to provide services to spammers?

Re: Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work

#100

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 24, 2021, 2:52 AM UTC

granshaw wrote: post #27

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…

IMO what you’re describing is usually not considered “decentralized”, but rather “open protocols” or “open standards”

[deleted]