I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-Berners Lee story. In any case, I'll state again that decentralization is really a "ga

I suppose this is hot on the front page because of the corresponding Tim-Berners Lee story. In any case, I'll state again that decentralization is really a "game-theory-economics" puzzle and not a "protocol" or "node software stack" problem. Most software projects and essays on this subject keep analyzing the situation in terms of the software tech. That limited lens of software is fine if one has modest ambitions for the decentralization to only spread to a small group of tech-minded enthusiasts. (E.g. a decentralized-StackOverflow could be successful.) However, that framework won't be enough for a billion non-techies to choose decentralized social over something like Facebook. In a previous comment I wrote: Thinking in terms of technology & software like the "fathers of Internet"[1] have done to try and "solve" the adoption of decentralized ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the "software stack", think about the economics. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee are smart but they don't seem to ever address the economics of why a billion people won't choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers. Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused trust, security updates, etc. My theory on why those scientists don't put economics at the forefront of their pleas for a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when the entire Internet was sponsored by the government and universities. So to them, it just seems like today's problem can be solved with "technology". As another example of how "protocols" & "specifications" don't really solve decentralization, take a look at the old SMTP RFC 821[2] from 1982. As you read through it, notice that it talks about how fields are sequenced, etc. The technical stuff. But there is nothing about how people pay for pushing SMTP bytes around and storing it on harddrives. To be fair, the "economics" are out of scope for a RFC. But knowing what we know now, you can see that a computer scientist can read that RFC 821 and not predict that centralized email like Gmail/Hotmail emerges from it by way of aggregate human behavior. (E.g. the word "spam" is not found anywhere in RFC 821 and yet that is one of the primary drivers of the economics and why ISPs block port 25 on residential internet.) [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/intern... [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821