> The common theme: technical protocols can be decentralized but the real-world implementation of those protocols end up centralized because physical things lik

> The common theme: technical protocols can be decentralized but the real-world implementation of those protocols end up centralized because physical things like cpus, harddrives, network bandwidth, etc cost money. I agreed with you up until here. Not convinced that centralization is due to the economics of running a computer on a network. It's also a due to reputation and trust. People use gmail and hotmail, not just because they don't want to pay for the computer, it's because they trust these companies will do it properly and reliably. Github isn't the best example either. It didn't spring up because of the economics of running a git server. It got big largely because of its social features, and also because it was a pretty trustworthy git repository. I feel far more confident pushing to a git repo than to some physical server somewhere. There's a trust aspect. I'll skip Bitcoin and got to another mostly decentralized system: paper currency. Exchanging paper currency is largely decentralized, but most people deposit it in a bank, in part due to interest, but largely due to the trust the bank provides. The common theme to centralized services isn't the cost of computing hardware, but rather raising trust/reliability in the service, outsourcing expertise, and risk mitigation. Big central service providers are good at exactly this.