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SMTP, Git, and Bitcoin are really and truly decentralized in their actual implementations, even as economies of scale favor a concentration of service providers
by mbrock 9y ago
SMTP, Git, and Bitcoin are really and truly decentralized in their actual implementations, even as economies of scale favor a concentration of service providers.
"Because Git the technical protocol is not a bank fund that gives every programmer a free $10 VPS account to host their own git repo."
No, but the protocol does ensure that every individual clone of a repository is a full mirror, and that everyone can work offline and synchronize via USB drives if they should need to.
I'm not sure that the kind of decentralization you're talking about is possible or even desirable.
- jasode 9y ago>No, but the protocol does ensure that every individual clone of a repository is a full mirror, and that everyone can work offline and synchronize via USB drives if they should need to. Correct, but what I was addressing was the recurring sarcasm of "why did we settle for a centralized service like Github when Git itself is decentralized?" ... everytime Github has an outage. Some people truly don't connect the dots as to why source code repo centralization exists despite the fact that Git is decentralized. To them, Github centralization seems like a weird irrational phenomenon. No, it's actually a quite natural and expected phenomenon!
- mbrock 9y agoYeah. I think part of the problem is that centralized vs decentralized becomes a dualism and people get fixated with an ideal of pure decentralization. In my view, decentralization is about building resilient systems where it's not a big problem if everyone uses the same provider, or the same three providers, because the content is de facto independent from the operators. But it's also true that decentralized systems are under constant threat of recentralization because lock-in benefits monopolists...