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All communities have leaders, whales, whatever you want to call them. Even Bitcoin is now controlled by a small group of mostly Chinese people. Decentralizati

All communities have leaders, whales, whatever you want to call them. Even Bitcoin is now controlled by a small group of mostly Chinese people. Decentralization does nothing other than put control in the hands of an unpredictable and potentially unaccountable group of people, whereas centralized systems have people you can point to and hold accountable (or so we hope). There is a reason it's never worked throughout history, and why decentralized systems always collapse into a more efficient centralized form.

zoul 9y ago
Like e-mail or the web, perhaps?
- tadzik_ 9y ago
  Exactly like email or the web. Certain services (shame on you, booking.com) now consider it a potential bug if you email doesn't end in gmail.com (they do their "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" when I enter the proper one, with my own domain). The web itself also tends to gravitate towards either "cloud" providers or at least stuff like cloudfare for ddos protection. Yes, it is still decentralized, but people keep choosing the centralized subsets of it for convenience.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    I noticed this too, and it's both quite annoying and rather sad.
  - ColinWright 9y ago
    > "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" This is incredibly annoying, I agree, but having run a service for which people type their email addresses, and having seen just how many people can't actually type their own email address properly (currently running at about 5%) I'm not surprised that a service aimed at non-technical people puts in attempted safeguards like this. And my service is for technical people - I can't imagine what it's like for genuinely open services.
    - mercer 9y ago
      could you give some examples of the types of mistakes they make?
      - ColinWright 9y ago
        Omitting letters in their username, getting the domain wrong by omitting or mutating letters, commas instead of periods, spaces, and more. Some, such as commas and spaces are easy to catch, but mutations in the username are pretty much impossible to catch. Without digging through my records I can't be more specific, but in general I was horrified at how many can't actually spell their own names correctly. Seriously, one person typed jojn.dpe instead of john.doe (name deliberately changed to protect the user). Sometimes it's possible to guess the correct username/domain, but sometimes it simply isn't.
- always_good 9y ago
  It's funny because those are perfect examples of what they are talking about. Gmail and Cloudflare. For example, the web makes it cheap and trivial to DoS someone. And you often don't want your origin exposed. Hence everyone using Cloudflare and the collapse of the decentralized dream.
transpostmeta 9y ago
Email is a decentralized system.
- hudon 9y ago
  Its design intended it to be used that way, but that's not how people use it. Everyone uses a centralized email provider now (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), and these providers act as gatekeepers to email. If they disappear, people will find an alternative centralized messaging scheme, not start learning how to run their own mail servers...
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    It's true that when or if you need to communicate with them, you need to play by their rules, but it's also true that email has the potential, the power, and the technical solutions to shift away from it, should it ever be needed or wanted. This is not true for centralised by design systems. EDIT: I don't think people will be able to abandon email, given it's a replacement for paper mail (banking, official papers, etc). If the big players won't play nice, people will need to get to another provider, simply because the source of email won't be willing/fast enough to jump on [system X].
  - rglullis 9y ago
    Sorry, it is still decentralized. - Even if it were true that "everyone uses Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc", the ones that don't can still send/receive emails from everyone else. - If one of the of the big providers disappear, the system as a whole will continue to function.
    - hudon 9y ago
      If all centralized providers disappeared and I had to send a message to my friend, I wouldn't setup my own SMTP server... I'd just send him an iMessage. Or I'd post to a Slack group. The system without centralized providers is useless to most people using it today because no one wants to learn how to setup a mail server when there are dozens of alternative messaging tools. As for the few that do have the capacity to setup a mail server, they would only be able to message others that also have the capacity to setup a mail server (again we're assuming no centralized providers and thus no delegation of this task to a trusted party). So maybe the system would still work for this niche group... but then we get into the bigger question: are there entities today that control the Internet and do they have the capacity to shut down systems like email? Tor?
russdpale 9y ago
Ill be frank. I don't see the problem with bitcoin as you describe it. The reason the mining power is in China is because they produce the ASICS and they have cheap power. Centralized systems offer this accountability in theory. But rarely does this work in practice.
arisAlexis 9y ago
It's total misinformation that Bitcoin is controlled by a group of Chinese actually

zoul 9y ago

Like e-mail or the web, perhaps?

tadzik_ 9y ago
Exactly like email or the web. Certain services (shame on you, booking.com) now consider it a potential bug if you email doesn't end in gmail.com (they do their "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" when I enter the proper one, with my own domain). The web itself also tends to gravitate towards either "cloud" providers or at least stuff like cloudfare for ddos protection. Yes, it is still decentralized, but people keep choosing the centralized subsets of it for convenience.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  I noticed this too, and it's both quite annoying and rather sad.
- ColinWright 9y ago
  > "did you mean: tadzik_@gmail.com?" This is incredibly annoying, I agree, but having run a service for which people type their email addresses, and having seen just how many people can't actually type their own email address properly (currently running at about 5%) I'm not surprised that a service aimed at non-technical people puts in attempted safeguards like this. And my service is for technical people - I can't imagine what it's like for genuinely open services.
  - mercer 9y ago
    could you give some examples of the types of mistakes they make?
    - ColinWright 9y ago
      Omitting letters in their username, getting the domain wrong by omitting or mutating letters, commas instead of periods, spaces, and more. Some, such as commas and spaces are easy to catch, but mutations in the username are pretty much impossible to catch. Without digging through my records I can't be more specific, but in general I was horrified at how many can't actually spell their own names correctly. Seriously, one person typed jojn.dpe instead of john.doe (name deliberately changed to protect the user). Sometimes it's possible to guess the correct username/domain, but sometimes it simply isn't.
always_good 9y ago
It's funny because those are perfect examples of what they are talking about. Gmail and Cloudflare. For example, the web makes it cheap and trivial to DoS someone. And you often don't want your origin exposed. Hence everyone using Cloudflare and the collapse of the decentralized dream.

transpostmeta 9y ago

Email is a decentralized system.

hudon 9y ago
Its design intended it to be used that way, but that's not how people use it. Everyone uses a centralized email provider now (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.), and these providers act as gatekeepers to email. If they disappear, people will find an alternative centralized messaging scheme, not start learning how to run their own mail servers...
- pmlnr 9y ago
  It's true that when or if you need to communicate with them, you need to play by their rules, but it's also true that email has the potential, the power, and the technical solutions to shift away from it, should it ever be needed or wanted. This is not true for centralised by design systems. EDIT: I don't think people will be able to abandon email, given it's a replacement for paper mail (banking, official papers, etc). If the big players won't play nice, people will need to get to another provider, simply because the source of email won't be willing/fast enough to jump on [system X].
- rglullis 9y ago
  Sorry, it is still decentralized. - Even if it were true that "everyone uses Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc", the ones that don't can still send/receive emails from everyone else. - If one of the of the big providers disappear, the system as a whole will continue to function.
  - hudon 9y ago
    If all centralized providers disappeared and I had to send a message to my friend, I wouldn't setup my own SMTP server... I'd just send him an iMessage. Or I'd post to a Slack group. The system without centralized providers is useless to most people using it today because no one wants to learn how to setup a mail server when there are dozens of alternative messaging tools. As for the few that do have the capacity to setup a mail server, they would only be able to message others that also have the capacity to setup a mail server (again we're assuming no centralized providers and thus no delegation of this task to a trusted party). So maybe the system would still work for this niche group... but then we get into the bigger question: are there entities today that control the Internet and do they have the capacity to shut down systems like email? Tor?

russdpale 9y ago

Ill be frank. I don't see the problem with bitcoin as you describe it. The reason the mining power is in China is because they produce the ASICS and they have cheap power. Centralized systems offer this accountability in theory. But rarely does this work in practice.

arisAlexis 9y ago

It's total misinformation that Bitcoin is controlled by a group of Chinese actually