Very good analysis. I found myself thinking about this phrase: > The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the

Very good analysis. I found myself thinking about this phrase: > The mobile revolution is and has been by far the most powerful driver of centralization in the last 10-15 years. Many of us who were active users of Skype in its earlier days (mid-2000s) might remember Skype's first attempt at a mobile client. They took all the distributed P2P goodness of the desktop client and tried to have that run on the mobile environment. The result was sadly a smartphone app that was slow and rapidly drained your battery. For those of us with many Skype group chats open, the mobile client was basically unusable. So Microsoft/Skype had to go back and rethink the mobile client. To your points in your reply... they made it a "thin client" with all the power in the centralized servers. As they did that, it seemed from the outside that they determined over time that maintaining a desktop P2P source code and a mobile thin-client/server source code didn't make sense. And so ultimately the desktop P2P was abandoned and everything became client/server. (Which is the case now - Skype on your desktop is basically a wrapper for a web client.) And so... the quest for a good mobile user experience wound up being one of the drivers for centralizing one of the original decentralized P2P apps. [1] Good analysis! [1] Yes, there were, I'm sure, many other contributing factors, including the issues around the supernodes that led to one of the major outages. And yes, I do realize that Skype, even its earliest form was NOT a completely-decentralized communications app. They did have a centralized mechanism for logins / authentication and also for PSTN gateways and other services.