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Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?

• niahmiah 8y ago
  When you need to bridge to any real-world asset
• cjslep 8y ago
  Decentralized infrastructure with federated transactions describes many successful technologies such as email. I think federation is just a design tool meant to solve a specific problem, much like decentralization, programming language choice, data structures, etc are more concrete software engineering ones.
  • mabbo 8y ago
    Certificate authorities seems to follow the same pattern. I wonder if we might see a crytocurrency someday follow that same pattern: the chain is decentralized and public, but the miners are each replaced by authorities that a user can choose to accept (or not). The downside to this would be disagreements over who actually owns what. You'd only be able to make a transaction if both the buyer and seller agree on who owns the currency being exchanged. At least then we wouldn't have the insanity of "whoever uses the most electricity is right".
    • woah 8y ago
      There are many chains like this
      • mabbo 8y ago
        Really? Do tell, I'm quite interested!
        • coconutrandom 8y ago
          Look up [Delegated] Proof of Stake
    • bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
      Those "authorities" could still be expending energy, be it marketing dollars or actual compute time, to jockey to be "the authority" trusted by users, though.
    • SeoxyS 8y ago
      Stellar is this
  • y_molodtsov 8y ago
    Email is a relic of an old era and isn’t a very good example. It wouldn’t catch on if it emerged just now. More and more modern email clients starts to add things on top of the protocol turning their apps into walled gardens (Polymail, Spark, Gmail too actually). Not because they’re evil, because it’s impossible for some players to update the protocol itself.
• bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
  I will say it: Decentralization has definitely been overhyped by certain fringes - that doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bath water, though. The cry to “decentralize all the things” does include moving things incrementally from single choke point to multiple choke points to multiple choke points working together with a byzantium consensus mechanism to a truly decentralized model without a single point of failure. Many projects are better suited to a hybrid model at this point in time by virtue of what is technologically feasible, as well. Example problem people still butt heads with in "decentralization": nothing at stake for PoS. Lots of food for thought when tackling this - thanks for raising the important question in this hype cycle.
  • smilesnd 8y ago
    If everything started to use blockchains then we could all be decentralized by 2035.
    • bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
      What do you feel about this statement/observation: If everyone started to use hybrids then we could all be in electric cars by 2035.
      • smilesnd 8y ago
        Truth just for the fact most people buy a new vehicle every 10 years or so mattering different things. Plus I hear in certain places they getting rid of the gasoline so people will be more in a rush to purchase something running electricity sooner then later.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      If by "decentralized" you mean the 10% of us who wouldn't starve during the first month would be running around the ruins of our civilization with spears, hunting animals and each other, day in, day out. We couldn't survive the loss of efficiency that would happen if "everything started to use blockchains".
• hxchen 8y ago
  I agree with you on that hybrid would be a more sustainable solution. I want to highlight a technical perspective. That’s the scalability issue of Blockchain. Fully decentralization cannot afford scalability, just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal. In fact, many technical solutions to scale the Blockchain are using the same principle of your idea of federation.
  • nathcd 8y ago
    > That’s the scalability issue of Blockchain. Fully decentralization cannot afford scalability, just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal. What you're talking about here is decentralized consensus, which is very different than just decentralization. Regular old decentralization -- a la Secure Scuttlebutt -- has no such scaling issues.
  • dmichulke 8y ago
    > just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal OT: I think it's about time to end this myth. We have the internetz for a few decades and voting machines (supposedly to make it all simpler) yet somehow direct democracy is impossible and we "need" the democracy as done in the 19th century just because ... well, because no single government is willing to give power back. Is it possible to have a referendum on every political proposal? Yes. Is it done? No.
    • dmichulke 8y ago
      Just to be clear: We don't need a referendum on every issue, we just need a way to - change your representative every week or so - override your representative's vote within a given time window
  • CM30 8y ago
    > just as we cannot afford referendum on every polical proposal. Part of me wonders whether this would be a good thing. I mean, the best political systems are those where things are difficult to change on purpose, like how in the US the constitution is virtually impossible to change without overwhelming agreement from most involved. In that sense, having referendums be required on a lot of political proposals may well help kill lobbying, as well as downplay the effects of knee jerk reactions and 'think of the children' style pearl clutching. Require a majority, and well, a lot of things like copyright extensions simply can't get off the ground at all.
• skaul 8y ago
  About federation in particular: Moxie wrote about why Signal is unfederated a little while back: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ It has some interesting insights into when federation works and when it doesn’t. “Nothing about any of the protocols we’ve developed requires centralization; it’s entirely possible to build a federated Signal Protocol-based messenger, but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”
  • kuschku 8y ago
    Yeah, but moxie is mostly wrong. He's only seen worst-case scenarios and assumes everything is lile that, so he builds his centralized stuff instead. You can easily move forward with a federated protocol as well if you've got cooperating people, guarantee only 6 months of support for a protocol version, and have a versioning and feature flag system. Hell in one project I contribute to we've kept protocol compatibility since 2009, we've got mamy third party clients, everyone hosts their own server — and still we can introduce new features without breakage in a matter of days (at least into beta, QA and translation take a while).
    • y_molodtsov 8y ago
      And how many consumer users does that project have? Federated clients lost.
      • kuschku 8y ago
        So you're saying that the only reason Facebook messenger with thousands of deva and a multi billion ad budget won against XMPP was that XMPP was federated? No. The reason federated clients lost was that mega corporations can't make profit with em, and so they spent billions on their own tech. This isn't david vs goliath, this is david vs a nuclear aircraft carrier
    • toomuchtodo 8y ago
      If he's wrong and it's easy, why can no one do it? Why did Slack overrun IRC? XMPP left by the wayside by Google and Facebook? Because it isn't easy, and users will always value the experience over compatibility and principal.
• madshiva 8y ago
  Decentralization is when you need to hide something. Torrent, etc. Decentralization did not work for Napster. Decentralization is not a magical trick. Money, specialy when he come to your retirement are better centralized. Because it's for your own security, gouvernement to don't let you starve. Decentralization for money only mean, no security, no rules, nothing. Like a punk anarchy.
• kruhft 8y ago
  Check out Curtis Yarvin's work on this, he problably solved it in an interesting way with how he's configured the current Urbit node system.
  • Presquare 8y ago
    Urbit is interesting for me in how I first couldn't understand its purpose at all. Since then, I have had several cases of pondering on some difficult problem, only to find myself thinking, "...isn't this what Urbit is attempting to be a (partial) solution to?"
• smilesnd 8y ago
  Decentralize does work when state doesn't matter. Look at tor for a example. When state matters federation is a better match such as emails. The real problem with executing decentralize/federate is it runs on the backbones of a centralized design network. IPv6 helps with that problem, but still at the end of the day dealing with all the complexity, headaches, and unknowns it is more simple to build a centralize solution then spend the extra time and effort for a federated/decentralize solution.
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
    "The real problem with executing decentralize/federate is it runs on the backbones of a centralized design network." This is the crux of the current landscape exactly.
  • ryanlol 8y ago
    >Look at tor for a example Is tor not a federation of onion routers?
• pjc50 8y ago
  I think you're looking in the right direction - governance. The problems of governance are real. There's a libertarian tendency to just try to define them away, but this underestimates the extent to which abuse questions are important and how a few bad actors can overwhelm a distributed system, requiring considerable dedicated central effort to fight. USENET had its cancels ( http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/cancel/ , mostly sent by a small group of spam fighters), email had to build centralised DNS blocklists to remain usable. And as you say, there needs to be a legitimate front organisation to interact with the regulators. Perhaps more than one, to cope with geographically distinct regulations. Or offer people an escape from their local systems of control (until you're blocked at the national level). To me it seems that the nonprofit/co-operative model is under-explored for this. A lot of the old Internet that people look back on fondly relied on what I call "Postel decentralisation": people think it was decentralised, but in fact it was managed by hand by John Postel back when he was IANA. Similarly Linux has "Linus decentralisation": there's an elaborate decentralised version control system, but nonetheless Linus has effective final veto in practice. And Etherum has "Vitalik decentralisation": disasters such as the DAO can be reversed by code changes, because even if the blockchain is immutable the code required to interpret it isn't.
  • moviuro 8y ago
    > Similarly Linux has "Linus decentralisation": there's an elaborate decentralised version control system, but nonetheless Linus has effective final veto in practice. And Etherum has "Vitalik decentralisation": disasters such as the DAO can be reversed by code changes, because even if the blockchain is immutable the code required to interpret it isn't. There is nothing but "sheep mentality" preventing most people from (hard) forking. Don't like what Ethereum did with the DAO incident? Don't patch. See https://ethereumclassic.github.io/ https://ethereumclassic.github.io/ Don't like what Linus did (not) merge? Fork the project, and patch it like you want. See https://grsecurity.net/features.php https://grsecurity.net/features.php
    • abakker 8y ago
      Well, yes, except that unless you get a critical mass of people that agree with you, you lose all compatibility. Nobody will buy your Ether-fork and while your Linux fork might work, it’s all yours to maintain from that moment on. There is value in standardization, even if the standards aren’t perfect.
• openfuture 8y ago
  I've thought a lot about this recently so I'll share my 2c First some semantics; I use decentralization as a term that applies to both distributed and federated systems. That way the aggregate term 'decentralization' contrasts centralisation properly. Centralized systems usually work quite well until they reach a certain scale. At what scale centralized systems start breaking down is an interesting question that depends on some variables like the underlying information technology and the cultural assumptions of actors. Federation is a pretty simple way of solving this problem if you can somehow figure out when and how to split up the centralized system and an interface for the various central nodes to communicate. Distribution is like anarchism, a laudable goal, but each participant must be capable of independence which may be unrealistically optimistic. Having hierarchies as actors in a network seems more realistic if we can just figure out a way to keep those hierarchies bounded. For example I think the world would be a better place if we had put into place laws early on in capitalism that would limit how many employees a company could have to some smallish amount like 25 - 100, that way the emphasis would have been on the cooperation of small hierarchies ( = individuals in our current system). Many large companies look like this internally but the teams are not autonomous to the extent of being allowed to move across company borders. A couple of other observations with the max employee idea: nepotism wouldn't happen (wasting a whole slot in the company on someone useless would breed resentment) and tribes would form (loyalty to your tribe and learning to work together would be paramount). What I'm leading up to here is that ideally the issue of federation vs distribution would be handled culturally. We could have a network like maidsafe or some ethereum based idea to reach distribution automagically but I tend to think something like a activitypub based social network with lots of different social interfaces (tinder, couchsurfing, instagram, language exchange, facebook groups for different interests, microblogging - only one already implemented, second hand shopping/selling and others) then you'd subscribe to a server that'd fit your niche and someone would be able to make a job out of serving a certain community. Basically letting people decide where they outsource their server needs to instead of trying to make the jump to personal servers in one go (a la urbit). Over generations server hosting would become a family thing probably? It seems natural, we'd essentially be back to square one where your family is your social bedrock. I'm just flow-of-consciousnessing here so a massive grain of salt please but the overarching point is that distribution vs federation is more political than technical in my opinion.
• thisisit 8y ago
  Is decentralization overhyped? Yes. It is more due to people just scratching the surface of a problem. For example governance is not only about a democratic process - everyone having a say. It is also about public perception. If you need an example, a rather obtuse one is the current US Presidency race. People who hype decentralization go by the book and forget (or don't have) practical knowledge. On the federation side, ethereum's oracle contracts are meant to be federated feeds. For example you can create a stock price publishing contract which federates feeds from NASDAQ, BATS, NYSE etc. but the end point is a blockchain. I don't know if that is a good idea.
• Taek 8y ago
  Most decentralized projects are approaching the problem in the wrong way. Blockchains are a new, early technology, and most of the developers building blockchains don't understand them very well and aren't using them correctly. I think the dotcom bubble was much the same way - suddenly everyone had a website, but almost nobody had a useful website, because people didn't really understand how a website was best able to serve a business. Federation over decentralization makes sense in any context where there is pre-existing trust. Federation is faster, more scalable, more easily upgraded, if something goes wrong it's easier to pause things and make a surgical change to the system. But federations are also easier to subvert, and users more or less end up controlling the maintainers of the system entirely. If you are a group of international banks, that's not a problem. But if you a single human being that expects corporations, banks, and governments to more or less always behave sociopathically, then it doesn't make sense. Blockchain core infrastructure needs more time. The hype train took off way too early. I think we're looking at 5 to 10 more years of heavy improvements to things like the wallets, custody process, governance models, scripting systems / dapp languages, the cryptography itself, the peer to peer network, cross-chain exchanges, and other big developer and interoperability features, and just general education / common sense about what blockchains can and can't do. We'll get there. Blockchain technology is absolutely revolutionary, and it's going to change a lot of things about our global infrastructure. But 2018 or even 2020 isn't the year that we see blockchains really start to get traction. There's a lot of groundwork that we still need to put in place.
  • sanderjd 8y ago
    It's been a pretty long time since the Bitcoin paper. About the same or longer than the time between the definition of HTTP and the emergence of the web as a useful mainstream technology. Why does this seem to be developing more slowly than the web? Maybe a better analogy is the time it took arpanet to develop into the modern web? Perhaps analogies like this are not worth looking at? I'm not sure about any of this, but I feel like lots of people recently have been making the argument that it's really early, hasn't had time to develop, etc., when I've been waiting for it to turn into something for a long time now and becoming increasingly skeptical as the goal posts have continued to move.
• woah 8y ago
  The problem with a lot of federated platforms (I’m thinking of diaspora, secure scuttlebutt, mastodon etc) is that whole they do provide a way for data to be easily synchronized and replicated, they never answer the question of who is ultimately going to store the data and why. So you end up with a “temporary” list of servers for new users to sign up with, which become centralized in their own right.
  • gregknicholson 8y ago
    SSB is distinct from Diaspora and Mastodon in this respect. It's decentralised rather than federated (pub servers are just peers with a public address). SSB's answer to this question is: your friends are going to store your data, because they want to read it themselves. You are going to store your friends' data, because you want to pass it on to your other friends.
    • woah 8y ago
      Actually, I'm mostly basing this on SSB, since it is the only one of these three I've used seriously, and I've followed its development since when it was just Dominic Tarr and Paul Frazee in an IRC chat. The system has gotten a lot more complex since the early days, and although I no longer know all the internals, it seems that the pub servers are pretty integral to its operation, and you can't get someone onto the system without one. I agree that an SSB-like system with pub servers removed and replaced by STUN/TURN servers which would only facilitate WebRTC would not have this problem. Just to be clear, the reason for this is that STUN/TURN servers are so lightweight and have very little to do with the actual operation of the system, so they could be put on a list on the main website and supported by very small donations. Then again, like you said, one could describe such a system as "decentralized", not "federated". I also suspect it would have performance characteristics that many users would not like.
• imbokodo 8y ago
  The US Treasury department says trading in Petro cryptocoins would violate US sanctions against Venezuela. So Bitfinex will not trade in it. Coinmarketcap.com lists over 1500 cryptocoins, but not the Petro. This sort of things shows up the myth of decentralization. Only one cryptocoin with elements of decentralization has been truly challenged, and has basically collapsed under US government pressure. It shows "decentralization" only exists until one powerful country challenges it. Which effectively means all cryptocoins may as well be directed by the US Federal Reserve. Which means you might as well buy dollars if that is the case. While this is all the case, it can not be proved, so can be dismissed. What it does portend - the complete collapse of Bitcoin at some point - can not be dismissed though.
  • smilesnd 8y ago
    Their is a difference when a hacker/coder creates a cryptocurrency and a government creates one. I do agree with you the weakness of cryptocurrency now a days is it relies on exchanges that need approval from banks/governments to do business. Gone the days when crypto fans would meet in dark alley ways to exchange cash for coin.
  • mythrwy 8y ago
    The other thing people sometimes overlook is the infrastructure these schemes depend upon. Control of the wires means a lot. Sure you can always sneak under to radar to some extent but the mass cannot and that probably won't change.
• bitCromwell 8y ago
  "As long as we live in a world where fiat currency and nation states dominate transactional and regulatory environments" Do you think that world will ever end? What will that look like? Will the very, very early stages look something like this? Cryptocurrencies were not developed as a get rich scheme, nor as a tool for energy efficiency, corporate profits nor so many of the rubrics we use to judge them today. The idealists that authored the crypto world imagined replacing the fiats of current rulers. Considering how rare a thing that is in history their early, chaotic form of decentralization isn't doing so badly judged on its own merits.
• rhlala 8y ago
  If governance and concensus between the diferent actors is your thing, take a look at the Decred cryptocurrency.
• endymi0n 8y ago
  Here's the core of the problem and also why most of crypto / blockchain technology will go down the drain soon: Decentralization isn't a business model. The opposite is. That's it. How you get to any competitive edge in a market is: 1) Be better than your competitors in a field. 2) Own that field and displace everyone else. 3) Extract value. The Crypto hype happened because a super elegant technical solution (-> Blockchain) that nobody really understands was (and IMHO still is) waiting for a problem met a visionary hippie fantasy of a world of inefficient, evil companies that somehow will be made better by some form of decentralization. The problem is: There wasn't ever an inefficiency and none of those "huge" competitors has any incentive to leave their market share to someone else. So exactly nothing will happen. Crypto is nothing more than modern white knight fantasy - in reality all the purpopoted benefits of a blockchain are serious shortcomings. Do you really want a payment that can't be rolled back by a centralized authority because you were defrauded or someone hacked your account? Do you want any kind of accounts for a whole tech-afraid populace that they can't access anymore once they've lost their key? Most people haven't realized that the current centralization and trust in some large companies and institutions is actually a pretty deep local optimum that will be incredibly hard to displace with something better.
  • purvis 8y ago
    Your argument against crypto is one of the more compelling I've read. I like the "deep local optimum" visual you painted. I definitely agree if you're comparing "crypto" directly to centralized companies doing traditional things -- they're not going anywhere. However, I think it solves a different problem. It's a geopolitical problem. Blockchain technology provide a bulletproof (so far) way of exchanging value across borders without having to trust any middlemen. There's a quote, I believe by Erik Voorhees, saying roughly: "Bitcoin is separation of money and state".
    • smilesnd 8y ago
      But currently this only works in third world countries where the government lacks resources or care to combat it. Plus their is still a middleman if you don't mine the cryptocurrency yourself. I still have to pay a exchange if I cannot find someone willing to take cash/check from me. You also have the opposite effect where you need the exchange and a bank account to turn that coin I sent into usable cash.
• paulsutter 8y ago
  Blockchains were designed to prevent double-spending, and not to solve other problems. Most blockchain enthusiasm is misplaced. One subjective (but powerful) reason for blockchain implementations, is that we're all human, and our egos want to avoid making someone else's database The Big Platform. Or maybe that's our rational sense (looking at GOOG/FB), we don't want our application controlled by someone else. This article spells out a few reasons why new categories of securities make sense to implement on a blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/the-security-token-thesis-4c5904761063 https://hackernoon.com/the-security-token-thesis-4c590476106... > “Do we need a blockchain for this? Couldn’t this be done with a database?” The answer is yes, some of it could be done with a centralized database, but it begs the question “why hasn’t it already been done?” The answer is that the current centralized solutions for electronic value transfer lack compatibility — they don’t talk to each other. I can’t send value from PayPal to Venmo, or from E*Trade to RealtyShares. These layers aren’t interoperable.
  • TomK32 8y ago
    We have seen a 51% double spending attack on Bitcoin Gold just a few days ago. Can we stop claiming that blockchains prevent that?
    • paulsutter 8y ago
      The attacks on the smaller blockchains are good news. Blockchains have the biggest bug bounties in history, and in time we'll all learn what works. I've never heard anyone claim blockchains are immune to double spending. There's evolutionary value behind all the experiments. And they're all experiments, including Bitcoin.
• celso 8y ago
  Agreed. Federation makes a lot of sense to me in many cases, especially those that relate to the enterprise use cases where performance over extreme theoretical security is much more critical. I think some newer consensus algorithms are experimenting with similar concepts as well. For instance, with delegated proof of stake, you can use your funds to elect a federation or a government (a list of nodes), which in turn will stake their funds and resources to validate blocks.
• EGreg 8y ago
  As someone who has worked exactly with these issues for the past 7 years, let me share what I have learned. Just a bit of background. My first startup, https://qbix.com https://qbix.com focused on letting each community host its own social network, the same way Wordpress powers blogs. Wordpress powers 30% of the Web so it seemed to be a good business model (and it is). Here is a video explaining that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI Last year we started a new company at https://intercoin.org https://intercoin.org focused on letting each community manage its own currency. We saw that crypto wasn't solving payments as well as WeChat and all the other centralized social networks, so we figured we could fix that. Here is a video explaining that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIbAz29L-FA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIbAz29L-FA OK, so what have I learned? First of all, federated is much easier. You simply have one source of truth for each stream of data. It's why it's more prevalent. It also creates "landlords" that you have to trust to host your data, and often their agendas clash with your own. Two months ago I asked why have "communities" at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741913 We are familiar with "landlords" all the time, and their inordinate power within their ecosystems. Consider Amazon's bookstore, Apple's app store, Google's search engine, Facebook's social network, and so on. Federating this would be a very good way of introducing choice, and competition among landlords. You still have to choose a landlord, but now the market can improve everyone's experience through competition. But it turns out that you can do even better than the market, if you build technology that facilitates collaboration instead of competition. Collaboration has entirely different economics, but ultimately wins in the end. Think about Wikipedia vs Britannica, Linux vs Windows, WebKit vs old IE, and so on. With Collaboration, the infrastructure gets paid for, but not by extracting rents through closed source software. Instead, you distribute the work across many different actors and none of them own their own little fiefdom but they are all intermixed in a grand tapestry. So why would any actor do anything? One answer is that, if they don't do it, someone else will, so they get a little bit of control / money in the beginning, which fades with time. That part is similar to capitalism. But another part is simply because "the main software is designed to facilitate that mode of collaboration by default". Also the landlord can be a single point of failure for your data. Consider, for instance, how we store files. Imagine you have no backups in the cloud, and all files are stored in your apartment. Now there's a fire. What happened to all your files? They are gone. But if your'e going to have backups in the cloud, you want to make sure they are encrypted, and only you can access them. Even better would be to blur the distinction between servers run by "the landlord" (even if it's your own apartment) and "the cloud" and just make protocols that find the best server, have it be in a consensus group, encrypt everything end-to-end, and allow reading and writing by multiple parties. This is very hard to get right. But any such platform would allow people to build communities on top of a reliable foundation, where only members in the communities would be able to access information, and they could have validators who vouch for what actions (e.g. in a game) are valid. Clients that don't agree with a validator can ignore it, and thus the consensus may sometimes split (e.g. a hard fork), with each client choosing which validator to listen to. This is a strict improvement in terms of resilience and control, removing arbitrary landlord relations, and capable of reducing back to them as a special case. It's just harder to implement. Consider, for example, why we have domains and DNS. I have files, why do I have to "choose Google Drive" to store my data, and then trust that they will store it, encrypt it, and so on? Why do we have to choose a domain at all? There is a technique called Kademlia, invented in 2002, which was used to power DHTs including BitTorrent and now used in SAFENetwork. SAFENetwork is probably the ultimate example of a benign "landlord" - a network which encrypts and stores your files redundantly, and prevents them being taken down. (Qbix is moving towards the same thing (https://qbix.com/blog https://qbix.com/blog) except with dynamic data instead of static files. https://maidsafe.net/docs/Safe%20Network%20Primer.pdf https://maidsafe.net/docs/Safe%20Network%20Primer.pdf I would say the future is: End-to-end encryption Kademlia (or similar) for routing Consensus groups for each data stream Churn (backend groups constantly change to prevent collusion) Proof of resource (every so often, within groups) On top of this, people can build apps that can spread phone-to-phone, taking advantage of a dynamic data layer that lets anyone start their own "stream" and not worry about the arbitrary decision of "which domain hosts it". The participants get determine the rules of each stream (democracy? dictatorship?) and the landlord is just someone they give access to as well. A search engine would just be a guest in many streams. Do I think Federated systems and market mechanisms are great? Yes. Do I think Distributed systems acting as totally benign landlords are better? Oh yes! They are more resilient, too. For a crypto-currency, that is a must, or you can have this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1d5VvCa8Fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1d5VvCa8Fo (they who know this movie know what happened there.) But they are way harder to do. It took us over 1 year at Intercoin just to come up with the right design. If you want to know more about this topic, you can read about our design decisions (and economics etc) here: https://forum.intercoin.org/ https://forum.intercoin.org/ Also feel free to email me (greg is the username, intercoin.org is the domain) if you have more questions or want to discuss this topic, I geek out on it. Here is a video I made about decentralizing more than just software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY
• deleted 8y ago
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