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The article is extremely light on substance. This issue can be more readily addressed with a simple list: Centralization pros: * security * ease of manag

The article is extremely light on substance. This issue can be more readily addressed with a simple list: Centralization pros: * security * ease of management * lower overhead in task delegation * maintenance simplicity * versioning * no distribution Centralization cons: * fixed resources * fixed configuration * fixed environment Looking at these lists centralization at first appears immediately superior. These lists is an illusion in that it accounts for concerns in the present, but it does not account for growth or future concerns. Decentralized systems can scale in ways centralized systems cannot. The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer. There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation. There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems. Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way.

wslh 8y ago
You missed one of the most important points about centralization: performance and legal aspects/governance. Could you sue IPFS if the protocol removed your files? You can against companies like Google. Not saying that centralization is always the best options, just adding more food for thought.
- 18pfsmt 8y ago
  Obviously, you know one cannot sue a protocol or TheFappening torrent would not be available. That seems to be a strength: censorship resistance. But, it does have its downsides.
  - jonny_eh 8y ago
    Are you saying TheFappening was a good thing? If the best example of torrents being used to avoid censorship is the massive leak of salacious, private, non-newsworthy photos, then maybe your argument isn't all that great.
arka2147483647 8y ago
Centralization cons: fixed resources, fixed configuration, fixed environment I'm not willing to assign any of those cons to centralized services in the Cloud Era. All of those a just one one click away in AWS or any other such service.
- austincheney 8y ago
  This is far easier than swapping hardware, rebuilding the framework, or moving to a different programming language. The ease of adjustment is certainly present with the AWS dashboard, but the fixed qualities still applies just the same. If you want a change of resources or environment YOU must make that change with the AWS tools. In a decentralized system the diversity and flexibility are inherently present.
DenisM 8y ago
Bigger problem with centralized services is stifling monoculture. There will never be 10 different frontends to Facebook the way there can be 10 different email clients. Or 10 different newsfeed sorting algorithms. It’s the same problem that Amazon has - one size does not fit all in UX, and one decision maker, even if very smart and well-meaning, will sooner or later get himself into a corner and be stuck there.
- kiriakasis 8y ago
  But one could say the same for a monoculture of protocols in decentralized systems, the email protocol has been stable for a long time and has some serious issues due to its decentralized nature. For emails it is surely worth, but for many other application it might be different.
  - DenisM 8y ago
    That’s true - federated systems, unlike monoliths, suck at protocol and this capability evolution. But think about what it means for a minute! If one figured out protocol evolution or migration might be all it takes to give federated systems prominence.
  - 18pfsmt 8y ago
    >monoculture of protocols in decentralized systems Can you compare SMTP, NNTP, ActivityPub, XMPP, ATOM, Scuttlebut (SSB), to make your point clearer?
  - ghthor 8y ago
    If you attach a signed monetary transaction cost using a decentralized smart contract transaction system to sending email to a federated host I hypothesize that spam would start dwindling. Email, IMO, largely grew into a centralized system due to the difficulties in combating spam. From the receiving end where filtering and blacklisting is a major system administration task. Self hosting also requires high quality SRE skills to combat servers from being compromised and used to flood the federated network with spam. Make the act of sending a message cost the send or money and I think spam goes away and self hosting becomes much simpler.
visarga 8y ago
> Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. Only for parallelizable problems. It won't work if each node needs to communicate much with the rest of the nodes.
- austincheney 8y ago
  That depends on the application in question. I don't see this as in issue behind bit torrent. The biggest limitation in this regard is versioning. A change of API or format major version could break backwards/forwards compatibility that disrupts the decentralized system since you don't control the version present at each node.
  - visarga 8y ago
    > I don't see this as in issue behind bit torrent The main bottleneck in data processing is often the interconnect, not the compute.
    - austincheney 8y ago
      That depends on the amount of data to process and the computational effort involved. Provided a sufficiently challenging task and a fixed amount of computational resources you can easily predict the time needed to reach the goal. If the duration is exceedingly large or expensive it might make more sense to distribute the work load. Even though there is a delay to interconnect this delay will not likely reduce the benefits provided by distribution if the decision criteria are costs and expenses over time. These are all things that can be graphed and mapped against financial estimates.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
> Centralization pros: > * security No, that is bullshit. It's the same kind of security that a "strong leader"/dictator provides. Really, it's the same kind of power structure. It provides security against certain kinds of adversaries. But at the same time it eliminates all security against a malevolent "strong leader". That looks like improved security as long a you have a benevolent and competent person/entity in control of the centralized structure, but the huge risk is built into the structure, and that is very much a security problem. Facebook concentrating control over social interaction is a security problem. It's not a security problem for Facebook, but it is for society, and that is what counts.
archagon 8y ago
I'd argue that the biggest cons for centralization are: * lack of ownership * lack of privacy * lack of resilience[1] * lack of self-determination In my opinion, these are the factors that will make decentralization win out in some niches for the average user. [1] You might laugh at this given the 99.99etc.% uptime most cloud services advertise—and yet I still can't use my Google Docs when I'm passing through a tunnel.
peterhunt 8y ago
> The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer. There's very few problems that are embarrassingly parallel like this which is why the examples you gave are almost 20 years old. Most of the time you're bottlenecked on sharing state. > There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation. Compute is already pretty cheap and getting cheaper. > There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems. Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way. I would say the diversity of hardware and software creates more surface area for attacks, not less. I would also argue that distributed systems are way harder to design for privacy and security. For example, it's basically impossible to revoke access to something after it's granted in a distributed system unless you want users to run their own nodes 24/7 (which introduces availability problems).

wslh 8y ago

You missed one of the most important points about centralization: performance and legal aspects/governance. Could you sue IPFS if the protocol removed your files? You can against companies like Google. Not saying that centralization is always the best options, just adding more food for thought.

18pfsmt 8y ago
Obviously, you know one cannot sue a protocol or TheFappening torrent would not be available. That seems to be a strength: censorship resistance. But, it does have its downsides.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  Are you saying TheFappening was a good thing? If the best example of torrents being used to avoid censorship is the massive leak of salacious, private, non-newsworthy photos, then maybe your argument isn't all that great.

arka2147483647 8y ago

Centralization cons: fixed resources, fixed configuration, fixed environment I'm not willing to assign any of those cons to centralized services in the Cloud Era. All of those a just one one click away in AWS or any other such service.

austincheney 8y ago
This is far easier than swapping hardware, rebuilding the framework, or moving to a different programming language. The ease of adjustment is certainly present with the AWS dashboard, but the fixed qualities still applies just the same. If you want a change of resources or environment YOU must make that change with the AWS tools. In a decentralized system the diversity and flexibility are inherently present.

DenisM 8y ago

Bigger problem with centralized services is stifling monoculture. There will never be 10 different frontends to Facebook the way there can be 10 different email clients. Or 10 different newsfeed sorting algorithms. It’s the same problem that Amazon has - one size does not fit all in UX, and one decision maker, even if very smart and well-meaning, will sooner or later get himself into a corner and be stuck there.

kiriakasis 8y ago
But one could say the same for a monoculture of protocols in decentralized systems, the email protocol has been stable for a long time and has some serious issues due to its decentralized nature. For emails it is surely worth, but for many other application it might be different.
- DenisM 8y ago
  That’s true - federated systems, unlike monoliths, suck at protocol and this capability evolution. But think about what it means for a minute! If one figured out protocol evolution or migration might be all it takes to give federated systems prominence.
- 18pfsmt 8y ago
  >monoculture of protocols in decentralized systems Can you compare SMTP, NNTP, ActivityPub, XMPP, ATOM, Scuttlebut (SSB), to make your point clearer?
- ghthor 8y ago
  If you attach a signed monetary transaction cost using a decentralized smart contract transaction system to sending email to a federated host I hypothesize that spam would start dwindling. Email, IMO, largely grew into a centralized system due to the difficulties in combating spam. From the receiving end where filtering and blacklisting is a major system administration task. Self hosting also requires high quality SRE skills to combat servers from being compromised and used to flood the federated network with spam. Make the act of sending a message cost the send or money and I think spam goes away and self hosting becomes much simpler.

visarga 8y ago

> Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. Only for parallelizable problems. It won't work if each node needs to communicate much with the rest of the nodes.

austincheney 8y ago
That depends on the application in question. I don't see this as in issue behind bit torrent. The biggest limitation in this regard is versioning. A change of API or format major version could break backwards/forwards compatibility that disrupts the decentralized system since you don't control the version present at each node.
- visarga 8y ago
  > I don't see this as in issue behind bit torrent The main bottleneck in data processing is often the interconnect, not the compute.
  - austincheney 8y ago
    That depends on the amount of data to process and the computational effort involved. Provided a sufficiently challenging task and a fixed amount of computational resources you can easily predict the time needed to reach the goal. If the duration is exceedingly large or expensive it might make more sense to distribute the work load. Even though there is a delay to interconnect this delay will not likely reduce the benefits provided by distribution if the decision criteria are costs and expenses over time. These are all things that can be graphed and mapped against financial estimates.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago

> Centralization pros: > * security No, that is bullshit. It's the same kind of security that a "strong leader"/dictator provides. Really, it's the same kind of power structure. It provides security against certain kinds of adversaries. But at the same time it eliminates all security against a malevolent "strong leader". That looks like improved security as long a you have a benevolent and competent person/entity in control of the centralized structure, but the huge risk is built into the structure, and that is very much a security problem. Facebook concentrating control over social interaction is a security problem. It's not a security problem for Facebook, but it is for society, and that is what counts.

archagon 8y ago

I'd argue that the biggest cons for centralization are: * lack of ownership * lack of privacy * lack of resilience[1] * lack of self-determination In my opinion, these are the factors that will make decentralization win out in some niches for the average user. [1] You might laugh at this given the 99.99etc.% uptime most cloud services advertise—and yet I still can't use my Google Docs when I'm passing through a tunnel.

peterhunt 8y ago

> The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation. Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer. While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer. There's very few problems that are embarrassingly parallel like this which is why the examples you gave are almost 20 years old. Most of the time you're bottlenecked on sharing state. > There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too. Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity. When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation. Compute is already pretty cheap and getting cheaper. > There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems. Centralized systems are a single point of failure. Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks. A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way. I would say the diversity of hardware and software creates more surface area for attacks, not less. I would also argue that distributed systems are way harder to design for privacy and security. For example, it's basically impossible to revoke access to something after it's granted in a distributed system unless you want users to run their own nodes 24/7 (which introduces availability problems).