> 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 distri

> 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).