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Sure it can. Let's back up a bit to something physical as an example. If every car on the road were self driving, that would form a decentralized and distribute
by uluyol 8y ago
Sure it can. Let's back up a bit to something physical as an example. If every car on the road were self driving, that would form a decentralized and distributed system. Each car independently monitors and reacts to its surroundings. That doesn't prevent accidents between two cars, nor does it prevent huge cascading accidents that can cause highway closures.
Decentralization often makes these scenarios harder to avoid, not easier. There are simply more ways that things can interact (and therefore break).
To avoid these failures in any setting, you need to have provable containment of failures while assuming part of your network is malicious. That's asking for a lot more than decentralization.
- gambler 8y agoLike I said, a decentralized system can fail, but the root cause of such a failure cannot be "configuration change". If a configuration change is sufficient to break your system then it's not truly decentralized. Let's take your car example. If you update your car's firmware and get in an accident, it's not a system-level failure. If manufacturer sends a wireless update and all their autonomous cars start to bump into one another, it's not really a decentralized system anymore - updates are centralized. If you update your car, it crashes, sends a wireless signal that affects another car, and it crashes and so on... This is an example of a cascading failure in a fully decentralized system, but the real root cause would be cars interfering with one another, not your firmware update.
- uluyol 8y agoIf a manufacturer with 10 percent market share sends out an update that causes their vehicles to suddenly turn right, that would ruin conditions for everyone.
- matt_kantor 8y agoIf that's the case, then the conclusion based on the upthread reasoning is that this system isn't decentralized enough when any single manufacturer has a 10 percent market share.
- m0zg 8y agoIt prevents all cars failing at the same time worldwide.
- masto 8y agoUnless you push out a bug that is triggered by some combination of events so distant from the release that you could never have caught it in testing. Perhaps a bizarre interaction between multiple unrelated systems from different vendors that all work tested in isolation and only fall over when a series of 1 bits in a certain pattern in the real time clock chip creates a blip on a bus that gets corrected in a way that was interpreted differently by two different teams and the fallback system tries to take over but the primary system comes back online at just the wrong time and trips a bus contention bug that was never seen because testing never hit this perfect storm of race conditions and, well, the front falls off. The point of me making up a stupidly improbable story is that stupidly improbable events keep happening despite all the clever people in the world. And of course the people on hacker news who know even better.