One point I've made in alignment with this is to ask why decentralized systems are inherently more private. Most decentralized systems seem to have more surfac

One point I've made in alignment with this is to ask why decentralized systems are inherently more private. Most decentralized systems seem to have more surface area for surveillance, not less. Why couldn't surveillance agencies and data-grabbing corporations just launch a bunch of "Sybil" nodes to surveil everyone? These would be virtually undetectable as they would be otherwise well behaved nodes and could be put behind ordinary looking cloud or ISP connections. Most shared data stores can be trivially scanned and data mined, decentralized networks like DHTs can be crawled, decentralized apps can be MITMed with Sybils and honey pots, and so on. I predict that if any decentralized or federated system really becomes popular enough to merit attention from data-grabbers we will see the launch of an industry of companies and consulting services dedicated to mining and surveilling it. Security is hard, and security across a heterogenous decentralized network run by users and volunteers is many times harder. I suppose you can see something analogous in the cryptocurrency space. I've argued for a while that Bitcoin and similar CC systems were in fact rapidly compromised, but not by attacking their cryptography or protocols. They were compromised via social engineering and financial game playing that transformed them from currencies of the sort they were intended to be into decentralized Ponzi schemes and money laundering vehicles. They were taken over and repurposed, not taken down or hacked in the conventional sense. The same thing would probably happen to e.g. Matrix or Mastodon if it got popular enough. Companies and governments would just assimilate and repurpose these things into surveillance and spam-delivery vehicles. With superior resources and economic forcing functions this would be quite easy. A centralized system has a single point of failure, but that also limits attack surface. I assume centralized systems to be surveilled by their own operators and their host countries, but it's a lot harder for other actors to do so.