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The author touches on some of the weaknesses of true decentralization but does not directly address the fundamental paradox. True decentralization is a natural

The author touches on some of the weaknesses of true decentralization but does not directly address the fundamental paradox. True decentralization is a natural but ephemeral quality of networks with relatively few nodes. That is, scales where each individual node has enough internal resources to accurately represent the entire network. Human networks are parameterized _very roughly_ by Dunbar's Number (100-250), while modern computer networks are much more capable. As a small network scales up, decentralization becomes unnatural; nodes and links require too many resources to accurately model and communicate the network state. It becomes net energy efficient to introduce layers of dedicated networking nodes, routing protocols, and entire subnets. It is not a fluke that "Web3.0/DeFi" technologies so far are either a) tremendously inefficient or b) end up centralized. If you want to preserve true decentralization at this scale, you need to enforce it. Prohibit centralization in any form. No more central networking/control nodes. Perhaps there are clever schemes where you can e.g. shard the entire network uniformly across its nodes, but the bottom line--the paradox--is that some central authority must decide on and enforce the sharding/decentralization policies and actively prevent centralization from emerging. Frankly, decentralization at almost any meaningful scale in our modern global society is a myth. It's a myth tightly coupled to the American origin story and its philosophical roots in the classical liberalism of Locke et al. and Western/Reformation Christianity. From a hard scientific perspective, it makes no sense why to sacrifice the welfare of a system for the sake of maximizing the welfare of an arbitrary component that depends on the welfare of the system. Especially when we are confronted with systemic I/O imbalances on a global scale. To arrive at the myth of decentralization, you need the ingredient of (hyper)individualist ideology.

igorkraw 5y ago
If you want to see true décentralisation, look to Europe, especially Germany, Switzerland etc., but also the EU And for an ideology that actually build decentralised but just systems, I am strangely enamored by anarchists. They(except Ancaps) have been working at this for about 1-2 centuries and it's a hard problem (and not all anarchists are trying to be smart about it). The only way that I can see to make it work (in theory) is to find a way to do confederations of confederations that keep everything more or less manageable with human interpersonal relationships and "sane" local rules on each layer and delegate global things upwards, with shortcuts and balancing mechanisms that make sure the state apparatus stays decentralised, nimble and controlled bottom up, not too down. I think Switzerland and Norway as well as some first Nations are closest to this, but I hope we'll all get there one day.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Interesting interpretation. In general, Northern Europe is far less individualistic[1] than USA. Don't mistake deeply entrenched (perhaps invisible) traditional hierarchies for the lack thereof. I view anarchism as another expression of classical liberalism, with the same structural faults re: decentralization, etc. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
  - igorkraw 5y ago
    The Jante law, tall poppy syndrome etc. is quite overblown in my personal experience, but it might have been a thing in prior times. But in modern Germany and Switzerland (where I lived from) I think the systems simply recognises more that the individual is nothing without the collective and tries to put systems into place that make sure single individuals can't co-opt the system (nothing is perfect on this of course, and rent seeking, elite populists ala Trump stirring sentiments etc all exists). It's the difference between positive and negative freedoms (I think in germany and especially the nordics poor people are much more able to chase their happiness than in the US,in the sense a decent life without homelessnes, fear of bankruptcy due to disease and horrible working conditions is possible, not if you want to become a millionaire). And anarchism was literally born out od rejection of classical liberalism and "classical liberals" don't really like them https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists. (not a good source on anarchism, but just to give evidence that classical liberalism/libertarians and anarchists are not the same. There are socialist libertarians who are closer to anarchists but I think most libertarians would not align with them)
    - pphysch 5y ago
      European collectivism definitely took a hit during the Cold War (collectivist = "communist"), but it's still there and will see a resurgence in the coming decades. > And anarchism was literally born out od rejection of classical liberalism and "classical liberals" don't really like them This doesn't quite align with what I've learned. Nonetheless, sectarian infighting between liberal ideologies is indeed a common theme.
bufbupa 5y ago
Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes". I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideologies espouse that it does either. Individualism isn't renouncing hierarchical power structures, but rather asserting that the power rests with the hierarchy's leaves (individuals) not with the root nodes (collectives). It's the same way the west leverages a republic rather than direct democracy for it's legal system. Or put another way, the individual leaves should be in control of the nodes higher up in the hierarchy, not visa versa. Imo, your interpretation of the debate is missing the real argument being had here. Decentralization in this a political context is saying "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible". Naturally, those leaves will still organize themselves hierarchically in the name of efficiency (ie: I'll elect this official to make decisions on my behalf because i don't have the time to contemplate every bill/law being proposed myself). But that hierarchical delegation is still a distributed/decentralized power structure as long as the people can freely re-organize into a different hierarchy or elect a new representative at will.
- afiori 5y ago
  for a decentralized social-like network nodes closer to the root need to have influence on nodes closer to the leafs, but leafs also need to move around and maybe connect to multiple root-like nodes simultaneously. One of most successful decentralized system that is useful for what it was meant to do is DNS, which has this tree-like delegation in its core
- pphysch 5y ago
  > "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible" I don't see how this works in practice. Power manifests in subtle ways. For example, you can have a pure direct democracy where individual voters nominally carry all the political power... ...but who decides what is on the ballot? Who determines the ontology of current and future policy decisions? Are closely-worded policies X ("ban abortion") and Y ("restrict abortion") the same policy with shared vote counts or different policies with separate vote counts? If you democratize that power, you are subscribing for literally endless arguments over semantics. See also district gerrymandering.
lkrubner 5y ago
Hello, I'm writing about this issue now and I'd like to quote you. What name should I use to quote you? Feel free to reach me at: lawrence@krubner.com 434 825 7694
ItsMonkk 5y ago
This mirrors my current thinking. Each individual naturally filters out information that they consider weird, the less they know the person that they are reading, the farther it is from their viewpoint, the more that idea will be passed over. Each community is made up of the average of the opinions of its members, and we can collectively track this through the Overton window. The more people that don't know each-other in a community, the less their weirdness budgets are, therefore the slower the community is able to change its mind. This is where Dunbar's Number comes in, eventually you reach a point where the Overton window metastasizes and two factions in that community break apart. So what we really need to be asking is... 1. Dunbar's number suggests that as a community gets larger, it should naturally split, why don't digital communities do this? One obvious conclusion is that the internet sites that we are building them on top of do not allow the split. The website is owned by the web owner, and they want all communication on it, and they don't have any sharding built in, so we can't split. But even when we build sites like Reddit that are inherently built of many communities and make it extremely easy to create new communities, we still see concentration of communities. So it is dismissive just to say it is the owners fault. It must somehow be that, because digital is so effective, the economies of scale within the digital space grows and even with the worsening of communication the community gets stronger with each member. That is, opinions within the websites Overton window have such good quality, that it doesn't matter that all discussion outside the window is ignored. And there are mostly more people entering than there are leaving, so it works out until it doesn't. And thus as you say, the only option we have to reach beyond our local maximums is to split the communities soon after we reach something close to Dunbar's Number. Does that mean each community would just be 150 people? Does that mean each person could only be a community of 150 people local to them? No. You can have a community of the top community members, and that 150 community would have it's own Dunbar's Number. In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or was before 1920.
- pphysch 5y ago
  > In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or was before 1920. An interesting observation: the population of the USA since its founding until today has increased approximately by a factor of Dunbar's Number. In theory, this would call for the introduction of another layer of national bureacracy (say, a Regional level above the individual States). Yet our political structure has not meaningfully changed, at least de jure (de facto I believe it has changed substantially with the rise of capitalism in the early 20th century).

igorkraw 5y ago

If you want to see true décentralisation, look to Europe, especially Germany, Switzerland etc., but also the EU And for an ideology that actually build decentralised but just systems, I am strangely enamored by anarchists. They(except Ancaps) have been working at this for about 1-2 centuries and it's a hard problem (and not all anarchists are trying to be smart about it). The only way that I can see to make it work (in theory) is to find a way to do confederations of confederations that keep everything more or less manageable with human interpersonal relationships and "sane" local rules on each layer and delegate global things upwards, with shortcuts and balancing mechanisms that make sure the state apparatus stays decentralised, nimble and controlled bottom up, not too down. I think Switzerland and Norway as well as some first Nations are closest to this, but I hope we'll all get there one day.

pphysch 5y ago
Interesting interpretation. In general, Northern Europe is far less individualistic[1] than USA. Don't mistake deeply entrenched (perhaps invisible) traditional hierarchies for the lack thereof. I view anarchism as another expression of classical liberalism, with the same structural faults re: decentralization, etc. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
- igorkraw 5y ago
  The Jante law, tall poppy syndrome etc. is quite overblown in my personal experience, but it might have been a thing in prior times. But in modern Germany and Switzerland (where I lived from) I think the systems simply recognises more that the individual is nothing without the collective and tries to put systems into place that make sure single individuals can't co-opt the system (nothing is perfect on this of course, and rent seeking, elite populists ala Trump stirring sentiments etc all exists). It's the difference between positive and negative freedoms (I think in germany and especially the nordics poor people are much more able to chase their happiness than in the US,in the sense a decent life without homelessnes, fear of bankruptcy due to disease and horrible working conditions is possible, not if you want to become a millionaire). And anarchism was literally born out od rejection of classical liberalism and "classical liberals" don't really like them https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists. (not a good source on anarchism, but just to give evidence that classical liberalism/libertarians and anarchists are not the same. There are socialist libertarians who are closer to anarchists but I think most libertarians would not align with them)
  - pphysch 5y ago
    European collectivism definitely took a hit during the Cold War (collectivist = "communist"), but it's still there and will see a resurgence in the coming decades. > And anarchism was literally born out od rejection of classical liberalism and "classical liberals" don't really like them This doesn't quite align with what I've learned. Nonetheless, sectarian infighting between liberal ideologies is indeed a common theme.

bufbupa 5y ago

Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes". I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideologies espouse that it does either. Individualism isn't renouncing hierarchical power structures, but rather asserting that the power rests with the hierarchy's leaves (individuals) not with the root nodes (collectives). It's the same way the west leverages a republic rather than direct democracy for it's legal system. Or put another way, the individual leaves should be in control of the nodes higher up in the hierarchy, not visa versa. Imo, your interpretation of the debate is missing the real argument being had here. Decentralization in this a political context is saying "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible". Naturally, those leaves will still organize themselves hierarchically in the name of efficiency (ie: I'll elect this official to make decisions on my behalf because i don't have the time to contemplate every bill/law being proposed myself). But that hierarchical delegation is still a distributed/decentralized power structure as long as the people can freely re-organize into a different hierarchy or elect a new representative at will.

afiori 5y ago
for a decentralized social-like network nodes closer to the root need to have influence on nodes closer to the leafs, but leafs also need to move around and maybe connect to multiple root-like nodes simultaneously. One of most successful decentralized system that is useful for what it was meant to do is DNS, which has this tree-like delegation in its core
pphysch 5y ago
> "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible" I don't see how this works in practice. Power manifests in subtle ways. For example, you can have a pure direct democracy where individual voters nominally carry all the political power... ...but who decides what is on the ballot? Who determines the ontology of current and future policy decisions? Are closely-worded policies X ("ban abortion") and Y ("restrict abortion") the same policy with shared vote counts or different policies with separate vote counts? If you democratize that power, you are subscribing for literally endless arguments over semantics. See also district gerrymandering.

lkrubner 5y ago

Hello, I'm writing about this issue now and I'd like to quote you. What name should I use to quote you? Feel free to reach me at: lawrence@krubner.com 434 825 7694

ItsMonkk 5y ago

This mirrors my current thinking. Each individual naturally filters out information that they consider weird, the less they know the person that they are reading, the farther it is from their viewpoint, the more that idea will be passed over. Each community is made up of the average of the opinions of its members, and we can collectively track this through the Overton window. The more people that don't know each-other in a community, the less their weirdness budgets are, therefore the slower the community is able to change its mind. This is where Dunbar's Number comes in, eventually you reach a point where the Overton window metastasizes and two factions in that community break apart. So what we really need to be asking is... 1. Dunbar's number suggests that as a community gets larger, it should naturally split, why don't digital communities do this? One obvious conclusion is that the internet sites that we are building them on top of do not allow the split. The website is owned by the web owner, and they want all communication on it, and they don't have any sharding built in, so we can't split. But even when we build sites like Reddit that are inherently built of many communities and make it extremely easy to create new communities, we still see concentration of communities. So it is dismissive just to say it is the owners fault. It must somehow be that, because digital is so effective, the economies of scale within the digital space grows and even with the worsening of communication the community gets stronger with each member. That is, opinions within the websites Overton window have such good quality, that it doesn't matter that all discussion outside the window is ignored. And there are mostly more people entering than there are leaving, so it works out until it doesn't. And thus as you say, the only option we have to reach beyond our local maximums is to split the communities soon after we reach something close to Dunbar's Number. Does that mean each community would just be 150 people? Does that mean each person could only be a community of 150 people local to them? No. You can have a community of the top community members, and that 150 community would have it's own Dunbar's Number. In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or was before 1920.

pphysch 5y ago
> In fact, this is mostly what the House of Representatives and the Senate are, or was before 1920. An interesting observation: the population of the USA since its founding until today has increased approximately by a factor of Dunbar's Number. In theory, this would call for the introduction of another layer of national bureacracy (say, a Regional level above the individual States). Yet our political structure has not meaningfully changed, at least de jure (de facto I believe it has changed substantially with the rise of capitalism in the early 20th century).