10 ms·

A mental model for decentralization

78 points by jacobobryant 5y ago

dkh 5y ago
While I agree that there should be more discussion about what should/shouldn't be decentralized and to what extent, the huge issue right now that's responsible for how heated of a debate this is right now, is in the implementation. It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. Now add to it the rat race everyone is in to transition to a DAO as soon possible, despite the existing insane complexity modification difficulty of blockchain platforms, or that the DAO concept has a short history but one filled with failures, and we're left with something that, frankly, frightens me. I'm not anti-crypto, and in fact I work in the space and am primarily focused on some areas I feel are in need of being "decentralized" in the CDN and streaming video spaces. And while a ton of technical progress has been made, I can't shake the feeling that we are in many cases implementing this stuff wrong, or haven't even bothered to address the "how" or "why" in as much length as one should before going out and building it.
- k__ 5y ago
  What are good alternatives that also have useful incentivization mechanisms built in? Every system that is lacking this is doomed.
  - loceng 5y ago
    Democratically elected government which implements policy mandating data mobility (etc) at penalty of exponentially increasing fines for non-compliance? You don't need to use a carrot for corporations, a "stick" will work just fine for making sure they follow what's determined to be ideal.
    - k__ 5y ago
      I had the impression, the money of companies is used for lobbying, effectively controlling the "stick".
      - loceng 5y ago
        Indeed that is another problem and why policy needs to shift to counter that - but don't forget that Bitcoin et al will be, are involved in the same regulatory capture game - holders are financially incentivized to try to be the ones to gain control. I like Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including Ranked Choice Voting, and most notable I believe is his Democracy Dollars policy - wherein every eligible voter gets $100/year voucher they can allocate to the political candidate of their choice, which would wash out the corporate lobbyist money of roughly $4 billion with 8 times that by citizens (including giving those who can't afford $100/year for an additional layer of "voting with money" to fuel/funding the political system), meaning $4 billion to up to $32 billing from eligible voters; https://andrewyang.com https://andrewyang.com - Andrew Yang, ran in last Presidential race as a Democrat - polled higher than Kamala Harris and raised half that of Bernie Sanders, starting as an unknown - then ran for Mayor of NYC, and author of The War on Normal People, and most recently Forward: Notes On The Future Of Our Democracy - which in part was to announce the new relatively centrist political party he started called the Forward Party. I feel another noteworthy policy proposal of his is Journalism Dollars, similarly where you give every individual say $50/year voucher to fund/support the journalist of your choice - so then journalism and news media isn't adversely incentivized by the advertising dollars coming in from industrual complexes (including from the political establishment/duopoly of the arguably captured Democratic-Republican parties).
        rglullis 5y ago
        Believing that governments can be effective on a global scale is the leftist version of Intelligent Design Theory of Evolution. History has shown time and again that the best we can do is some local maxima that works only for a part of the population at the cost of everyone of the periphery of power, and even these on the top can get wiped out by a Black Swan. There will not be one single standard of policies that will work for all people, no matter how "democratic" the process to establish the rules are and no matter how good the ideas you think they are. What we need is to reduce the scope and reach of governments, get their leaders to act on a localized level and to be directly accountable for the results of their policies. Anything else will take us to more centralization, more forced conformity, less diversity and more fragility facing global-scale events. We need more Switzerlands and less USAs and even less European Unions.
  - grey_earthling 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on what you mean by “useful incentivization mechanisms” and why they're necessary? I use scuttlebutt because it's fun and nice. I'm not sure what more incentive is needed.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Scuttlebutt works on a small scale because all of its participants are willing to pay for the cost of hosting the data and they can afford the inefficiencies and redundancies of decentralization. And I know that it works for you, but if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for it to be viable.
      - danShumway 5y ago
        > if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive The problem is that when you start measuring on "reaching more than a few thousand people" instead of "is creating a lot of economic incentive", cryptocurrency experiments around building communities also start to look pretty bad in practice. I have yet to see any general-user social platform built on top of cryptocurrency amass the same amount of mainstream success as Mastodon. And Mastodon is comparatively tiny when stacked up against Twitter/Facebook, it should be the low-hanging fruit. But at least Mastodon is a platform that seems to have somewhat evolved past the initial "the only people using this are the people who built it or who are invested in it" phase. On the protocol level, look at stuff like Matrix; it's got very little incentive built in to get you to run your own platform, and yet... it still kinda looks like it's beating blockchain networks at being actually useful. A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. So sure, crypto has an interesting approach to incentivizing economic investment, but at a certain point I start to question whether those incentives actually result in generalized, successful platforms that tons of everyday people are using. It unfortunately is starting to seem like the incentive structures attract a lot of capital and a lot of eyes that are either hostile to the overall goals of decentralization, or at least that the attention doesn't seem to be providing the kind of value/structure required to get non-invested, non-capital-focused general users to join in.
- austincheney 5y ago
  Implementation is whatever two parties agree upon, otherwise it isn't decentralized.
- grey_earthling 5y ago
  > It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. This isn't my experience. These types of solutions may be generating a lot of interest in some places (perhaps because the people talking about them hope to profit?), but they're not all that exist.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > by players in the decentralization space Keep in mind that this is a somewhat large space, and depending on what parts of the decentralization space you're looking at you might see players who are all-in on blockchain tech, or you might see people who view it as a giant waste of time or even actively campaign against it. In particular when I look at projects that are using federation (Mastodon, Matrix, etc), I see a lot of people who are fairly skeptical about cryptocurrency and outright hostile to NFTs. I have my own biases there, I don't think that NFTs are in practice particularly decentralized, and I've slowly come to believe that cryptocurrencies have both systemic problems that make them less valuable as a decentralization tool than they're often advertised as being, and community problems that make them difficult to use as a basis for any kind of political movement (and decentralization is inherently a political idea/movement). But my biases aside (I'm not trying to make a pro/anti blockchain post here), just remember it's a big space without a single uniformity of views; from the circle of advocates I'm paying attention to and interacting with the most, I would have almost guessed the opposite, absent better stats I'd have guessed from my experiences that at least a plurality if not the majority of the decentralized "community" is against this stuff. Interesting to run into people who seem to be more in touch with parts of the community that are outside of my bubble.
s7r 5y ago
This is akin asking 'Will we build our community around hammers or screwdrivers?' Network architectures are means, not ends. The question is what are we trying to do? Based on that context, we can determine whether a hammer, screwdriver, centralized architecture, decentralized architecture, or federated architecture is most beneficial for us. They all have tradeoffs (e.g. easier to remove screws than nails, easier to secure centralized than decentralized systems, easier to power federated systems than decentralized systems, easier to trust decentralized and federated systems than centralized systems) which can make them more or less useful for us in any given context. The point is, they are tools to help us realize our desired outcomes -- not the outcomes themselves.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Yeah. This seems to be missing from the current conversation.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Finally, some common sense. There's some weird psychology of tech circles that keeps us focused on decentralization. Often it just seems like bikeshedding rather than problem-solving. My guess is the Social Media generation has become wary of people controlling their lives, preferring autonomy. They hear about network decentralization, and then come to the conclusion that it must be better than the alternative, because the alternative is centralization, which is Google and Facebook (but never Apple apparently, which is pretty ironic).
austincheney 5y ago
I am writing a fully decentralized application and in doing so have learned a lot about the concept. There has been a lot of interest on the subject over the last few months so I likely need to write a document about the things I have learned. Some quick things: * Security is wildly different in a decentralized model compared with a client/server model. * Decentralization is about one thing only: maximum autonomy. * Federated systems are semi-autonomous. They are a move towards decentralization but not completely so. With decentralization you only need an application that send/receive agreed upon instructions. * Anonymity and privacy are opposing qualities. Decentralization is not about either but enables one or the other. As I have been exploring this subject I have formed some criteria for decentralization: * Address based (IP addresses or identifiers that resolve to an IP address without third party consultation, no DNS) * Protocol agnostic (what ever two parties can agree upon) * No third parties (no servers or message proxies unless you own them) Think about it in terms of snail mail. The post office moves packages around without opening or inspecting the contents. The contents are never stored in a database and could be broken. It is address to address communication. Decentralization allows for personal or organizational devices to be remotely connected as a large physically distributed computer: * A single file system, cross OS. * Remote application execution, such as Steam’s remote game play. * Content on demand. Push media out to your friends or access their computer and pull it off yourself.
- loceng 5y ago
  "* Content on demand. Push media out to your friends or access their computer and pull it off yourself." Reminds me of dialing into a BBS way back when, that early on was just someone with a non-dedicated or dedicated telephone line hooked up to their personal computer's modem; you could connect to fun, non-real-time multi-player text-based games (ASCII art FTW!) hosted on their PC, and some had file servers open for download and sometimes upload.
- Comevius 5y ago
  I'm writing an offline-first database and it typically uses a server for storage and coordination. The difference is that I don't think the server should be able to see what it stores and coordinates, for which searchable encryption is the solution. However my database is address based, it reads and writes blocks of encrypted data, and it is protocol agnostic, it works over S3 and Google Drive, or could work over a pendrive sent in a letter back and forth, or IPFS. It just requires a single source of truth and optionally event notification. So would this fit into an every peer-to-peer system is decentralized, but not every decentralized system is peer-to-peer picture, or is this not decentralized at all, because you would normally use it with Amazon S3, albeit in a maliciously-secure manner (the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of your data is secured via authenticated encryption, the client keeps the key, the access pattern is obfuscated).
k__ 5y ago
"how much decentralization do we need?" I think, that hits the nail on its head. Many people are happy with MANGA basically owning the Internet and many people aren't. If we look at companies bending the knee for China or shutting down accounts, simply because they have different moral than the account owners, it's clear that we need much more decentralization than we have right now. How much? I don't know.
- loceng 5y ago
  I think part of the solution is to make sure there is a functional and tested decentralized system that's available as a fallback or failsafe, say in case the system(s) get captured by tyranny or authoritarians; and these fallback systems must be enshrined in policy/constitution, so that if they're ever attacked or targeted then that becomes a canary signal. Data mobility could also perhaps be considered the other side of the decentralized coin.
gandutraveler 5y ago
Centralization is a human nature. Internet is already decentralized but we still tend to congregate in common space. Even with web3, organizations like polkadot are creating a centralized space around them. So I doubt we will ever achieve true decentralization there will always be a hierarchy and a central body that will have more control over it.
- hwhelan210 5y ago
  I don't think what we're running into here is "human nature" so much as it is investor nature. I'm not particularly familiar with them, but Polkadot has raised $300M. There has to be some return for that investment (i.e. they need to be able to lock users into their ecosystem and prove to investors that a competitor can't come along and provide an equally valuable service without starting from scratch). How can a truly decentralized service / protocol compete with the companies that are getting that kind of investment?
kuroguro 5y ago
> there are the decentralization maximalists who think that blockchain will make tech platforms obsolete I doubt blockchain is a silver bullet. I really liked Kleppmann's work on local-first software / CRDTs. It seems a lot closer to something practically usable at least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qytg0Ibet2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qytg0Ibet2E
- blamestross 5y ago
  Blockchain tech just offuscates centralization, it doesn't provide decentralization.
  - brightstep 5y ago
    In terms used by the memo discussed by the article, blockchain are still susceptible to indirect and platform centralization.
delaaxe 5y ago
In other words, it’s ok for some things to be “decentralized enough”, as opposed to fully decentralized (whatever that means).
foxhop 5y ago
Hello, I have a similar thread going here. I think we need to "shard the centralized monolith". https://www.unturf.com/let-us-define-a-permacomputer/ https://www.unturf.com/let-us-define-a-permacomputer/ I avoid writing prescriptively to avoid setting a bias on the talent. I AM growing my own "YouTube". Not open source yet but I'm planning big things. https://media.unturf.com https://media.unturf.com
verisimi 5y ago
Here's a fantastic quote I heard this week: "A successful utopian society would most likely be one made up of 1000s of smaller utopias." This strikes me as the valid mega-target that we should be attempting to reach collectively - space for all. It should also be the foundational principle for software solutions. And neutral software solutions should also be able to accommodate people who don't want to be in the proposed solution!
- skohan 5y ago
  It's a good start but you still need a mechanism for preventing negative externalities between utopias.
  - verisimi 5y ago
    The foundational principle is the same as it ever was: 'do no harm'. The golden rule. Do not initiate harm. In reverse, do not roll over when someone is initiating harm against you.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - coderzach 5y ago
    Land Value Tax solves everything! /meme
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Better would be 1000s of overlapping utopias. Reducing the geographic size of government seems like a lot less desirable a way to shrink it than reducing the scope of governments. That was the original rhetoric behind "Defund" IIRC. Break up the central police force to a rump used to coordinate and regulate police functions that have been devolved to exist under other government departments. Basically a bid to put a domestically-operating military under more thoughtfully-organized civilian control instead of simply having city cops, state cops, and country cops whose only points of oversight come respectively from the mayor, the governor, and the president.
blamestross 5y ago
First, thinking of decentralization/centralization as having a boundary between them can be useful, but is wrong. They are a continuum upon which things oscillate. Decentralization fundamentally trades inefficiency for long-term robustness. Centralization trades long term robustness for short term efficiencies. Under our implementation of capitalism, most people don't value robustness on a timescale longer than 20 years unless there was recently a crisis to remind them of it. So every aspect of human infrastructure oscillates on the centralized-decentralized axis over time. Thinking of "decentralized" as something that will stay that way is wrong, over time people will ever centralize the system in pursuit of short term returns until the perceived "decentralized" system might as well be centralized in practice (see internet infrastructure), once a crisis happens due to over-centralization we build a new system (or re-brand an old system) that is more decentralized in response. That system eventually decays into centralization the same way. I value changing society to think in the long term, so I think it is a lot more valuable to change the cycle versus attempt to participate in just one swing of it.
lottin 5y ago
Discussions about decentralization should start by defining the term decentralization in the specific context of the discussion, otherwise nobody knows what they're talking about. For example, nobody in the economics profession would refer to the financial system as being 'centralised'. It is not. There's no central planner. Financial institutions are autonomous and make their own decisions with regards to what products to sell, and how to make them. If you want to argue that it's centralised, you will have to be much more specific. And the same applies to everything else, from the internet, money, software or whatever.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  Good point. Control of the inflation rate (total money supply) in fiat currency is centralized.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Isn't the same thing true for bitcoin? As far as I know, it was set with the first implementation, and can only be changed when a majority of miners agree to change it.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
      Valid point. It's much more complicated but suffice to say it can be changed by a majority of full node operators, of which miners are only a subset. The meta checks and balances preventing such an occurrence have been proven for Bitcoin. We haven't seen miners succeed in reversing the halvenings, for instance.
- 3np 5y ago
  Thank you. It really grinds my gears when people/projects/companies make strong claims about “decentralization” without even specifying what they’re talking about. Many times it becomes nonsensical.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
From the linked article Avoiding Internet Centralization: 5.2. Encrypt, Always When deployed at scale, encryption can be an effective technique to reduce many inherited centralization risks. By reducing the number of parties who have access to content of communication, the ability of lower-layer protocols and intermediaries at those layers to interfere with or observe is precluded. Even when they can still prevent communication, the use of encryption makes it more difficult to discriminate the target from other traffic. Note that the benefits are most pronounced when the majority (if not all) traffic is encrypted. As a result, protocols SHOULD be encrypted by default. They're literally describing the lack of decentralization that encryption brings. "If you encrypt, intermediaries have no control". Which means a central actor does. By encrypting communications, without an intermediary protocol to support more flexible operations, there is no way to extend functionality for networks that depend on intermediary controls. All systems that scale HTTP-based applications require a lack of encryption on the backend. The encryption is terminated at the load balancer and the entire connection is then inspected in plaintext. Sure, the "best practice" is to encrypt between endpoints, but they must be decrypted at each hop so that load balancers, API gateways, and applications can inject or parse headers, perform rewrites, forward traffic, inspect requests (WAF), create sticky sessions, and cache media. If all HTTP connections were end to end encrypted, the web could not scale. Another example is DNS over HTTPS. The encryption centralizes control of the protocol at the server. The encryption removes the ability of intermediate LAN/WAN DNS resolvers to cache records for a large local network, or to serve their own custom zones transparently, or do things like ad-blocking. As there are valid and necessary use cases, it means that now new "hacks" will have to be developed to accommodate the old use cases, that the protocol design intentionally ignored. The result is more centralization. Distributed decentralized applications also suffer when PKI is used for encryption. It is very common for backend applications to stop working because they were using a private CA to encrypt backend connections and the certs expired without warning, killing all the connections. Refreshing the certs then involves re-deploying not just the servers, but all the clients that were reliant on an old client cert, and possibly an expired CA cert. This use of a private CA also breaks decentralization compared to the public CA model.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Honestly how decentralized is the Internet? AFAIK there are groups like W3C and ICAAN which basically control domains, and a few IPs which control routing. Most of the internet is also behind Cloudflare, AWS, etc. The key is that these companies are very conservative when blocking users and giving others special privileges. Your service won't be blocked by Cloudflare and IPs unless it's particularly bad or your government requests it. Whereas e.g. YouTube has very strict rules and often bans people incorrectly or for debatable reasons. Idk if the issue is actually decentralized vs. centralized. I think it's "do I decide the rules or do I just enforce them?"
golemotron 5y ago
> Given my mental model of centralization vs. decentralization, I think it's more productive to think about the boundary: how much decentralization do we need? If there's too little, then software will stagnate from lack of competition; if there's too much, then it'll stagnate from lack of coordination. So we want to figure out where the sweet spot is. This is a static view. A dynamic view would recognize that systems have a lifetime and tend to go through centralize and then disintegrate. Decentralization often exists prior to centralization. Catch systems on the rise.

78 points by jacobobryant 5y ago

dkh 5y ago

While I agree that there should be more discussion about what should/shouldn't be decentralized and to what extent, the huge issue right now that's responsible for how heated of a debate this is right now, is in the implementation. It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. Now add to it the rat race everyone is in to transition to a DAO as soon possible, despite the existing insane complexity modification difficulty of blockchain platforms, or that the DAO concept has a short history but one filled with failures, and we're left with something that, frankly, frightens me. I'm not anti-crypto, and in fact I work in the space and am primarily focused on some areas I feel are in need of being "decentralized" in the CDN and streaming video spaces. And while a ton of technical progress has been made, I can't shake the feeling that we are in many cases implementing this stuff wrong, or haven't even bothered to address the "how" or "why" in as much length as one should before going out and building it.

k__ 5y ago
What are good alternatives that also have useful incentivization mechanisms built in? Every system that is lacking this is doomed.
- loceng 5y ago
  Democratically elected government which implements policy mandating data mobility (etc) at penalty of exponentially increasing fines for non-compliance? You don't need to use a carrot for corporations, a "stick" will work just fine for making sure they follow what's determined to be ideal.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I had the impression, the money of companies is used for lobbying, effectively controlling the "stick".
    - loceng 5y ago
      Indeed that is another problem and why policy needs to shift to counter that - but don't forget that Bitcoin et al will be, are involved in the same regulatory capture game - holders are financially incentivized to try to be the ones to gain control. I like Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including Ranked Choice Voting, and most notable I believe is his Democracy Dollars policy - wherein every eligible voter gets $100/year voucher they can allocate to the political candidate of their choice, which would wash out the corporate lobbyist money of roughly $4 billion with 8 times that by citizens (including giving those who can't afford $100/year for an additional layer of "voting with money" to fuel/funding the political system), meaning $4 billion to up to $32 billing from eligible voters; https://andrewyang.com https://andrewyang.com - Andrew Yang, ran in last Presidential race as a Democrat - polled higher than Kamala Harris and raised half that of Bernie Sanders, starting as an unknown - then ran for Mayor of NYC, and author of The War on Normal People, and most recently Forward: Notes On The Future Of Our Democracy - which in part was to announce the new relatively centrist political party he started called the Forward Party. I feel another noteworthy policy proposal of his is Journalism Dollars, similarly where you give every individual say $50/year voucher to fund/support the journalist of your choice - so then journalism and news media isn't adversely incentivized by the advertising dollars coming in from industrual complexes (including from the political establishment/duopoly of the arguably captured Democratic-Republican parties).
      - rglullis 5y ago
        Believing that governments can be effective on a global scale is the leftist version of Intelligent Design Theory of Evolution. History has shown time and again that the best we can do is some local maxima that works only for a part of the population at the cost of everyone of the periphery of power, and even these on the top can get wiped out by a Black Swan. There will not be one single standard of policies that will work for all people, no matter how "democratic" the process to establish the rules are and no matter how good the ideas you think they are. What we need is to reduce the scope and reach of governments, get their leaders to act on a localized level and to be directly accountable for the results of their policies. Anything else will take us to more centralization, more forced conformity, less diversity and more fragility facing global-scale events. We need more Switzerlands and less USAs and even less European Unions.
- grey_earthling 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by “useful incentivization mechanisms” and why they're necessary? I use scuttlebutt because it's fun and nice. I'm not sure what more incentive is needed.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Scuttlebutt works on a small scale because all of its participants are willing to pay for the cost of hosting the data and they can afford the inefficiencies and redundancies of decentralization. And I know that it works for you, but if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for it to be viable.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive The problem is that when you start measuring on "reaching more than a few thousand people" instead of "is creating a lot of economic incentive", cryptocurrency experiments around building communities also start to look pretty bad in practice. I have yet to see any general-user social platform built on top of cryptocurrency amass the same amount of mainstream success as Mastodon. And Mastodon is comparatively tiny when stacked up against Twitter/Facebook, it should be the low-hanging fruit. But at least Mastodon is a platform that seems to have somewhat evolved past the initial "the only people using this are the people who built it or who are invested in it" phase. On the protocol level, look at stuff like Matrix; it's got very little incentive built in to get you to run your own platform, and yet... it still kinda looks like it's beating blockchain networks at being actually useful. A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. So sure, crypto has an interesting approach to incentivizing economic investment, but at a certain point I start to question whether those incentives actually result in generalized, successful platforms that tons of everyday people are using. It unfortunately is starting to seem like the incentive structures attract a lot of capital and a lot of eyes that are either hostile to the overall goals of decentralization, or at least that the attention doesn't seem to be providing the kind of value/structure required to get non-invested, non-capital-focused general users to join in.
austincheney 5y ago
Implementation is whatever two parties agree upon, otherwise it isn't decentralized.
grey_earthling 5y ago
> It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. This isn't my experience. These types of solutions may be generating a lot of interest in some places (perhaps because the people talking about them hope to profit?), but they're not all that exist.
danShumway 5y ago
> by players in the decentralization space Keep in mind that this is a somewhat large space, and depending on what parts of the decentralization space you're looking at you might see players who are all-in on blockchain tech, or you might see people who view it as a giant waste of time or even actively campaign against it. In particular when I look at projects that are using federation (Mastodon, Matrix, etc), I see a lot of people who are fairly skeptical about cryptocurrency and outright hostile to NFTs. I have my own biases there, I don't think that NFTs are in practice particularly decentralized, and I've slowly come to believe that cryptocurrencies have both systemic problems that make them less valuable as a decentralization tool than they're often advertised as being, and community problems that make them difficult to use as a basis for any kind of political movement (and decentralization is inherently a political idea/movement). But my biases aside (I'm not trying to make a pro/anti blockchain post here), just remember it's a big space without a single uniformity of views; from the circle of advocates I'm paying attention to and interacting with the most, I would have almost guessed the opposite, absent better stats I'd have guessed from my experiences that at least a plurality if not the majority of the decentralized "community" is against this stuff. Interesting to run into people who seem to be more in touch with parts of the community that are outside of my bubble.

s7r 5y ago

This is akin asking 'Will we build our community around hammers or screwdrivers?' Network architectures are means, not ends. The question is what are we trying to do? Based on that context, we can determine whether a hammer, screwdriver, centralized architecture, decentralized architecture, or federated architecture is most beneficial for us. They all have tradeoffs (e.g. easier to remove screws than nails, easier to secure centralized than decentralized systems, easier to power federated systems than decentralized systems, easier to trust decentralized and federated systems than centralized systems) which can make them more or less useful for us in any given context. The point is, they are tools to help us realize our desired outcomes -- not the outcomes themselves.

RF_Savage 5y ago
Yeah. This seems to be missing from the current conversation.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Finally, some common sense. There's some weird psychology of tech circles that keeps us focused on decentralization. Often it just seems like bikeshedding rather than problem-solving. My guess is the Social Media generation has become wary of people controlling their lives, preferring autonomy. They hear about network decentralization, and then come to the conclusion that it must be better than the alternative, because the alternative is centralization, which is Google and Facebook (but never Apple apparently, which is pretty ironic).

austincheney 5y ago

I am writing a fully decentralized application and in doing so have learned a lot about the concept. There has been a lot of interest on the subject over the last few months so I likely need to write a document about the things I have learned. Some quick things: * Security is wildly different in a decentralized model compared with a client/server model. * Decentralization is about one thing only: maximum autonomy. * Federated systems are semi-autonomous. They are a move towards decentralization but not completely so. With decentralization you only need an application that send/receive agreed upon instructions. * Anonymity and privacy are opposing qualities. Decentralization is not about either but enables one or the other. As I have been exploring this subject I have formed some criteria for decentralization: * Address based (IP addresses or identifiers that resolve to an IP address without third party consultation, no DNS) * Protocol agnostic (what ever two parties can agree upon) * No third parties (no servers or message proxies unless you own them) Think about it in terms of snail mail. The post office moves packages around without opening or inspecting the contents. The contents are never stored in a database and could be broken. It is address to address communication. Decentralization allows for personal or organizational devices to be remotely connected as a large physically distributed computer: * A single file system, cross OS. * Remote application execution, such as Steam’s remote game play. * Content on demand. Push media out to your friends or access their computer and pull it off yourself.

loceng 5y ago
"* Content on demand. Push media out to your friends or access their computer and pull it off yourself." Reminds me of dialing into a BBS way back when, that early on was just someone with a non-dedicated or dedicated telephone line hooked up to their personal computer's modem; you could connect to fun, non-real-time multi-player text-based games (ASCII art FTW!) hosted on their PC, and some had file servers open for download and sometimes upload.
Comevius 5y ago
I'm writing an offline-first database and it typically uses a server for storage and coordination. The difference is that I don't think the server should be able to see what it stores and coordinates, for which searchable encryption is the solution. However my database is address based, it reads and writes blocks of encrypted data, and it is protocol agnostic, it works over S3 and Google Drive, or could work over a pendrive sent in a letter back and forth, or IPFS. It just requires a single source of truth and optionally event notification. So would this fit into an every peer-to-peer system is decentralized, but not every decentralized system is peer-to-peer picture, or is this not decentralized at all, because you would normally use it with Amazon S3, albeit in a maliciously-secure manner (the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of your data is secured via authenticated encryption, the client keeps the key, the access pattern is obfuscated).

k__ 5y ago

"how much decentralization do we need?" I think, that hits the nail on its head. Many people are happy with MANGA basically owning the Internet and many people aren't. If we look at companies bending the knee for China or shutting down accounts, simply because they have different moral than the account owners, it's clear that we need much more decentralization than we have right now. How much? I don't know.

loceng 5y ago
I think part of the solution is to make sure there is a functional and tested decentralized system that's available as a fallback or failsafe, say in case the system(s) get captured by tyranny or authoritarians; and these fallback systems must be enshrined in policy/constitution, so that if they're ever attacked or targeted then that becomes a canary signal. Data mobility could also perhaps be considered the other side of the decentralized coin.

gandutraveler 5y ago

Centralization is a human nature. Internet is already decentralized but we still tend to congregate in common space. Even with web3, organizations like polkadot are creating a centralized space around them. So I doubt we will ever achieve true decentralization there will always be a hierarchy and a central body that will have more control over it.

hwhelan210 5y ago
I don't think what we're running into here is "human nature" so much as it is investor nature. I'm not particularly familiar with them, but Polkadot has raised $300M. There has to be some return for that investment (i.e. they need to be able to lock users into their ecosystem and prove to investors that a competitor can't come along and provide an equally valuable service without starting from scratch). How can a truly decentralized service / protocol compete with the companies that are getting that kind of investment?

kuroguro 5y ago

> there are the decentralization maximalists who think that blockchain will make tech platforms obsolete I doubt blockchain is a silver bullet. I really liked Kleppmann's work on local-first software / CRDTs. It seems a lot closer to something practically usable at least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qytg0Ibet2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qytg0Ibet2E

blamestross 5y ago
Blockchain tech just offuscates centralization, it doesn't provide decentralization.
- brightstep 5y ago
  In terms used by the memo discussed by the article, blockchain are still susceptible to indirect and platform centralization.

delaaxe 5y ago

In other words, it’s ok for some things to be “decentralized enough”, as opposed to fully decentralized (whatever that means).

foxhop 5y ago

Hello, I have a similar thread going here. I think we need to "shard the centralized monolith". https://www.unturf.com/let-us-define-a-permacomputer/ https://www.unturf.com/let-us-define-a-permacomputer/ I avoid writing prescriptively to avoid setting a bias on the talent. I AM growing my own "YouTube". Not open source yet but I'm planning big things. https://media.unturf.com https://media.unturf.com

verisimi 5y ago

Here's a fantastic quote I heard this week: "A successful utopian society would most likely be one made up of 1000s of smaller utopias." This strikes me as the valid mega-target that we should be attempting to reach collectively - space for all. It should also be the foundational principle for software solutions. And neutral software solutions should also be able to accommodate people who don't want to be in the proposed solution!

skohan 5y ago
It's a good start but you still need a mechanism for preventing negative externalities between utopias.
- verisimi 5y ago
  The foundational principle is the same as it ever was: 'do no harm'. The golden rule. Do not initiate harm. In reverse, do not roll over when someone is initiating harm against you.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- coderzach 5y ago
  Land Value Tax solves everything! /meme
pessimizer 5y ago
Better would be 1000s of overlapping utopias. Reducing the geographic size of government seems like a lot less desirable a way to shrink it than reducing the scope of governments. That was the original rhetoric behind "Defund" IIRC. Break up the central police force to a rump used to coordinate and regulate police functions that have been devolved to exist under other government departments. Basically a bid to put a domestically-operating military under more thoughtfully-organized civilian control instead of simply having city cops, state cops, and country cops whose only points of oversight come respectively from the mayor, the governor, and the president.

blamestross 5y ago

First, thinking of decentralization/centralization as having a boundary between them can be useful, but is wrong. They are a continuum upon which things oscillate. Decentralization fundamentally trades inefficiency for long-term robustness. Centralization trades long term robustness for short term efficiencies. Under our implementation of capitalism, most people don't value robustness on a timescale longer than 20 years unless there was recently a crisis to remind them of it. So every aspect of human infrastructure oscillates on the centralized-decentralized axis over time. Thinking of "decentralized" as something that will stay that way is wrong, over time people will ever centralize the system in pursuit of short term returns until the perceived "decentralized" system might as well be centralized in practice (see internet infrastructure), once a crisis happens due to over-centralization we build a new system (or re-brand an old system) that is more decentralized in response. That system eventually decays into centralization the same way. I value changing society to think in the long term, so I think it is a lot more valuable to change the cycle versus attempt to participate in just one swing of it.

lottin 5y ago

Discussions about decentralization should start by defining the term decentralization in the specific context of the discussion, otherwise nobody knows what they're talking about. For example, nobody in the economics profession would refer to the financial system as being 'centralised'. It is not. There's no central planner. Financial institutions are autonomous and make their own decisions with regards to what products to sell, and how to make them. If you want to argue that it's centralised, you will have to be much more specific. And the same applies to everything else, from the internet, money, software or whatever.

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
Good point. Control of the inflation rate (total money supply) in fiat currency is centralized.
- deleted 5y ago
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- pessimizer 5y ago
  Isn't the same thing true for bitcoin? As far as I know, it was set with the first implementation, and can only be changed when a majority of miners agree to change it.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    Valid point. It's much more complicated but suffice to say it can be changed by a majority of full node operators, of which miners are only a subset. The meta checks and balances preventing such an occurrence have been proven for Bitcoin. We haven't seen miners succeed in reversing the halvenings, for instance.
3np 5y ago
Thank you. It really grinds my gears when people/projects/companies make strong claims about “decentralization” without even specifying what they’re talking about. Many times it becomes nonsensical.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

From the linked article Avoiding Internet Centralization: 5.2. Encrypt, Always When deployed at scale, encryption can be an effective technique to reduce many inherited centralization risks. By reducing the number of parties who have access to content of communication, the ability of lower-layer protocols and intermediaries at those layers to interfere with or observe is precluded. Even when they can still prevent communication, the use of encryption makes it more difficult to discriminate the target from other traffic. Note that the benefits are most pronounced when the majority (if not all) traffic is encrypted. As a result, protocols SHOULD be encrypted by default. They're literally describing the lack of decentralization that encryption brings. "If you encrypt, intermediaries have no control". Which means a central actor does. By encrypting communications, without an intermediary protocol to support more flexible operations, there is no way to extend functionality for networks that depend on intermediary controls. All systems that scale HTTP-based applications require a lack of encryption on the backend. The encryption is terminated at the load balancer and the entire connection is then inspected in plaintext. Sure, the "best practice" is to encrypt between endpoints, but they must be decrypted at each hop so that load balancers, API gateways, and applications can inject or parse headers, perform rewrites, forward traffic, inspect requests (WAF), create sticky sessions, and cache media. If all HTTP connections were end to end encrypted, the web could not scale. Another example is DNS over HTTPS. The encryption centralizes control of the protocol at the server. The encryption removes the ability of intermediate LAN/WAN DNS resolvers to cache records for a large local network, or to serve their own custom zones transparently, or do things like ad-blocking. As there are valid and necessary use cases, it means that now new "hacks" will have to be developed to accommodate the old use cases, that the protocol design intentionally ignored. The result is more centralization. Distributed decentralized applications also suffer when PKI is used for encryption. It is very common for backend applications to stop working because they were using a private CA to encrypt backend connections and the certs expired without warning, killing all the connections. Refreshing the certs then involves re-deploying not just the servers, but all the clients that were reliant on an old client cert, and possibly an expired CA cert. This use of a private CA also breaks decentralization compared to the public CA model.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Honestly how decentralized is the Internet? AFAIK there are groups like W3C and ICAAN which basically control domains, and a few IPs which control routing. Most of the internet is also behind Cloudflare, AWS, etc. The key is that these companies are very conservative when blocking users and giving others special privileges. Your service won't be blocked by Cloudflare and IPs unless it's particularly bad or your government requests it. Whereas e.g. YouTube has very strict rules and often bans people incorrectly or for debatable reasons. Idk if the issue is actually decentralized vs. centralized. I think it's "do I decide the rules or do I just enforce them?"

golemotron 5y ago

> Given my mental model of centralization vs. decentralization, I think it's more productive to think about the boundary: how much decentralization do we need? If there's too little, then software will stagnate from lack of competition; if there's too much, then it'll stagnate from lack of coordination. So we want to figure out where the sweet spot is. This is a static view. A dynamic view would recognize that systems have a lifetime and tend to go through centralize and then disintegrate. Decentralization often exists prior to centralization. Catch systems on the rise.