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> The vast majority of people don't want to, and indeed, most nerds also don't want to, even if you know some counterexamples. The point is that things are bes
by zrm 5y ago
> The vast majority of people don't want to, and indeed, most nerds also don't want to, even if you know some counterexamples.
The point is that things are best designed in such a way that people may run their own servers but not that they must run their own servers.
The former is good even for the people who never intend to do it, because it implies that whoever is operating the servers you do use is in a competitive market that anyone can enter without having to overcome a network effect.
- tsimionescu 5y agoSure, but Moxie's point was that current Blockchain protocols are designed for the latter: you either run your own server, or connect to some platform's server that is exposing whatever data they want over some other protocol. There is no client you can run that can talk to the distributed server network.
- kelnos 5y agoThe problem is -- referring to Moxie's article here -- that some of the supposedly-decentralized things are already depending on or are fronted by specific centralized services, so even if you do decide to run your own server, it doesn't matter, because those centralized services have become de-facto gatekeepers to the decentralization in the background, and it's difficult (and sometimes impossible) for the average user to replace those. It was very interesting to me to learn that if OpenSea de-lists your NFT, then it effectively ceases to exist. Sure, it's still on the blockchain, but any app that uses OpenSea's platform to list or operate on NFTs (which, turns out, is a lot of them right now) won't see it. This might be fixable, but it's a big red flag to me that these problems already exist, with no proposed solutions.