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People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a w

by alexb_ 5y ago

People use centralized systems because they actually like the convenience that comes with it. And with that, comes the decentralized system changing in such a way that it changes to almost NEEDING centralization. The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true. The biggest example is the internet itself - the internet is a completely decentralized network until it wasn't, with website certs becoming required. People use popular web hosting because it's easier and just better than what they could do. Email is completely decentralized, and it's very easy to set up your own web server - as long as you want every single spam system to immediately block all of your messages. "Decentralized" systems will all go the exact same way. And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" but once you get to a critical mass of everyone using Gmail instead of their own server then the system becomes unusable without centralization. Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money.

neelc 5y ago
This. The sad thing is that people like the convenience of centralized systems. Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly. I should've made this point clearer. Note: I am the article's author.
- alexb_ 5y ago
  Even then, I think blaming it on laziness is really not a good idea. People are not lazy for not understanding how systems work - not every single person has time for that, or cares about decentralization. Laziness implies it's a problem, and programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough. You have to look at the individual decisions that people make, and actually make it worth someone's time to do something themselves. For some people, they care a lot about decentralization, are anti-corporate, etc., but most people don't care. They see that they could either spend money on a cheap PC and 10 hours learning about, setting up, and troubleshooting their own mail server; or they can get a gmail account in 2 minutes and get the exact same practical result. The same will apply to web3 systems. It's not laziness, it's people making rational decisions.
  - the_snooze 5y ago
    >programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough. This. It's not up to techies to decide what people value. The philosophical problem with web3/blockchain/whatever is that it assumes "decentralization" is a valuable thing in and of itself, without really tying it into what people actually value.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It's almost as if trust turns out to be some kind of dominant strategy.
  - MrMan 5y ago
    thank you
- bluehorseray 5y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily sad at all. It seems like centralized systems make the most sense in, well, most systems. And safeguards can be put in place to prevent the centralization from being abused.
- oivey 5y ago
  I think people have some big misunderstandings about power. You’re right, centralized systems can lead to monopolies. On the other hand, decentralized systems where no one has absolute power can make important changes difficult to implement. See: changes to Bitcoin and Ethereum’s protocols to address issues with mining.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Why is this sad? We live in a world of Ikea furniture and cabinetry, of fast food and passionate gourmet, there's room in the world for the convenient and the passionate tinkerers. Everyone is different and likes to allocate their time in different places. My partner will not put a sticker on her laptop that she hasn't designed and drawn herself, while I type on a handmade desk. That there are easy and hard ways to do things is fantastic; it means I can pick the lazy choice for things I don't care for and the passionate things for those I do. Do you really want a world where everyone cares about the same things you do? I feel the world is better for its diversity.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly. Am I lazy because I don't forge spare parts for my car and install them myself? No. I leave this to the huge, rich, established company that manufactured my car, and their contractors. Why? Because the only times I ever repaired anything in a car, was in videogames. And I want to be sure that the thing that I entrust my safety to while traveling, is in excellent working order. For the same reason, most people don't setup their own mail servers, don't setup their own racks to run webapps, invent their own currencies, grow their own food, produce their own electricity, or dig wells. Our society runs on a huge variety of systems, most of which are too complex individually for any single human to fully understand/make/maintain on his own. Centralization is not a bad thing to be avoided, it's an inevitable consequence of technological development.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    This example is silly - it's actually impossible for you to forge spare parts for your car, as most of them require multi-million dollar machines to manufacture, the information on how they are made, blueprints or schematics are not avaliable to you. And even if you succeed, someof them are IP protected so this is a terrible analogie.
    - usrbinbash 5y ago
      I can give you plenty of more feasible analogies; Do I make my own bread? Sure, sometimes I do. Baking bread isn't that hard. But do I do it every day? No. Why? Because it takes time to do, my kitchen counter is usually a mess afterwards, and the result usually doesn't taste anywhere near as good as the 20+ bread varieties I can buy at the corner store. I sometimes do it for fun, but I wouldn't do it every day. Let's go to macro scale: What's the better solution: 1000000 people each baking their own bread (1 loaf a day), or a giant company baking all the bread? A million stoves are most certainly less energy efficient than the professional industrial ones at the company. Having to divide the resources into many small packages and distributing them to each individual households is less efficient. The quality of the bread will vary widely. And lets say baking takes 0.5 hours, that's 57 person years wasted per day to do something the bread factory can probably do with a few dozen employees.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  This isn't laziness. This is different priorities. Few people think that decentralized systems are an important thing in and of themselves. Laziness would be believing the decentralization is good without working to achieve it.
- MrMan 5y ago
  this statement is embarrassing. specialization and division of labor is not due to "laziness"
- vanveenada 5y ago
  Do you knit? Do you wear sweaters? The sweaters you have -- did you knit them? Do you wear shirts? Did you sew them yourself? If not, why are you so lazy?
beambot 5y ago
Not everything is centralized. Internet routing infrastructure (e.g. BGP) is decentralized. Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources. Power grids are decentralized loads and (increasingly) generation. It's true that centralization & decentralization tend to operate like a pendulum over time. Having a blockchain that provides historic cryptographic evidence of provenance with a modicum of worldwide trust seems like a generally valuable capability to combat all forms of digital newspeak.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  'Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources' So long as you keep monopolies and abuse of power in check, in the past 30 years we have gone from a dozen conpetitors to like 2 or 3 player cartel in many industries
  - Sprocklem 5y ago
    Notably, this is the result of a failure in our (necessarily) centralized anti-trust system. In the past 30 years, the government has been reticent to pursue anti-trust cases against the growing number of monopolies/oligopolies. Without the centralized regulation of decentralized system, they seem to consistently centralize around a few key players to the detriment of the system.
cmelbye 5y ago
The problems you’re describing are problems of the internet, not decentralization. Few could’ve predicted what the initial rules of the internet would generate after a few decades. We can learn from the outcome and come up with new rules. The point about how “people want centralized systems” reminds me of the initial response to Apple’s privacy strategy. At the time, it was met with skepticism, to say the least. Privacy wasn’t something that normal people obsessed over, and it came at the expense of wonderful features that were only possible through centralized archival of personal information. Since then, a steady drumbeat of surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset.
- polyomino 5y ago
  Yeah, and Apple sold people on "privacy" and now operate a surveillance network against Chinese citizens. They are the archetypical example of this playing out. Promising decentralization and instead you get metamask overriding the blockchain because some jpegs are illegal.
  - Siira 5y ago
    Isn’t Metamask opensource? Why don’t people maintain a fork without the censorship?
- majormajor 5y ago
  Apple suggested that people would care about privacy, and there was skepticism. Of course, privacy had been the status quo in an earlier era of the internet, and the lack of privacy didn't enable much in terms of novel user experience (turns out all the crap about "people would rather have personalized ads" was crap). Now a crowd of people are suggesting something very different: that people wouldn't care about giving up the conveniences of today's centralized systems. But we do have experience with a less centralized web, and it wasn't a lack of "web3" tech that resulted in the centralized systems gaining their current position. It was open competition with the less-centralized old status quo. The centralized systems that won are very different than the older centralized systems that had lost - AOL tried to force everything inside of its wall; Facebook and Twitter merely extend their reach so that they can touch everything, and won out as aggregators vs doing in-house content production. So why would the desire to have such convenient, one-stop-shop, minimal-setup centralized aggregator services go away?
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
This is a false dichotomy. Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers would rather kill them on purpose and force more people to use them. Which we could fix it if we wanted to. Everything could work this way, and should. You don't run your own social network instance, but you can, and thousands of independent entities do, and you can take your pick of them and move between them. And we can learn lessons from the past. Major one from email: Addresses should be portable, or at least have zero-cost permanent forwarding built into the protocol.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world." Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.
  - distortedsignal 5y ago
    I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application. I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.
makeitdouble 5y ago
People are fine with centralized systems that make sense and brings value. To me the best part of decentralized systems is that they allow for centralized sub-systems to emerge organically, instead of being decided top-down. For instance, I don't think that when launching the first internet nodes we would have anticipated that certs should have centralized entities, it happened that it made more sense that way once we saw the issues emerging from actual use.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Centralization also comes from the problem of trust. Who do you trust? For example certs. I can build my on CA fairly quickly. The trick is getting anyone to trust me and my certs and say 'yeah I will add your certs to the pile'. DNS is slightly similar. In that I can stand up my own DNS central authority node. Now will anyone use it? Probably just me. The early net code assumed trust. Email, DNS, FTP, etc. You were trusted or authorized to use particular computers. Getting on those meant talking to someone with a bit of sense not to let spammers/trolls onto their networks. Then if they did get someone like that they walked over to their terminal and just locked them out of their account. It was also why they heavily stayed away form corp interests for so long. As many times a small cohort of people will ignore doing the right thing if it gets them some sort of power/wealth. So we end up with central authorities who can either limit or kick off those who do trolly things. It is not going back to that. It cant. But the trick is can we get those distributed properties back? Yet still keep the spammers at bay? Most people who use these systems could not care one whit if it is centralized or not. They just want to send some cat pics and watch a video of someone doing something silly and give a thumbs up to that.
eek2121 5y ago
Centralization is a cost cutting measure, nothing more. Don't be fooled.
- alexb_ 5y ago
  As it turns out, rational people actually want to cut costs. This is true even down to the individual level. And time is money, so nobody wants to spend the effort to be decentralized when a centralized system exists that takes less money. Rational choices are what bring centralized systems into existence.
- karpierz 5y ago
  Buying a car from a dealership instead of mining metal from the ground and building it from scratch is a cost cutting measure. Buying my food from a market instead of foraging for it is a cost cutting measure.
silisili 5y ago
Complete opposite take. Imagine putting all your eggs in Myspace, Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, or probably soonish, Facebook. The internet would have up and died. Yet these centralized providers come and go, but the web remains. Decentralization isn't about doing things yourself, it's about having constant choice. To flee sinking ships, to bet on rising stars. The web is fine. Web3 will pass like myspace, and the web will remain.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  I'm often confused because "decentralized" means different things to different people, like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. BitTorrent and other peer to peer apps are decentralized, but are they really when the data flows through the pipes of a few Telco's? I think web3 means there isn't a central authority for conducting transactions with other people, but I have a nagging feeling that this could be accomplished without a blockchain and proof of work waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
  - 0ldskool 5y ago
    Without decentralization you wouldn't have "A few Telco's" you would have 1 global telco. The most hardcore form of decentralization usually means that there is no centralization ontop of the decentralize medium. I think this is in general unlikely. People are lazy and tend to congregate together and therefore there will always be some form of centralization. Not everyone wants to think about the implementation details and just wants stuff to work without caring how. Whats important with decentralization is choice and future proofing. When one company dies or becomes untrustworthy you can jump onto a different one. Proof of Work is one implementation but not the only one, there are many more efficient versions now. You might as well complain about Dial-up saying internet is a waste and will never amount to anything because the phone line is always tied up....
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Something like 1/3 of the world uses FB. Do you really see it dying soon?
janjones 5y ago
One problem is that decentralization sometimes doesn't scale. It's cool to have completely decentralized email, but once many people use it, there will be lots of spam, and it's hard dealing with that in a decentralized way, I guess.
- nfin 5y ago
  Decentralization doesn't scale well, that is sure. But humans are inventing new tools to improve the decentralization over time, give new options. Sometimes the jumps are bigger, sometimes smaller. Regarding decentralized email: there are technical solutions to spam like Hashcash [0]. It has drawbacks, like a bit of energy consumption. On the other side it keeps big corps reasonable (or gives them an upper limit to how bad they can behave), as if they start to behave too bad, such solutions would likely see increasing adoption. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
S0und 5y ago
On top of this, if you're into self hosting the one thing people don't recommend to self host is an email server. It can be done but it's a real pain.
onion2k 5y ago
Most centralized systems exist because the best way to extract profit from whatever they do is to maintain control. It's possible to profit from part of a decentralized system, but if you want to maximize your take then centralization is the way to go. Every decentralized system that works was created with a goal other than directly profiting from it to start with, and succeeded because someone found a way to profit from some part of it. Eventually though, in most cases, the companies and people that run the system coalesce until its effectively centralized, with a few single entities running the points of failure. See electricity generation, car manufacturing, news media, game publishing, book publishing, glasses manufacturing, etc for examples. The Internet is still in the "companies coalesce" stage which is why it still looks decentralized, but those companies merge or vanish quite regularly, with fewer and fewer getting more and more control.
threatripper 5y ago
If we don't stop blaming people for the choices they make for reasons we don't understand we won't effect change to the world.
prmoustache 5y ago
Internet started being centralized when companies started making decisions instead of keeping it collegial and use IETF RFC's. Business companies all strive to get monopolies, hence they build things to capture consumers. Same companies are more attractive than open standard because making things not interoperable is more agile/faster as you can break things whenever you want. Thus companies build more attractive things to the users and users get captured in those shiny gold plated cells.
eternityforest 5y ago
If blockchain had never been invented, we'd be a lot farther ahead. BitTorrent proves the idea can work. And Tox is already totally usable, aside from it's mobile data usage. Federation is the other problem. It's decentralized without real end user benefits other that a bit of censorship resistance, within the limits of the hosting company. It doesn't add reliability or offline communications on the LAN.
- lfkdev 5y ago
  "a bit of censorship resistance" tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    I'm not sure how much Federation would do against government censorship in practice, for an average person. It's not like it can bypass a firewall or protect you legally if you connect them with an illegal VPN or something. It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows. Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.
    - jermaustin1 5y ago
      I'm not a normal user of bitcoin or any crypto, but I have not seen large unpredictable fees in a while. My transaction fees are almost always 0.00001 BTC or less, with my typical transfer being anywhere from 0.0004 BTC to 0.002 BTC. Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.
      - moffkalast 5y ago
        Assuming you want to actually get bitcoin first you'll need to buy it on an exchange which will charge your absurd fees to transfer it into your own wallet. And if you ever want to do the reverse you'll get charged those same absurd fees again. In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.
darkerside 5y ago
It's creative destruction. When you decentralize, you are destroying institutions and tradition that are slowing us down. That doesn't mean you don't want new ones to rise up in their place. It's not that centralization is bad, it's just that _sometimes you centralize the wrong thing_ and this is how you fix it.
- pharke 5y ago
  I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice, and variety.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    What do you think "in the middle" means? Everything is semi centralized? No, it means we've centralized the right things and not the wrong things. Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyone. It's not a split the difference situation.
    - pharke 5y ago
      In the middle means that you have a large number of small centralized services that are interoperable. That way you get most of the benefits of centralization e.g. someone else manages the technical details, you benefit from the network effects of the service, the service can provide things at scale that you can't on your own and you get most of the benefits of decentralization e.g. you get to choose a service that is more in alignment with your principles, has the bucket of features you prefer, has the community you want to interact with, you can switch to a new service whenever you like. You also have to lose something in exchange, you can't fully customize everything the way you like and not everyone in the world will have exactly the same features available to them. It's a compromise. The key to making it work is having a common protocol and everyone agreeing to at least speak to each other rather than building their own walled garden Utopia™.
indymike 5y ago
> Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money. The fallacy here is most centralized services are implemented on top of the biggest, most successful decentralized system: the web. > And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. I'm not so sure. For really important tasks, I'm routinely amazed by what people cobble together to solve the problem, especially when they can't build software. Perhaps there are just a lot of things that if made easy, provide enough value they are worth buying, but aren't important enough to people to invest a year or two building a product for. Regardless, most modern centralized systems are simply nodes on a decentralized system.
james4k 5y ago
More broadly, any decentralized system that interacts with the process of capital accumulation will centralize, as this is an emergent feature of capitalism.
amyjess 5y ago
Just look at git adoption. Git's selling point is that it's decentralized and distributed... but just look at the shitshow that happens whenever GitHub goes down. Git may allow for developers to all pull from each other, but in practice your employer will always have a canonical repo that's blessed as the official source, and if that one becomes unavailable for any reason work grinds to a halt. And that goes double if your company's deployment process is tied to GHA.
- greyhair 5y ago
  Small organizations use github. Really large organizations have their own git servers. I have worked on both sides of that.
  - amyjess 5y ago
    I used to work for a company that used on-prem BitBucket. And even there, "Stash is down" caused development to grind to a halt. Yeah, sure, our outages weren't synchronized with the rest of the world's outages, but the end result is the same: productivity depends on the uptime of our authoritative repo. That all the developers have clones of that repo on our own boxes is irrelevant... nobody's going to bother pointing our remotes at each other's workstations or reconfiguring Jenkins.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    I’ve worked for a number of very large, enterprise companies. They use Github Enterprise. Even banks are moving to SaaS first for their core applications.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  It’s not really lack of repo access that makes GitHub outages bad. It’s all the “value-add” stuff on top of the repo that makes outages suck. You’ve got workflows bolted on top that block forward progress when it goes down. Hooks for when push requests happen, when commits happen, etc. You’ve got code reviews in your workflow that cannot happen when the service is down. Basically there is much more to a service like GitHub / gitlab than just “write code, commit”. These services enable powerful workflows. When those go down all you can do is write code locally. The rest of the pipeline is dead in the water, which in many cases makes your overall ability to work virtually impossible.
pharke 5y ago
I think we just need a balance between decentralization and centralization. Think of banking as an example. If you want to be fully decentralized you can just use cash only and keep all of your money (or gold) in a safe at home. A fully centralized option is to have one national bank that everyone uses. Neither are great options but they both exist in practice. What's currently prevalent in a lot of places are a few big services that cooperate, same thing in tech right now too. What we want is a large number of small to medium sized services that are interoperable but also reliable. Make it easy for people to start their own service through laws or code and you've gone a long way towards solving the problem without putting extra work on the consumer.
- 0ldskool 5y ago
  My opinion is that the backbone should always be decentralized and open. i.e. the internet. What is built ontop of it can be pseudo-centralized and/or regulated if needed but there is always the technical ability to re-decentralize if needed. My main concern is that I want the creation to outlast the creators/controllers. What happens if an important company gets bought and its IP split up? What if the new owners simple disable the product or put it behind a paywall. Look at bittorrent, the new owners completely screwed it up but the protocol + previous implementations could continue to be used. Look at Facebook's double standard of how they censor content. I personally think anything that is popular + important enough to be used by much of the world should always have an open backbone should things go wrong with the current company+implementation. Open source is a form of decentralization. I also think decentralization of networks (backbones) is important to prevent one organization from achieving a "network affect" that makes them the central authority on a given resource (facebook, twitter, etc...)
unixbane 5y ago
> The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true. In theory yes. In practice, nobody has made this supposedely good for the hacker / engineer system. Otherwise I'd be using it. Since your post is just parrotting the usual anti-decentralized stuff with extremely strange motives, and ignoring obvious facts such as that bittorrent works perfectly even with the legal threat to using it, lets move onto a new topic: What such a system would look like. I don't want 2FA, phone auth, certs. I want to connect to a service providing my own public key as auth and authenticating it against a known public key which is saved on my computer. I can secure my computer however I want. I also don't want to use a badly designed roundabout way to do this like X.509 with cert pinning. I can just have a <1000LOC lib written from the ground up to do all cryptographic tasks. I don't want my software to have """human readable""" names that are stored in a centralized directory where they conflict with others with character sets (and restrictions on them) that change every month. Instead, I want content-addressable code (functions, types, etc) which I have a dedicated editor for that allows me to write code against them. I don't want a weird character set full of unknown functionality like ASCII. I don't want to have untyped data where I or my code is forced to make insecure ad-hoc decisions on how to interpret it (is this ASCII, CP*? UTF?). I don't want a crappy ad-hoc fly by night serialization system (each with its own gimmick such as "speed", "readability") like protobuf, yaml, yet another yaml, toml, yet another toml that doesn't solve any semantic problems associated with serialization. I don't want that protobuf lib where there is no documentation on how it maps types to protobufs and in some cases it leaves pointers initialized to null and in some cases it initializes them to point to an empty struct, based on some stupid intuition I was supposed to pick up if I become a fanboy of this particular serialization lib over the 10,000 others. Instead, I want to use the same editor mentioned before to view data, which is just data of the ONE programming language on this computer. Algebraic data types serve this purpose almost perfectly. This problem was solved in 1970. I want one serialization format which is just a set of steps on how convert data of one type to bits. Then when I receive this data, I will view it in this editor. The point being that we don't care how the data looks on wire, because it's universally decodeable with the most common tool of the OS. I don't want multiple programming languages that are each overly designed around strawmen like "the user" and "speed" and "C-like", with tons of edge cases such that even if I learned one well enough to be able to write sound code (you can't: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-java-program-terminate-despite-that-apparently-it-shouldnt-and-d https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-j...), it wouldn't matter because your program relies on components written in 15 other such languages. I want the only language to also be at the very least, such that I can understand what it does on a syntactic level. Again, you can't: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newline-character-u000d-in-java https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newlin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17707290/set-a-variable-and-print-it-without-any-threads-but-it-prints-the-old-value https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17707290/set-a-variable-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662815/how-does-java-distinguish-these-multiple-methods-with-the-same-name-signature https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662815/how-does-java-d... I don't want to have to check what ports my program uses and check if the web browser (of course, I don't want a web browser at all) on a malicious page can send a request to those ports that will be processed as some administrative function; I want things not to pointlessly listen for no reason by default in a non-composable way. Instead, I want a program to have a list of channels that only I as the computer owner can choose to link up with other programs I choose to have it communicate with (this is known as the capability security model). I don't want to host data, I want to refer to them by links in a self organizing anonymous content addressable storage like Freenet. I want to use the same system to distribute code. I don't want my programming console (essentially what *sh is, just an extremely poor version of it) to be implemented on top of some obsolete tech called a terminal, that you couldn't even explain to the typical software engineer 20 years ago, that goes bezerk when certain characters hit it and has ui interaction quality comparable to a 5 year old's javascript program.
jasonm23 5y ago
In a nutshell you are saying decentralized advocates forget about the bell curve of "effort" humans are willing to spend. Isn't this just a design problem, as opposed to an intrinsic problem with decentralization? I believe that we can design convenient decentralized systems. We definitely have not done this yet, but that does not mean this is an unachievable goal. There are also human factors which currently are a problem too. The massive increase in people using internet technology (via smartphones obv.) Was not accompanied by massive increase in technology education/expertise. The early users of the internet were extremely technically capable in comparison, raised on microcomputers. Getting online was a hassle, but presented a fun challenge to these people. Not only are today's platforms essentially closed, the average user has a lot of difficulty understanding all the layers required to do something like say, set up an email server. This is a major drain of effort and it's just one piece of the networked tech people take for granted. However if there were simple alternatives which could be setup and used "effortlessly" people would use them. Web3 is an unfulfilled promise, so far, and is in a phase where scams and bullshit are rife. It's unlikely that people will perpetually be satisfied with the centralized services, especially as they continue to degrade in service and ethical quality. A process which may be part of the equation which leads to better decentralized systems which are also secure and simple to deploy & use. I think the interest is there, the technology isn't yet of course.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" basically what happens here everytime youtube has some sort of drama and users recommend all these alternatives "that put the power back to you". the vast majority of users (I even argue 99+% when you exclude the technical crowd) don't want the "power". They want to host their content, not deal with random It related issues, and maybe even make a small bit of monetization. not having videos taken down for mysterious (or not so mysterious, but asinine) reasons would have them jump ship to ANOTHER solution that offers the above factors, but they won't jump to open source like a developer may.
Siira 5y ago
The problem is that self-hosting is pretty difficult. If one could just run a docker image, only setting up the absolutely needed personal info, it would become a lot more common. Not on the personal/everyday level, but for professional (money generating) settings, it can absolutely become mainstream. The spam problem is also simply the decentralized system not working; it has no protections against unwanted incoming messages.

by alexb_ 5y ago

neelc 5y ago

This. The sad thing is that people like the convenience of centralized systems. Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly. I should've made this point clearer. Note: I am the article's author.

alexb_ 5y ago
Even then, I think blaming it on laziness is really not a good idea. People are not lazy for not understanding how systems work - not every single person has time for that, or cares about decentralization. Laziness implies it's a problem, and programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough. You have to look at the individual decisions that people make, and actually make it worth someone's time to do something themselves. For some people, they care a lot about decentralization, are anti-corporate, etc., but most people don't care. They see that they could either spend money on a cheap PC and 10 hours learning about, setting up, and troubleshooting their own mail server; or they can get a gmail account in 2 minutes and get the exact same practical result. The same will apply to web3 systems. It's not laziness, it's people making rational decisions.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  >programmers have an unhealthy fascination with seeing problems and thinking they can all be fixed somehow if they just technology hard enough. This. It's not up to techies to decide what people value. The philosophical problem with web3/blockchain/whatever is that it assumes "decentralization" is a valuable thing in and of itself, without really tying it into what people actually value.
shadowgovt 5y ago
It's almost as if trust turns out to be some kind of dominant strategy.
- MrMan 5y ago
  thank you
bluehorseray 5y ago
I don't think it's necessarily sad at all. It seems like centralized systems make the most sense in, well, most systems. And safeguards can be put in place to prevent the centralization from being abused.
oivey 5y ago
I think people have some big misunderstandings about power. You’re right, centralized systems can lead to monopolies. On the other hand, decentralized systems where no one has absolute power can make important changes difficult to implement. See: changes to Bitcoin and Ethereum’s protocols to address issues with mining.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Why is this sad? We live in a world of Ikea furniture and cabinetry, of fast food and passionate gourmet, there's room in the world for the convenient and the passionate tinkerers. Everyone is different and likes to allocate their time in different places. My partner will not put a sticker on her laptop that she hasn't designed and drawn herself, while I type on a handmade desk. That there are easy and hard ways to do things is fantastic; it means I can pick the lazy choice for things I don't care for and the passionate things for those I do. Do you really want a world where everyone cares about the same things you do? I feel the world is better for its diversity.
usrbinbash 5y ago
> Humans are lazy. They'll go with the #1 option, even if it means building a centralized monopoly. Am I lazy because I don't forge spare parts for my car and install them myself? No. I leave this to the huge, rich, established company that manufactured my car, and their contractors. Why? Because the only times I ever repaired anything in a car, was in videogames. And I want to be sure that the thing that I entrust my safety to while traveling, is in excellent working order. For the same reason, most people don't setup their own mail servers, don't setup their own racks to run webapps, invent their own currencies, grow their own food, produce their own electricity, or dig wells. Our society runs on a huge variety of systems, most of which are too complex individually for any single human to fully understand/make/maintain on his own. Centralization is not a bad thing to be avoided, it's an inevitable consequence of technological development.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  This example is silly - it's actually impossible for you to forge spare parts for your car, as most of them require multi-million dollar machines to manufacture, the information on how they are made, blueprints or schematics are not avaliable to you. And even if you succeed, someof them are IP protected so this is a terrible analogie.
  - usrbinbash 5y ago
    I can give you plenty of more feasible analogies; Do I make my own bread? Sure, sometimes I do. Baking bread isn't that hard. But do I do it every day? No. Why? Because it takes time to do, my kitchen counter is usually a mess afterwards, and the result usually doesn't taste anywhere near as good as the 20+ bread varieties I can buy at the corner store. I sometimes do it for fun, but I wouldn't do it every day. Let's go to macro scale: What's the better solution: 1000000 people each baking their own bread (1 loaf a day), or a giant company baking all the bread? A million stoves are most certainly less energy efficient than the professional industrial ones at the company. Having to divide the resources into many small packages and distributing them to each individual households is less efficient. The quality of the bread will vary widely. And lets say baking takes 0.5 hours, that's 57 person years wasted per day to do something the bread factory can probably do with a few dozen employees.
UncleMeat 5y ago
This isn't laziness. This is different priorities. Few people think that decentralized systems are an important thing in and of themselves. Laziness would be believing the decentralization is good without working to achieve it.
MrMan 5y ago
this statement is embarrassing. specialization and division of labor is not due to "laziness"
vanveenada 5y ago
Do you knit? Do you wear sweaters? The sweaters you have -- did you knit them? Do you wear shirts? Did you sew them yourself? If not, why are you so lazy?

beambot 5y ago

Not everything is centralized. Internet routing infrastructure (e.g. BGP) is decentralized. Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources. Power grids are decentralized loads and (increasingly) generation. It's true that centralization & decentralization tend to operate like a pendulum over time. Having a blockchain that provides historic cryptographic evidence of provenance with a modicum of worldwide trust seems like a generally valuable capability to combat all forms of digital newspeak.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
'Capitalism itself is decentralized allocation of resources' So long as you keep monopolies and abuse of power in check, in the past 30 years we have gone from a dozen conpetitors to like 2 or 3 player cartel in many industries
- Sprocklem 5y ago
  Notably, this is the result of a failure in our (necessarily) centralized anti-trust system. In the past 30 years, the government has been reticent to pursue anti-trust cases against the growing number of monopolies/oligopolies. Without the centralized regulation of decentralized system, they seem to consistently centralize around a few key players to the detriment of the system.

cmelbye 5y ago

The problems you’re describing are problems of the internet, not decentralization. Few could’ve predicted what the initial rules of the internet would generate after a few decades. We can learn from the outcome and come up with new rules. The point about how “people want centralized systems” reminds me of the initial response to Apple’s privacy strategy. At the time, it was met with skepticism, to say the least. Privacy wasn’t something that normal people obsessed over, and it came at the expense of wonderful features that were only possible through centralized archival of personal information. Since then, a steady drumbeat of surveillance scandals, security incidents, and technological innovations have turned data retention into more of a liability than an asset.

polyomino 5y ago
Yeah, and Apple sold people on "privacy" and now operate a surveillance network against Chinese citizens. They are the archetypical example of this playing out. Promising decentralization and instead you get metamask overriding the blockchain because some jpegs are illegal.
- Siira 5y ago
  Isn’t Metamask opensource? Why don’t people maintain a fork without the censorship?
majormajor 5y ago
Apple suggested that people would care about privacy, and there was skepticism. Of course, privacy had been the status quo in an earlier era of the internet, and the lack of privacy didn't enable much in terms of novel user experience (turns out all the crap about "people would rather have personalized ads" was crap). Now a crowd of people are suggesting something very different: that people wouldn't care about giving up the conveniences of today's centralized systems. But we do have experience with a less centralized web, and it wasn't a lack of "web3" tech that resulted in the centralized systems gaining their current position. It was open competition with the less-centralized old status quo. The centralized systems that won are very different than the older centralized systems that had lost - AOL tried to force everything inside of its wall; Facebook and Twitter merely extend their reach so that they can touch everything, and won out as aggregators vs doing in-house content production. So why would the desire to have such convenient, one-stop-shop, minimal-setup centralized aggregator services go away?

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

This is a false dichotomy. Most people don't want to run their own mail servers. That isn't the same thing as saying we need a single entity to be in charge of email. There are thousands of independent email providers. Your emails get marked as spam if you have two users, not if you have two thousand. And small providers getting marked as spam isn't because it's necessary to prevent spam, it's because large providers would rather kill them on purpose and force more people to use them. Which we could fix it if we wanted to. Everything could work this way, and should. You don't run your own social network instance, but you can, and thousands of independent entities do, and you can take your pick of them and move between them. And we can learn lessons from the past. Major one from email: Addresses should be portable, or at least have zero-cost permanent forwarding built into the protocol.

majormajor 5y ago
Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world." Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.
- distortedsignal 5y ago
  I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application. I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.

makeitdouble 5y ago

People are fine with centralized systems that make sense and brings value. To me the best part of decentralized systems is that they allow for centralized sub-systems to emerge organically, instead of being decided top-down. For instance, I don't think that when launching the first internet nodes we would have anticipated that certs should have centralized entities, it happened that it made more sense that way once we saw the issues emerging from actual use.

sumtechguy 5y ago
Centralization also comes from the problem of trust. Who do you trust? For example certs. I can build my on CA fairly quickly. The trick is getting anyone to trust me and my certs and say 'yeah I will add your certs to the pile'. DNS is slightly similar. In that I can stand up my own DNS central authority node. Now will anyone use it? Probably just me. The early net code assumed trust. Email, DNS, FTP, etc. You were trusted or authorized to use particular computers. Getting on those meant talking to someone with a bit of sense not to let spammers/trolls onto their networks. Then if they did get someone like that they walked over to their terminal and just locked them out of their account. It was also why they heavily stayed away form corp interests for so long. As many times a small cohort of people will ignore doing the right thing if it gets them some sort of power/wealth. So we end up with central authorities who can either limit or kick off those who do trolly things. It is not going back to that. It cant. But the trick is can we get those distributed properties back? Yet still keep the spammers at bay? Most people who use these systems could not care one whit if it is centralized or not. They just want to send some cat pics and watch a video of someone doing something silly and give a thumbs up to that.

eek2121 5y ago

Centralization is a cost cutting measure, nothing more. Don't be fooled.

alexb_ 5y ago
As it turns out, rational people actually want to cut costs. This is true even down to the individual level. And time is money, so nobody wants to spend the effort to be decentralized when a centralized system exists that takes less money. Rational choices are what bring centralized systems into existence.
karpierz 5y ago
Buying a car from a dealership instead of mining metal from the ground and building it from scratch is a cost cutting measure. Buying my food from a market instead of foraging for it is a cost cutting measure.

silisili 5y ago

Complete opposite take. Imagine putting all your eggs in Myspace, Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, or probably soonish, Facebook. The internet would have up and died. Yet these centralized providers come and go, but the web remains. Decentralization isn't about doing things yourself, it's about having constant choice. To flee sinking ships, to bet on rising stars. The web is fine. Web3 will pass like myspace, and the web will remain.

mwattsun 5y ago
I'm often confused because "decentralized" means different things to different people, like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. BitTorrent and other peer to peer apps are decentralized, but are they really when the data flows through the pipes of a few Telco's? I think web3 means there isn't a central authority for conducting transactions with other people, but I have a nagging feeling that this could be accomplished without a blockchain and proof of work waste. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
- 0ldskool 5y ago
  Without decentralization you wouldn't have "A few Telco's" you would have 1 global telco. The most hardcore form of decentralization usually means that there is no centralization ontop of the decentralize medium. I think this is in general unlikely. People are lazy and tend to congregate together and therefore there will always be some form of centralization. Not everyone wants to think about the implementation details and just wants stuff to work without caring how. Whats important with decentralization is choice and future proofing. When one company dies or becomes untrustworthy you can jump onto a different one. Proof of Work is one implementation but not the only one, there are many more efficient versions now. You might as well complain about Dial-up saying internet is a waste and will never amount to anything because the phone line is always tied up....
HWR_14 5y ago
Something like 1/3 of the world uses FB. Do you really see it dying soon?

janjones 5y ago

One problem is that decentralization sometimes doesn't scale. It's cool to have completely decentralized email, but once many people use it, there will be lots of spam, and it's hard dealing with that in a decentralized way, I guess.

nfin 5y ago
Decentralization doesn't scale well, that is sure. But humans are inventing new tools to improve the decentralization over time, give new options. Sometimes the jumps are bigger, sometimes smaller. Regarding decentralized email: there are technical solutions to spam like Hashcash [0]. It has drawbacks, like a bit of energy consumption. On the other side it keeps big corps reasonable (or gives them an upper limit to how bad they can behave), as if they start to behave too bad, such solutions would likely see increasing adoption. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

S0und 5y ago

On top of this, if you're into self hosting the one thing people don't recommend to self host is an email server. It can be done but it's a real pain.

onion2k 5y ago

Most centralized systems exist because the best way to extract profit from whatever they do is to maintain control. It's possible to profit from part of a decentralized system, but if you want to maximize your take then centralization is the way to go. Every decentralized system that works was created with a goal other than directly profiting from it to start with, and succeeded because someone found a way to profit from some part of it. Eventually though, in most cases, the companies and people that run the system coalesce until its effectively centralized, with a few single entities running the points of failure. See electricity generation, car manufacturing, news media, game publishing, book publishing, glasses manufacturing, etc for examples. The Internet is still in the "companies coalesce" stage which is why it still looks decentralized, but those companies merge or vanish quite regularly, with fewer and fewer getting more and more control.

threatripper 5y ago

If we don't stop blaming people for the choices they make for reasons we don't understand we won't effect change to the world.

prmoustache 5y ago

Internet started being centralized when companies started making decisions instead of keeping it collegial and use IETF RFC's. Business companies all strive to get monopolies, hence they build things to capture consumers. Same companies are more attractive than open standard because making things not interoperable is more agile/faster as you can break things whenever you want. Thus companies build more attractive things to the users and users get captured in those shiny gold plated cells.

eternityforest 5y ago

If blockchain had never been invented, we'd be a lot farther ahead. BitTorrent proves the idea can work. And Tox is already totally usable, aside from it's mobile data usage. Federation is the other problem. It's decentralized without real end user benefits other that a bit of censorship resistance, within the limits of the hosting company. It doesn't add reliability or offline communications on the LAN.

lfkdev 5y ago
"a bit of censorship resistance" tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin
- eternityforest 5y ago
  I'm not sure how much Federation would do against government censorship in practice, for an average person. It's not like it can bypass a firewall or protect you legally if you connect them with an illegal VPN or something. It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows. Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.
  - jermaustin1 5y ago
    I'm not a normal user of bitcoin or any crypto, but I have not seen large unpredictable fees in a while. My transaction fees are almost always 0.00001 BTC or less, with my typical transfer being anywhere from 0.0004 BTC to 0.002 BTC. Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.
    - moffkalast 5y ago
      Assuming you want to actually get bitcoin first you'll need to buy it on an exchange which will charge your absurd fees to transfer it into your own wallet. And if you ever want to do the reverse you'll get charged those same absurd fees again. In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.

darkerside 5y ago

It's creative destruction. When you decentralize, you are destroying institutions and tradition that are slowing us down. That doesn't mean you don't want new ones to rise up in their place. It's not that centralization is bad, it's just that _sometimes you centralize the wrong thing_ and this is how you fix it.

pharke 5y ago
I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice, and variety.
- darkerside 5y ago
  What do you think "in the middle" means? Everything is semi centralized? No, it means we've centralized the right things and not the wrong things. Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyone. It's not a split the difference situation.
  - pharke 5y ago
    In the middle means that you have a large number of small centralized services that are interoperable. That way you get most of the benefits of centralization e.g. someone else manages the technical details, you benefit from the network effects of the service, the service can provide things at scale that you can't on your own and you get most of the benefits of decentralization e.g. you get to choose a service that is more in alignment with your principles, has the bucket of features you prefer, has the community you want to interact with, you can switch to a new service whenever you like. You also have to lose something in exchange, you can't fully customize everything the way you like and not everyone in the world will have exactly the same features available to them. It's a compromise. The key to making it work is having a common protocol and everyone agreeing to at least speak to each other rather than building their own walled garden Utopia™.

indymike 5y ago

> Decentralization is a fantastic idea, and it works great in theory, but it fails to actually consider any of the practical problems that come with decentralization and doesn't consider what people who aren't programmers actually want to do with their time and money. The fallacy here is most centralized services are implemented on top of the biggest, most successful decentralized system: the web. > And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. I'm not so sure. For really important tasks, I'm routinely amazed by what people cobble together to solve the problem, especially when they can't build software. Perhaps there are just a lot of things that if made easy, provide enough value they are worth buying, but aren't important enough to people to invest a year or two building a product for. Regardless, most modern centralized systems are simply nodes on a decentralized system.

james4k 5y ago

More broadly, any decentralized system that interacts with the process of capital accumulation will centralize, as this is an emergent feature of capitalism.

amyjess 5y ago

Just look at git adoption. Git's selling point is that it's decentralized and distributed... but just look at the shitshow that happens whenever GitHub goes down. Git may allow for developers to all pull from each other, but in practice your employer will always have a canonical repo that's blessed as the official source, and if that one becomes unavailable for any reason work grinds to a halt. And that goes double if your company's deployment process is tied to GHA.

greyhair 5y ago
Small organizations use github. Really large organizations have their own git servers. I have worked on both sides of that.
- amyjess 5y ago
  I used to work for a company that used on-prem BitBucket. And even there, "Stash is down" caused development to grind to a halt. Yeah, sure, our outages weren't synchronized with the rest of the world's outages, but the end result is the same: productivity depends on the uptime of our authoritative repo. That all the developers have clones of that repo on our own boxes is irrelevant... nobody's going to bother pointing our remotes at each other's workstations or reconfiguring Jenkins.
- threeseed 5y ago
  I’ve worked for a number of very large, enterprise companies. They use Github Enterprise. Even banks are moving to SaaS first for their core applications.
spookthesunset 5y ago
It’s not really lack of repo access that makes GitHub outages bad. It’s all the “value-add” stuff on top of the repo that makes outages suck. You’ve got workflows bolted on top that block forward progress when it goes down. Hooks for when push requests happen, when commits happen, etc. You’ve got code reviews in your workflow that cannot happen when the service is down. Basically there is much more to a service like GitHub / gitlab than just “write code, commit”. These services enable powerful workflows. When those go down all you can do is write code locally. The rest of the pipeline is dead in the water, which in many cases makes your overall ability to work virtually impossible.

pharke 5y ago

I think we just need a balance between decentralization and centralization. Think of banking as an example. If you want to be fully decentralized you can just use cash only and keep all of your money (or gold) in a safe at home. A fully centralized option is to have one national bank that everyone uses. Neither are great options but they both exist in practice. What's currently prevalent in a lot of places are a few big services that cooperate, same thing in tech right now too. What we want is a large number of small to medium sized services that are interoperable but also reliable. Make it easy for people to start their own service through laws or code and you've gone a long way towards solving the problem without putting extra work on the consumer.

0ldskool 5y ago
My opinion is that the backbone should always be decentralized and open. i.e. the internet. What is built ontop of it can be pseudo-centralized and/or regulated if needed but there is always the technical ability to re-decentralize if needed. My main concern is that I want the creation to outlast the creators/controllers. What happens if an important company gets bought and its IP split up? What if the new owners simple disable the product or put it behind a paywall. Look at bittorrent, the new owners completely screwed it up but the protocol + previous implementations could continue to be used. Look at Facebook's double standard of how they censor content. I personally think anything that is popular + important enough to be used by much of the world should always have an open backbone should things go wrong with the current company+implementation. Open source is a form of decentralization. I also think decentralization of networks (backbones) is important to prevent one organization from achieving a "network affect" that makes them the central authority on a given resource (facebook, twitter, etc...)

unixbane 5y ago

> The problem is that engineers and cybersecurity people all think that everyone else thinks like they do, when in actuality the complete opposite is true. In theory yes. In practice, nobody has made this supposedely good for the hacker / engineer system. Otherwise I'd be using it. Since your post is just parrotting the usual anti-decentralized stuff with extremely strange motives, and ignoring obvious facts such as that bittorrent works perfectly even with the legal threat to using it, lets move onto a new topic: What such a system would look like. I don't want 2FA, phone auth, certs. I want to connect to a service providing my own public key as auth and authenticating it against a known public key which is saved on my computer. I can secure my computer however I want. I also don't want to use a badly designed roundabout way to do this like X.509 with cert pinning. I can just have a <1000LOC lib written from the ground up to do all cryptographic tasks. I don't want my software to have """human readable""" names that are stored in a centralized directory where they conflict with others with character sets (and restrictions on them) that change every month. Instead, I want content-addressable code (functions, types, etc) which I have a dedicated editor for that allows me to write code against them. I don't want a weird character set full of unknown functionality like ASCII. I don't want to have untyped data where I or my code is forced to make insecure ad-hoc decisions on how to interpret it (is this ASCII, CP*? UTF?). I don't want a crappy ad-hoc fly by night serialization system (each with its own gimmick such as "speed", "readability") like protobuf, yaml, yet another yaml, toml, yet another toml that doesn't solve any semantic problems associated with serialization. I don't want that protobuf lib where there is no documentation on how it maps types to protobufs and in some cases it leaves pointers initialized to null and in some cases it initializes them to point to an empty struct, based on some stupid intuition I was supposed to pick up if I become a fanboy of this particular serialization lib over the 10,000 others. Instead, I want to use the same editor mentioned before to view data, which is just data of the ONE programming language on this computer. Algebraic data types serve this purpose almost perfectly. This problem was solved in 1970. I want one serialization format which is just a set of steps on how convert data of one type to bits. Then when I receive this data, I will view it in this editor. The point being that we don't care how the data looks on wire, because it's universally decodeable with the most common tool of the OS. I don't want multiple programming languages that are each overly designed around strawmen like "the user" and "speed" and "C-like", with tons of edge cases such that even if I learned one well enough to be able to write sound code (you can't: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-java-program-terminate-despite-that-apparently-it-shouldnt-and-d https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16159203/why-does-this-j...), it wouldn't matter because your program relies on components written in 15 other such languages. I want the only language to also be at the very least, such that I can understand what it does on a syntactic level. Again, you can't: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newline-character-u000d-in-java https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newlin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17707290/set-a-variable-and-print-it-without-any-threads-but-it-prints-the-old-value https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17707290/set-a-variable-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662815/how-does-java-distinguish-these-multiple-methods-with-the-same-name-signature https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17662815/how-does-java-d... I don't want to have to check what ports my program uses and check if the web browser (of course, I don't want a web browser at all) on a malicious page can send a request to those ports that will be processed as some administrative function; I want things not to pointlessly listen for no reason by default in a non-composable way. Instead, I want a program to have a list of channels that only I as the computer owner can choose to link up with other programs I choose to have it communicate with (this is known as the capability security model). I don't want to host data, I want to refer to them by links in a self organizing anonymous content addressable storage like Freenet. I want to use the same system to distribute code. I don't want my programming console (essentially what *sh is, just an extremely poor version of it) to be implemented on top of some obsolete tech called a terminal, that you couldn't even explain to the typical software engineer 20 years ago, that goes bezerk when certain characters hit it and has ui interaction quality comparable to a 5 year old's javascript program.

jasonm23 5y ago

In a nutshell you are saying decentralized advocates forget about the bell curve of "effort" humans are willing to spend. Isn't this just a design problem, as opposed to an intrinsic problem with decentralization? I believe that we can design convenient decentralized systems. We definitely have not done this yet, but that does not mean this is an unachievable goal. There are also human factors which currently are a problem too. The massive increase in people using internet technology (via smartphones obv.) Was not accompanied by massive increase in technology education/expertise. The early users of the internet were extremely technically capable in comparison, raised on microcomputers. Getting online was a hassle, but presented a fun challenge to these people. Not only are today's platforms essentially closed, the average user has a lot of difficulty understanding all the layers required to do something like say, set up an email server. This is a major drain of effort and it's just one piece of the networked tech people take for granted. However if there were simple alternatives which could be setup and used "effortlessly" people would use them. Web3 is an unfulfilled promise, so far, and is in a phase where scams and bullshit are rife. It's unlikely that people will perpetually be satisfied with the centralized services, especially as they continue to degrade in service and ethical quality. A process which may be part of the equation which leads to better decentralized systems which are also secure and simple to deploy & use. I think the interest is there, the technology isn't yet of course.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

>And it's because people don't want to spend time setting up their own shit, they are very happy to pay in either money or data to have someone else do it for them. Yeah, it's very easy to say "well just set up your own thing" basically what happens here everytime youtube has some sort of drama and users recommend all these alternatives "that put the power back to you". the vast majority of users (I even argue 99+% when you exclude the technical crowd) don't want the "power". They want to host their content, not deal with random It related issues, and maybe even make a small bit of monetization. not having videos taken down for mysterious (or not so mysterious, but asinine) reasons would have them jump ship to ANOTHER solution that offers the above factors, but they won't jump to open source like a developer may.

Siira 5y ago

The problem is that self-hosting is pretty difficult. If one could just run a docker image, only setting up the absolutely needed personal info, it would become a lot more common. Not on the personal/everyday level, but for professional (money generating) settings, it can absolutely become mainstream. The spam problem is also simply the decentralized system not working; it has no protections against unwanted incoming messages.