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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 u

by 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...)

by pharke 5y ago

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...)