> What's wrong with hosting a server from your house? Nothing, but if you're hosting just your own site, that's not what people mean by decentralised. If you'

> What's wrong with hosting a server from your house? Nothing, but if you're hosting just your own site, that's not what people mean by decentralised. If you're part of a swarm all hosting replicas of the same data or providing replicas of the same service, that's decentralised, but if you're operating a large server, you're highly incentivised to be selective which data you host, to save on costs among other things. The result of many people doing that is what we see with torrents. > What's wrong with torrent? Torrents are a great example of when cryptocurrency tokens can improve decentralisation. Torrents are notoriously unreliable. If you want a specific file, it's sometimes available, sometimes not, depending on the file's popularity. For things which are less popular, it's down to luck whether someone else is seeding at the moment. You may even download half of a large file, only to find the seeder takes themselves offline and you can't get the other half for weeks, or ever. When you depend on one or two seeders for a particular file, that's not decentralised. You can't build serious infrastructure on something that unreliable. Some cryptocurrency tokens are designed to change this. Through something called proof of data availability and cryptocurrency tokens specially designed to link to those proofs, they set up a balance of forces called cryptoeconomic incentive which ensures a lot more people are motivated to continuously make a large amount of torrent-like data available as a service, and it's hard to cheat that system. People don't waste bandwidth uploading the contents that nobody is currently requesting, but they are effectively paid a small amount to store data and keep it ready to upload, so the incentives promote continuous high-availability of large archives of data, including unpopular and obscure files that people struggle to find and download from ordinary torrent services.