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I guess I'm not adding much to your comment, but I just wanted to remark that this exact thing has been bugging me for ages: people talk about these blockchain

I guess I'm not adding much to your comment, but I just wanted to remark that this exact thing has been bugging me for ages: people talk about these blockchain projects as being "decentralized" simply because _execution of the algorithm_ is distributed across lots of (mutually distrusting) nodes. This perspective confuses me, because it doesn't seem to be a particularly meaningful distinction when there is still one consensus truth in the network. In the case of a naming system, as you point out, that means there is still one finite, scarce namespace in the system, just as there is in DNS. More generally, there is still a central authority pushing out code, and so unless you want to hard-fork, what does the "decentralization" in a blockchain actually buy you? Does it do anything more for you in practical terms than protecting you from a central server suffering an outage? I spent some time a while back coming up with ideas for an alternative to blockchains that would pursue many of the same goals, starting from first principles ("what the heck even _is_ money?"). I have no idea whether any of my ideas would have actually worked in practice, but they at least ticked the "decentralized" box in a way that I found a lot more meaningful than merely "decentralized execution of a centrally-defined algorithm to determine a single global consensus state". (I stopped working on them not because they didn't show promise, but because I became convinced that they would be a net negative for the world if they were successful; I lost the desire to find a working design.)

ryukafalz 4y ago
You might find this (very) pre-blockchain page on smart contracts interesting: http://erights.org/elib/capability/ode/ode-bearer.html http://erights.org/elib/capability/ode/ode-bearer.html
cjbprime 4y ago
> More generally, there is still a central authority pushing out code Not necessarily, it's quite common for forks to compete on a single ledger, with features activated when the majority of miners elect to run the fork which supports them.
spencerchubb 4y ago
One reason why we want decentralization is censorship resistance, meaning nobody can be censored. I'll use bitcoin as an example. If you are using visa/mastercard, they can censor you. The government can order them to censor you. Bitcoin mitigates this problem. If a particular miner refuses your transaction, you have plenty of other miners to choose from.
mindslight 4y ago
I thought about similar for a long while, pre-Bitcoin even. I think it's impossible to do money as such. Bits don't have an intrinsic worth, and so value is always in relation to another party. A key property of money is fungibility, thus network effects from many people using the same definition of value. Thus, central authorities, whether those authorities are controlled by fickle individuals, natural language bureaucracies (traditional companies), or formal language programmatic consensus (blockchain). I think about the only decentralized improvement one can do is software that creates credit lines denominated in an existing currency, between mutually trusting parties. And then attempt to scale that up (ala Hawala), with technical means to keep the slightly diminishing fungibility from being an issue (one USD owed to you by the Treasury is worth slightly more than one USD owed to you by your friend A (owed to him by B, and so-on), even if you trust A with your life). However, there are many areas where we can adopt decentralized functionality (which actually means not having unnecessary centralized functionality), such as my above naming example. If we want decentralization, it's just ridiculous for my browser to be making hundreds of centralized name lookups to render a single page. And I've seen too many blockchain projects where they're actually pushing a solution that is more centralized than the existing ones.

ryukafalz 4y ago

You might find this (very) pre-blockchain page on smart contracts interesting: http://erights.org/elib/capability/ode/ode-bearer.html http://erights.org/elib/capability/ode/ode-bearer.html

cjbprime 4y ago

> More generally, there is still a central authority pushing out code Not necessarily, it's quite common for forks to compete on a single ledger, with features activated when the majority of miners elect to run the fork which supports them.

spencerchubb 4y ago

One reason why we want decentralization is censorship resistance, meaning nobody can be censored. I'll use bitcoin as an example. If you are using visa/mastercard, they can censor you. The government can order them to censor you. Bitcoin mitigates this problem. If a particular miner refuses your transaction, you have plenty of other miners to choose from.

mindslight 4y ago

I thought about similar for a long while, pre-Bitcoin even. I think it's impossible to do money as such. Bits don't have an intrinsic worth, and so value is always in relation to another party. A key property of money is fungibility, thus network effects from many people using the same definition of value. Thus, central authorities, whether those authorities are controlled by fickle individuals, natural language bureaucracies (traditional companies), or formal language programmatic consensus (blockchain). I think about the only decentralized improvement one can do is software that creates credit lines denominated in an existing currency, between mutually trusting parties. And then attempt to scale that up (ala Hawala), with technical means to keep the slightly diminishing fungibility from being an issue (one USD owed to you by the Treasury is worth slightly more than one USD owed to you by your friend A (owed to him by B, and so-on), even if you trust A with your life). However, there are many areas where we can adopt decentralized functionality (which actually means not having unnecessary centralized functionality), such as my above naming example. If we want decentralization, it's just ridiculous for my browser to be making hundreds of centralized name lookups to render a single page. And I've seen too many blockchain projects where they're actually pushing a solution that is more centralized than the existing ones.