BitTorrent is a perfect case study of how legal and commercial forces combine to marginalize a particular technology. All it took was the creation of legal risk

BitTorrent is a perfect case study of how legal and commercial forces combine to marginalize a particular technology. All it took was the creation of legal risk (in this case the possibility of being sued for millions) to create a market for managed seed boxes. At this point, two things simultaneously became true: the public perceived BitTorrent as risky and/or illegitimate, and torrent activity concentrated to a few high-profile targets. The parallels between this and OFAC compliance in Web3 are striking. In fact, OFAC compliance is even riskier for node operators because banned transactions can make their way onto your node regardless of your activity, unlike BitTorrent where copyrighted data only arrived on your node if you’re actually downloading it. My sense is that Web3’s hacker culture is overlooking an important fact: decentralization is a political project, and although the technical means of decentralization are necessary, they are by no means sufficient to realize this project. I suspect two things will happen: 1. Web3 will centralize around a small number of commercial (and perhaps government) actors. Some commercial innovation may happen along the way, which would be good. 2. Web3’s legacy will ultimately reside in scaling consensus techniques, much like the legacy of 2000’s p2p is to be found in todays “elastic” backend applications (think: CassandraDB, et al.) To be clear, indie node operators will likely continue to exist, but I expect it to become marginal (if it hasn’t already).