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(author here) your point is well taken. in the article, one of the main reasons i say that while it’s important to not get caught in the crypto jargon - it’s a

by viksit 3y ago

(author here) your point is well taken. in the article, one of the main reasons i say that while it’s important to not get caught in the crypto jargon - it’s also important to not ignore the technology paradigm behind it. giving people an incentive to run a server by the populace that uses it is a well defined and well known way to run decentralized services. staking and validating are concepts that have gotten very sophisticated - but the end result of it doesn’t need to be a “crypto token” bag holders madness. it can just be USD or USDC. one can imagine a world where server hosts stake a sum of money, and may lose it if communities that start there run amok in some way. the users of the system also stake money for privileges (say, like discord nitro - for nicer emojis and reactions). this pool of money - if it can run discord - can run decentralized services. better still - it allows for a pool of money to give those who do community work and engagement a way to get incentives. lastly - rather than ads, businesses could give end users the cost of their CAC that would otherwise go to instagram or reddit.

hayst4ck 3y ago
The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale. Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)? You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking about what it does well, but you have failed to address what decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems into O(N) problems. How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you prevent schism? Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why could e-mail never successfully fight spam before centralization? I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that led us towards centralization in the first place and what the benefits of that centralization were. I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs that make different styles of platform better under different contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we are experiencing right now), which means that during the reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is higher and therefore unappealing.

by viksit 3y ago

hayst4ck 3y ago

The core problem with decentralization is anonymity at scale. Creating an account per decentralized unit is a high cost. Fighting abuse of a platform on the scale of decentralized units rather than the platform as a whole is a very high cost. How does a decentralized platforms perform against an adversarial attacker (spammers/nation states/etc)? You have addressed the idea of centralization by talking about what it does well, but you have failed to address what decentralization does poorly. Namely, turning O(1) problems into O(N) problems. How do decentralized organizations handle conflict/how do you prevent schism? Email was very decentralized, but spam never got dealt with until email was nearly entirely centralized on gmail. So why could e-mail never successfully fight spam before centralization? I don't think your post attempted to explain the forces that led us towards centralization in the first place and what the benefits of that centralization were. I don't think decentralization is obviously better or worse than centralization, I think there are a series of tradeoffs that make different styles of platform better under different contexts. I think a "good king" centralized platform will beat a decentralized one until it doesn't (which is what we are experiencing right now), which means that during the reign of the "good king" the cost of decentralization is higher and therefore unappealing.