"I think that caches work where you have a vast imbalance of requests for a particular bit of content - they seem to me to define centralization." Hu? Caches f

"I think that caches work where you have a vast imbalance of requests for a particular bit of content - they seem to me to define centralization." Hu? Caches for geographical distribution are actually a form of decentralization! The problem with the existing ones is that they are mostly under centralized control, but there is no technical reason why that has to be, and an ISP's caching web proxy (which weren't that uncommon back in the day) is a simple example of caching infrastructure under decentralized control that could help an ISP reducing the load on their upstream connection for often-requested content. You don't need youtube to copy a video from your machine to the cache at some viewer's ISP, that's just the way it is commonly done right now because in that way youtube can make money - or, if you want to decentralize further, you could copy to a cache on the machine of some customer of said ISP in some geographic region: The more requests there are for some content, the more likely it is that there is a copy in your neighbourhood that doesn't need to be transferred from the original source.