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Why Decentralization Matters (medium.com)
Chris Dixon has an essay about the long-term promise of blockchain-based networks to upend web-based businesses such as Facebook and Twitter. He writes: When they hit the top of the S-curve, their relationships with network participants change from positive-sum to zero-sum. The easiest way to continue growing lies in extracting data from users and competing with complements over audiences and profits. Historical examples of this are Microsoft vs Netscape, Google vs Yelp, Facebook vs Zynga, and Twitter vs its 3rd-party clients. Operating systems like iOS and Android have behaved better, although still take a healthy 30% tax, reject apps for seemingly arbitrary reasons, and subsume the functionality of 3rd-party apps at will.
For 3rd parties, this transition from cooperation to competition feels like a bait-and-switch. Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms. We now have decades of evidence that doing so will end in disappointment. In addition, users give up privacy, control of their data, and become vulnerable to security breaches. These problems with centralized platforms will likely become even more pronounced in the future.
we used to call this a "sudden outbreak of common sense"
It's not new that overwhelming centralization is bad for everyone except those who share the profits of the resulting behemoth. It's not even new in technology - google "bell system breakup".
It's only news that people are starting to talk about it in the context of the current tech giants. The underlying theme is old hat.
During the second era of the internet, from the mid 2000s to the present, for-profit tech companiesâSâ"âSmost notably Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA)âSâ"âSbuilt software and services that rapidly outpaced the capabilities of open protocols.
This is total nonsense, as they did no such thing. When protocols were involved at all, these companies built their services on top of the same open protocols everyone else used (or could have used). Where these companies outpaced everyone else was in throwing obscene amounts of money at the patent system to keep out competitors (both real and imagined), and in building internal processes and technologies to support their rapid growths.
While decentralization matters, Blockchain seems to have utility in a rather narrow set of circumstances. It is certainly not anything even remotely close to the silver bullet its proponents make it out to be.
Blockchain is going to save us all! Because it will surely be essential to creating a place for people to chat with their friends and share pictures (i.e. virtually all of social media). And people will flock to these new saviours because they haven't had the option to use open social media systems before. But wait! These have blockchain!
Someone the other day was all excited about using blockchain for scientific publishing. I suggested they use git, since it's an already existing blockchain based document tracking system with a well proven record. Huh?
I've arrived at the conclusion that the vast majority of people, including all the ones writing articles, actually have no idea what blockchains are.
Don't operate your business on one vendor.
Because if you do chances are you will get burned. Because such vendor will change or go out of business.
If you have to rely on a vendor, try to minimize its impact. Like I work in a Microsoft shop... That doesn't mean for me to go all hog into all the MS API's and use those special features, tempting they are.
No you write your code in a way that porting to a different platform in case MS drops support is relatively easy.
Even if you are dealing with an Open Source product, unless you are willing to take the torch and ready to fully support it, a project can stagnate, or just never become popular, or some personally causes support to drive off into an other direction.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.