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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.
" Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms. "
Um, this is certainly not true. In fact, recently behavior has been the opposite. Everyone is building for closed, centralized systems. The only reason email still exists is because no one has figured out how to displace it. Eventually that will go too. Google AMP email is one step towards it.
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.
The link, top of the S-curve in the story summary does not work!
What's happening to Slashdot editor(s) these days?
Kindly fix.
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.
It starts to get really tiring all this talk about descentralization matters when you lived enough to see all the attempts of making that work that ended up in failure or lesser competition.
This idea of replacing currently centralized systems with descentralized ones is nothing new, it doesn't give you any brownie points anymore, and it's always lopsided with this one perspective view pointing out all the bad deeds of big corporation ignoring everything they made to get there.
So if you wanna talk the talk, walk the walk. Let's see you create a descentralized system that will topple any of those services. Go ahead, I'm waiting. I'll even volunteer to be an early adopter. Let me know when it happens.
Check out Sovrin. https://sovrin.org/. They are working in this same space and have similar view points about decentralization. There's a number of white papers available on their site.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
except for amateur radio, but that's too easy to track and shut down also.
Every telecom system ends with either a wire or a transmitter. The authorities can always track down the address/customer associated with the wire or triangulate the transmitter, so shutdown is always possible.
The authorities must license broadcast bands and enforce transmission regulations---at least, in the US. And since wires generally require pole or street access, there isn't any realistic scenario where private citizens run their own lines. Network connectivity will remain centralized, trackable, and identifiable for the foreseeable future.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Hackers Hijacked Tesla's Amazon Cloud Account To Mine Cryptocurrency
If you become too decentralized you get to the point that no one track was is going on.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
This is nothing new...We have known since the mainframe era not to build on sand.
Good-bye
Decentralize the info you would normally put on Facebook and Twitter. The concept is old, but apparently becoming more relevant.
https://alistapart.com/article...
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.
...in a less overtly hostile context. Yet the effect is exactly the same, with the innovation that blame for any unwanted harmful side effects and external costs is shifted from "disruptors" to the nameless, anonymous agency of of "the people" or "the investors." In the end, gravity wins, and that which was decentralized will re-centralize in roughly the same form.
Read Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future." (Be sure it's the paperback edition, which has an important Afterword.)
Security needed for a truly decentralised, peer2peer network has to be based on a trustworthy, audit-able network topology.
We haven't got that yet.
A modifiable, software based network is chasing it's proverbial tail to try to patch security leaks without trusted base hardware and protocols.
We haven't gone far from the old days of the centralised mainframe and client terminal paradigm.
The corporations control the data and application silos holding the world at ransom for their profits.
People create ideas and have to take back ownership of their personal IP.
Individuals have to work cooperatively outside the corporate structure as partners, not wage slaves.
Go well
blockchain-based networks
uuuugggghhhhh.
Also, wtf would a block-chain.... network... be all about? How are they using "network" here?
to upend web-based businesses such as Facebook and Twitter
First off, Twitter isn't web-based, it's Internet-based through and through. And there's a compelling argument that facebook isn't really web-based anymore either. Most of their traffic is through phones and their application, which bypasses the web.
Both of these are only networks in the sense that they have social networks (and whatever CDN they run on).
And decentralized facebook has been tried. despora? I think? It didn't go anywhere because facebook has a critical mass of users. Users are the product, why would you switch to a system with an inferior product?
Decentralized twitter... is... fuck man, I still don't even understand this fad. email is too complicated for some people? Newsletters just aren't hip enough? If you made a "I'll sign up for the first 200 characters of your email newsletter, but that's it" button, you'd effectively have the same damn thing. You don't even have to trust the senders, you could just filter shit on your end.