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.

Comments

Isn't true

[110010001000]

" 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.

Re:Isn't true

[ShanghaiBill]

Agreed. They have not become wary.

As a developer I am wary of closed platforms ... but I build apps there anyway because, as Willie Sutton once said, "Thats where the money is."

I am happy to develop for open platforms instead if you agree to pay my mortgage while we wait for them to become popular.

Back in my day

[llamalad]

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.

Re: Back in my day

[llamalad]

That thereâ(TM)s mania, seeming idiocy, and certainlyFUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) around blockchsin tech doesnâ(TM)t mean that it doesnâ(TM)t have huge potential.

The problem isnâ(TM)t with the technology. Itâ(TM)s with there being no easy profit or power to be accumulated from making the best and most truly beneficial and democratic use of it. Thereâ(TM)s no budget for working with it, for marketing it.

There is money to be made, market share to be kept, and power to be maintained in keeping it from reaching its potential.

Re:Back in my day

[wyHunter]

Hear, hear! I'm always amazed at the anti-monopolists who think that ever increasing government powers are wonderful. What?

Non-Sequitur

[StormReaver]

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.

Re:Non-Sequitur

[llamalad]

> they did no such thing

No? Facebook and Twitter didn't take HTTP and build huge services with it? Clearly they did, and that is goodâ" standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.

Whether we're talking REST interfaces to web apps or SDKs for an OS, they often have public APIsâ" but they're in charge of who can use them and how. Where ostensible platform providers begin to subsume the functionality of their third party developers is where coopertition (a portmanteau of cooperation and competition) comes in to play.

> While decentralization matters, Blockchain seems to have utility in a rather narrow set of circumstances

Think bigger. Suppose all your apps' data was stored in a blockchain, or STORJ or Maidsafe or some other encrypted distributed digital storage mechanism. Suppose the data formats were as open as SMTP/POP/IMAP/RADIUS/FTP. Suppose you could switch apps just by downloading a new one and popping in the necessary credentials?

This is what I'm thinking about these days. It's going to be a game changer.

Re:Non-Sequitur

[suutar]

I think the disagreement was more with "outpaced the capabilities of open protocols". It's still HTTP under there, after all.

Re:Non-Sequitur

[llamalad]

There is always risk in letting other people make decisions for you.

Everyone with responsibility can screw up. I've literally had a wheel fall off my car due to a mechanic using a shoddy parts to repair a much more minor issue. I've gotten food poisoning from bad food handling/preparation practices at a restaurant.

Lawmakers often have conflicts of interests. Software companies are more beholden to the dollar and their shareholders than they are to their customers and society in general. News media gets by on advertising dollars.

It's up to each of us to decide what to delegate to other people. If you want to trust software, use open source that you've vetted yourself, or write it yourself from scratch.

Let me turn your comment into a question and put it to everyone:
What would a data security model look like for decentralized apps based on ubiquitous encrypted serverless storage? Specifically, how would you revoke access from an app you no longer use? Or one you no longer trust? Or one which you know to have compromised your data? How would you undo changes made by a rogue app?

These questions are where software and computing and networking are actually interesting.

Ha ha right

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:Ha ha right

[ceoyoyo]

Yup, that right there is what I mean. "Git is an scm... it has nothing to do with a blockchain...." Git is an scm, yeah. But scm is a description (and a very high level one at that) of what it does, not what it is or how it works.

The heart of git is a tree-type data structure where every node on the tree contains a database transaction. A transaction in a generalized database framework is anything that modifies the database. In git, those transactions are changes to the documents you're tracking (the "diffs" you mentioned*). But the nodes also contain other things... your name, e-mail address etc. Oh, and two more things: each node in the git tree contains the SHA hash of the previous node, and the SHA hash of itself including the hash of the previous node. This data structure is called a hash tree, or Merkle tree. The defining characteristic of such a tree is that, because each node's hash depends on the hash of the previous node, you can't change a node, or it's connections, without changing all the downstream nodes, and the integrity of the whole thing is pretty quick to verify. Is this sounding suspiciously familiar yet?

So back in 1991 some comp sci dudes were playing around with some ideas involving lists of records and timestamps and hashes and stuff (your spidey sense should definitely be tingling now....). A year later they wrote this paper about using Merkle trees to collect records together into blocks and make the whole thing more efficient. Then, a decade or so later, this guy Szabo cooked up an idea he called "bit gold" that was supposed to use these chains of hash-secured records as a kind of ledger, as the basis for a payment system. Fast forward another few years and somebody using the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" wrote some stuff about "block chains" (yes, whoever he was, he had a functional spacebar) and using them as a ledger system....

Anticipating the pedants, the currently sexy implementations of block chains have a wee problem with deciding who gets to add nodes to them, a problem which (usually) isn't shared by git. So if it makes you happier, imagine that I post my github address on Slashdot and whoever guesses the password gets to make a change to the repo, at which point I change the password to something else, et cetera. And we all periodically vote about whether each other's changes are shit or not.

* unlike other scms, git doesn't actually store diffs, it stores snapshots of changed files.

Re:There will be no decentralization

[EndlessNameless]

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.

Why Decentralization Is Bad

[randomErr]

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.

Dont build on sand

[spire3661]

This is nothing new...We have known since the mainframe era not to build on sand.

So Many Buzzwards.

[jellomizer]

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.