At my generalized mining talk, one audience question was really interesting. It was, essentially, “Why would a business choose to build their app on a decentralized network, when bootstrapping is so much more expensive than a centralized solution?”
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It took me a minute to verbalize the answer. I was taken aback because the form of the question diverged extremely from my understanding of decentralized networks.
So the practical answer is: well, it’s early and the cost of decentralized solutions decreases exponentially over time, like with any developing technology. The assertion makes sense today, but won’t tomorrow. Businesses will perhaps adjust to building products on such networks.
But the philosophical answer is this: the form of the question assumes that decentralized networks exist to provide solutions to businesses, yet they provide crappy solutions today. However, this view cannot be further from reality. . .
. . .decentralized networks exist because they are feasible technologically and viable economically. They could care less about providing business solutions and few public networks are concerned with this specific criteria. These networks are public goods or commons.
Decentralized networks represent a new “operating system” for building automated, secure, value-driven economic mechanisms. Whether a business wants to use such mechanisms to attempt a business model is secondary to their purpose and existence.
So, a business may indeed choose a centralized model over a decentralized model today, because it may be the appropriate architecture for their particular business or product.
