Ok. 1 like = 1 opinion on decentralization. Technical, philosophical, political.
1. The differences in philosophy and terminology between decentralized, federated, and distributed systems are one of those turf wars you might not hear about from the outside. I’m just going to use “decentralization” as a catch-all.
2. The main advantages decentralized tech can offer are privacy, autonomy, censorship resistance, and offline connectivity (in some cases).
3. Everything is a tradeoff. Greater autonomy means greater responsibility. Most people do not want the level of responsibility for their data, keys, etc. that a fully decentralized system requires of them.
4. Going down the rabbithole of how to make a decentralized application work without first nailing UX and user acquisition is basically spending your entire product development lifecycle nerding out about how the database is set up.
5. Users don’t care what database you use. In the end, it only matters if it lets people do new things they couldn’t before, or do old things much better.
6. Hm, let me reframe censorship-resistance as resilience. From a decentralized protocol's perspective, a natural disaster or a government takedown are both network partitions to be routed around.
7. Resilience is a property you really hope the system has when sh*t hits the fan, but only the most paranoid are willing to make sacrifices to start preparing today. It's up to the paranoid or far-sighted to fund and build it.
8. But resilience isn’t just about preventing downside risk. That’s the anti-apocalypse, anti-dystopia approach. Resilience is based in variety or redundancy, and the upside is that we'd all get to live in our world of choice. Choose your currency, choose your social network.
9. People may say they care about privacy or autonomy, but they are generally not willing to sacrifice convenience for it.
10. However, if you can give people something they value “for free”, without requiring them to sacrifice convenience or assume lots of responsibility, it can get mainstream traction. See: Signal and WhatsApp’s approach to privacy
11. Decentralization turns principal-agent problems into agent-agent problems.
12. Technical decentralization turns all sorts of questions of access, control, and identity into key management problems.
13. When it comes to governance, the decentralized tech community has encountered the same problem encountered by countless grassroots social movements before - the Tyranny of Structurelessness, explored in this essay by 1960’s feminist: jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny…
14. "The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves... There is no such thing as a structureless group... structurelessness becomes a way of masking power."
15. "We will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques... But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess use."
16. The current enthusiasm for decentralization is partly a result of the cryptocurrency boom, partly a corrective response to over-centralization in the new tech giants.
17. It is a healthy response based on where we are at right now. But an extreme version of it may be unsustainable and contain a host of problems few have encountered yet. The safest approach is incremental.
18. At the end of extreme centralization, the Chinese state seems to be currently experimenting with how far you can take a society through centralized power and censorship. We’d do well to learn from their successes and failures
19. Even for the values we hold most dear, we ought to periodically ask ourselves what they accomplish. Decentralization often trades off things like speed and efficiency for values like freedom, autonomy.
20. A free system that cannot stand up to competition will not remain a dominant paradigm.
21. In governance, complete centralization seems to produce both the best and worst outcomes. Democracy exists because you cannot guarantee that there will always be wise kings, or that wise kings will always have perfect information.
22. Rome had “Five Good Emperors” because the rest were mediocre to terrible. China starved 18-30 million people during the few years of the Great Leap Forward, then rapidly lifted 850 million out of poverty in later decades. When centralized systems fail, they fail hard.
23. But centralized power can also lead to rapid progress. Probably since Asimov there’s been the dream that AI could help us govern better at higher levels of centralization. That lots of modeling over lots of data could help us avoid human shortcomings and systemic risk.
24. I don’t know if this is ultimately feasible. If there’s a trick to governance beyond good leadership and effective institutions, we haven’t figured it out yet. I like the idea of decentralization as a hedge, while continuing to improve centralized systems.
25. The path of “rule by wise kings” places hope in future AI overlords being able to act humanely on perfect information. The path of decentralization places hope in ourselves finding a way to live together as agents and achieving a balance that holds power accountable.
26. Incentives and collective action problems rule everything around me.
27. If you don't need global consensus on a piece of data, don't put it on a blockchain.
28. Protocols are so important to decentralized systems because you are trying to coax a self-organizing system to grow out of a few relatively simple rules.
29. I think the most "decentralization purist" position I have ever heard opposed logical centralization like blockchains and DHTs, and claimed that trees (the data structure) are hierarchical and thus oppressive.
30. In the category of extreme crypto-individualist decentralization visions, does anyone remember the Hermicity rainbow paper? Probably satire but who knows. ror.ooo/wp-content/upl…
31. Concentrations of power tend to develop at scale. Often what we really want is accountable power and meaningful representation or the right to exit. Decentralization is just a means to an end, not an end in itself.
32. Twitter decentralized news production and distribution. Broadcasting became something anyone — not just CNN — could do.
33. Now the platform is a new kind of gatekeeper.
34. 20th century mass media was a historical anomaly. Now that we're all free to seek or speak our truths, mass manufactured consensus reality has fractured. However, we all still have to live together in one tightly bound system.
35. Free speech means you have the right to speech, not to reach. Platforms are not obligated to give anyone a soapbox.
36. The emergence of new forms of centralization like super-nodes, exchanges, and gateways in decentralized networks should not come as a surprise.
37. p2p networks have a nice scalability property - growing popularity can actually add capacity and not just consume resources on the network. And the creator doesn't have to pay for mounting server costs.
38. Blockchains are actually logically centralized, which makes them useful for cases where you need a trusted third party but can't trust a platform/entity. If you can securely distribute trust across a blockchain, it acts like a third party.
39. Defining the problem is as hard, if not harder, as coming up with a solution. Decentralization technologies are a cool grab bag of solutions, but properly applying them still requires defining the right problems.
40. In centralized apps you trust the server, in decentralized ones you trust cryptography.
41. This essay by @pfrazee on the civic philosophy of computing networks is a good read: infocivics.com. It’s long so I’ll try to summarize some interesting points:
@pfrazee 42. Current web application structure is authoritarian, because the server has ultimate authority over the system. Users possess no authority of their own, since the server may override a user’s choice at any time.
@pfrazee 43. The fact that all power is concentrated in the server is not apparent until users become dissatisfied with UI changes, moderation policies, or algorithmic feeds, and discover they have no ability to change it.
@pfrazee 44. When users try to “vote with their feet” and use another service, that’s when this powerlessness becomes most apparent. They can’t take anything with them. Their data, identity, and connections are all lost.
@pfrazee 45. The server’s absolute authority can be constrained by switching to distributed networking model. Cryptographic addressing establishes a form of property rights. Blockchain consensus forms a “network constitution.”
@pfrazee 46. The tradeoff is that distributed protocols are slow to change, because it's a democratic process. Distributed applications can only do what their protocols support because they are designed to transact between peers, which must agree upon the terms of each transaction.
@pfrazee 47. Cryptographic URLs in p2p networking allow users to lay direct claim to their data, independent of a host. Content can move between hosts without changing identity, and users can publish a site, app, or dataset by allocating a cryptographic URL and sharing it.
@pfrazee 48. A “constitutional networking protocol” is a way to have a network authority that cannot manipulate data in ways users might not want. These protocols transfer authority from the operator to the code. Ex: secure ledgers, decentralized consensus. /end summary.
@pfrazee 49. Aesthetics: Cyberpunk is high-tech low-life digital dystopia. Cypherpunk is anonymous hackers escaping the matrix of a surveillance state (cryptocurrency). Solarpunk is off-the-grid hackers powering technology through renewables despite climate catastrophe (ssb).
@pfrazee 50.
Cyberspace - cyber, from Greek root "to steer, govern." The regular ol' web.
Cypherspace - cypher, zero, to encode. The decentralized web, which is navigated through "cypherlinks," hashes used as links.
Cyberspace - cyber, from Greek root "to steer, govern." The regular ol' web.
Cypherspace - cypher, zero, to encode. The decentralized web, which is navigated through "cypherlinks," hashes used as links.
