[HN Gopher] Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization i...
___________________________________________________________________
Centralization is inevitable, but decentralization is right behind
it
Author : agreeahmed
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-11-01 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (subconscious.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (subconscious.substack.com)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| "Inevitable" is the last desperate cry of those who have given up
| thinking.
| mistermann wrote:
| It can also be caused by people who think in an imperfect
| manner. Most people think according to how they have been
| taught to think, not what is perfect.
|
| A critical component of a well designed trap: consider all
| suggestions that you are trapped in an imperfect methodology to
| be conspiratorial/etc, _and therefore false_. Checkmate.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I think I follow you. It's a way to shut down conversation
| before it's even begun.
| mistermann wrote:
| Let's just hope that nothing like that ever happens on this
| planet!
| BirAdam wrote:
| Centralization and decentralization happen in waves as a natural
| result of ossification and complexity growth.
|
| As an example, IBM was once the dominant market force in
| computation. As the business grew and became increasingly
| byzantine, it was unable to respond to market changes or market
| demands in any meaningful way, and therefore the market became
| decentralized. This happened to Microsoft. If Apple continues on
| its current path it will happen to Apple. If Google continues on
| its current path, this will happen to Google. The entire internet
| was once significantly decentralized both in structure and in
| content providers. The content got silo'd by a few major players,
| and it is now swinging back the opposite direction while the
| structure is becoming increasingly AWS/Azure/Google. This too
| will eventually start going the opposite direction as those
| infrastructure providers ossify.
|
| Nothing is forever.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| lob_it wrote:
| "Most things are not forever"
|
| https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/what-is-pfas
|
| There.. Fixed that for you
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| "PFAS chemicals don't break down _easily_ over time"
| humanistbot wrote:
| Tim Wu makes a similar argument in The Master Switch, a history
| of information networks and monopolies going back to telegraph
| networks in the 19th century.
| cinquemb wrote:
| Why stop at the 19th century? It's not like the cost of
| transmitting information was less expensive before then, nor
| was it less centralized (people who had the resources/knowledge
| to propagate such information).
| humanistbot wrote:
| The book already was pretty long...
| seydor wrote:
| the internet is even less constrained than the airport network.
| With practically zero friction keeping it in check, it can
| centralize completely. So, we can't put our eggs on
| decentralization, but instead we should put them on competition.
| Seemingly however, there is no competitor to silicon valley. And
| the valley itself is extremely anticompetitive and monopolistic,
| with different parts of the net being consolidated to a few
| monopolistic giants. our hope for competing ideas in digital
| networking are going to come from siloed out ecosystems, like
| china and russia. Indeed, the cold war was a time of great
| progress in almost everything
| mistermann wrote:
| Is it possible to host a site on a Chinese or Russian internet
| such that it is impossible to be taken down by Western forces?
| bombcar wrote:
| Yes but no, as the Chinese or Russians may be much more
| likely to take down your site.
|
| If the site is _supported_ by the country, it is VERY hard to
| take down.
| seydor wrote:
| I assume so, in russia
|
| Of course western governments can block it
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of cases,
| but the 1% is really important: when the centralized system
| fails, or is controlled by an adversary (e.g. malicious
| government).
|
| IMO decentralized internet (and social media and currency) should
| be possible, routinely tested, and readily-available when the
| centralized internet fails. But a neutral, trusted, central
| server will is basically always preferred when it is available.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| > Centralization is better than decentralization in 99% of
| cases
|
| This is way overgeneralizing, and not remotely true for a large
| swathe of things. Centralized systems are actually less
| efficient unless the central agent is a party to every
| interaction due to the nature of the system. If the central
| agent is only a party by virtue of the imposed structure,
| you've created overhead, made the system difficult to change,
| and made it brittle to variance from design assumptions.
|
| Decentralized systems can evolve much more rapidly, can survive
| catastrophic variance, and are more efficient in a large number
| of cases.
|
| Centralizing mail delivery works well, centralizing economies
| or ecosystems does not.
| nicopappl wrote:
| It is true that power laws are seen everywhere, and that there
| are reason for those.
|
| I like the article, because it exposes very quickly a very
| powerful idea, but I disagree with the conclusion.
|
| Information networks are built by humans, they are designed, they
| are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which means
| we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted by the
| curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Information networks are built by humans, they are designed,
| they are not necessarily bound by the rules of evolution. Which
| means we may yet be able to find a system that is not afflicted
| by the curse of perpetual destruction and reconstruction."
|
| Given humanity's track record, destruction and reconstruction
| seem like a solid bet.
|
| Not to mention, systems will require change anywhere nature
| interacts with it.
| munificent wrote:
| It's very easy to design a system not afflicted by the curse of
| perpetual destruction and reconstruction.
|
| The key challenge is that that system, by design, will be less
| efficient than other competing systems. So if there is a
| surrounding meta-system that allows it to compete with others,
| the other systems that tend towards consolidation will drive
| out your system.
|
| It's essentially the same problem we see in economics today
| with supply chains. Companies that optimized their supply
| chains to have more margin made more money and won... as long
| as the supply chains were all running perfectly. But once COVID
| happened, it became clear that those businesses had no
| resilience.
| padobson wrote:
| It's also worth mentioning that in order to increase your status
| in any of these networks, you're going to have to serve the
| central nodes in some way. So if you're trying to grow your
| social media following, eventually you're going to have to get
| the attention of an influencer who will in turn rub off some of
| their influence on you. If you're trying to increase your
| capital, you're going to need to provide value to some
| influential capitalist. If you want to increase your political
| power, you're going to have to be appointed/elected to a role in
| some powerful political institution.
| happytiger wrote:
| Centralization is just the impact of digitization. Digitization
| is inevitable, because efficiencies are tremendous.
|
| Then you will have a battle for control of centralization
| centered on verifiable identity, kyc and centered ultimately
| around financial system control, which is the center use case of
| centralized identity platforms.
|
| All incentives during this phase are centralization,
| consolidation and scale. Decentralization efforts will be
| carefully controlled and excluded by very powerful interests.
| Financial incentives will prevent meaningful adoption.
|
| The carrot will initially be digital money centered on banking
| directly in the Federal Reserve. Those licenses have been issues
| for several years and the direction is clear.
|
| There is a lot of carrot left to fuel the consolidation phase,
| and as economic conditions change and global conditions degrade
| people will embrace centralized solutions in the short term.
|
| Then you will have an interruption to the central control systems
| which will lead to decentralized systems.
|
| It will take much longer than people realize for this cycle to
| play out. We're still in the consolidation phase. I'm a huge
| believer in decentralized systems, but like self-driving cars,
| it's less of a technology problem and more of an autocratic and
| powerful interest story.
| openfuture wrote:
| Sorry but you are full of shit. Centralization is not
| digitization. Centralization is relying on the use of coercion.
| It's a /central/ source of truth.
|
| The identity system we've been stuck with since WW1 will
| finally be replaced with something decentralized and
| approaching fair thanks to digitization. What we're lacking is
| the software that gives individuals self sovereignty.
| happytiger wrote:
| That's not a very kind response.
|
| I'd love to have a constructive conversation rather than
| resorting to base name calling.
|
| I mean to say that centralization is caused by digitization
| because of the financial incentives, not that centralization
| IS digitization. And all of our current systems _are_ systems
| of legacy control.
|
| In fact I generally agree with you. Generally the identity
| system will be interrupted, and at the core digitization of
| the legacy system will happen. I'm simply saying that there
| will be further consolidation and centralization first and it
| will take longer than most people think due to the powerful
| financial interests involved.
|
| To put it in your own words, I generally believe we will have
| to go through a economics "with the tragedy" before we get to
| the part where the tragedy gets removed.
| openfuture wrote:
| I believe it was kind but the tone does not get across the
| textification.
|
| Glad to hear your justifications. They are more persuasive
| than the initial representation.
|
| Thank you for engaging the constructive conversation.. now
| w.r.t. the power of financial interests, I think it is
| overestimated and easily shattered but we will just have to
| see what happens.
| kornhole wrote:
| When framed as extremes in a false dichotomy, centralization
| seems the better option. In the reality of decentralized social
| media servers, thousands of community servers of various sizes
| rather than individuals make up most of the nodes and homes for
| people. In the current #Twittermigration, the biggest general
| servers are buckling from the mass inflows of members. More
| servers are easily springing up to provide new homes. The
| architects and maintainers of the fediverse anticipated the need
| to make setup and administration easy, but we were maybe not
| prepared for such a big pulse. Thanks for the boost Elon.
| skybrian wrote:
| Nit: Dunbar's number is casually used in a way that doesn't seem
| relevant here. It's not true that we can only remember about 150
| entities. People know many thousands of words.
|
| (It is true that there are limits on what people will remember.)
| mellavora wrote:
| Dunbar's number is that ON AVERAGE people can only maintain 150
| relationships.
|
| "maintaining relationship" is not the same as remembering or
| knowing the person's name. It is spending enough time with the
| person that you have an ongoing relationship, which is eased if
| you remember a number of details about them (job history,
| hobbies, birthdays, etc).
|
| On average matters because the number is about group size, not
| any one individual's ability. For the group to cohere, most of
| the people in the group need to know most of the people in the
| group.
|
| You will find people who can only manage 100 or fewer
| relationships, likewise, people who can maintain many more,
| even orders of magnitude more.
|
| It isn't about the individual. It is about the group.
| bombcar wrote:
| Another way to put it is that for a group of 100-150 or so,
| you'll be able know everyone decently well. A small college
| graduating class, or a tiny high school perhaps.
|
| At about 300 or so, you'll "recognize" most of the group, but
| you won't know much about many of them, or really have a
| relationship.
|
| And once the group is above that, you either need to have it
| hierarchical setup (you don't know all the members of the
| families at your school, but you recognize the parents, etc)
| or it just becomes a mash of smaller groups (no matter how
| you try to pretend it isn't).
| Retric wrote:
| Dunbars number relates to remembering relationships between
| people which is 150 * ~149 things not 150.
|
| You might not remember what everyone in the group thinks of
| everyone else, but keeping track of grudges is often relevant.
| robocat wrote:
| It is nowhere near 150 * 149 because people in human networks
| have different amounts of connectivity, "influencers" with
| many connections, and others with few connections, as well as
| cliques with high internal connectivity but low external
| connectivity. And relationships between influential
| individuals matter way more.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
| Retric wrote:
| Influencers are more a function of very large social
| networks, they don't really represent small tightly knit
| communities very well.
|
| Consider something like a thanksgiving dinner you have what
| looks like central figures say a grandparent that everyone
| is related too, but the grand kids have tighter bonds to
| their parents than the grandparent.
|
| Extend that to a village and you get more social people
| with more connections across the community, but those
| aren't even close to the strongest bonds.
| dathinab wrote:
| We centralize because we created/use a economical system where
| that such system behaviour is promoted.
|
| We could also use a system which demotes or outright forbids too
| much centralization.
|
| So it's not inevitable at all.
|
| Or at least it isn't if you just look at how people are likely to
| interpret the title, reading "centralization" as in "central to
| the whole system".
|
| Local increases in "centralization" are normal, e.g. people
| centralize in cities, but calling that centralization is
| misleading IMHO. They are local aggregates not central to the
| whole system.
|
| More important if we e.g. look at (biological) nature
| centralization is nearly always the prelude of collapse and
| anything more then very localized centralization is often an
| indication for potential problems.
|
| So we probably should change our system to demote too much
| centralization.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| And yet our economic and social systems have never been more
| decentralised...
| jasmer wrote:
| Yea, not really. The wild west was wild. People used to make up
| their own banknotes, there were fraud and schemes everywhere.
| We take for granted that our bank won't steal our deposits,
| that's a new concept. Most of that is derived from some degree
| of 'centralization' - that said - it's definitely not this
| 1-to-many scheme that the language implies. The Fed has immense
| power, but is not really in your business. You can exchange
| money with whomever you want (almost) and it's none of the
| Feds' business.
|
| Much like 'AI' I think this word 'decentralization' triggers
| something within.
|
| It's worth considering that impulse (i.e. freedom is really
| important, and we should think about it), but also needs
| constant contextualizing.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| What your describing is just a different, more local form of
| centralisation. If your bank manager gets to refuse to give
| you your money, he has all the power. That's very very
| centralised, even if it's centralised in him, not in a CEO or
| a president.
|
| I have 4 accounts at 4 different banks. If one of them
| refused to hand the cash over, even without any redress, I
| have 3 other accounts to fall back on. So my life is much
| less centralised than Wild West Bill.
|
| The same applies to almost all elements of life. Back in the
| wild west, no one would date you if you didn't go to church.
| The priest literally had centralised power to refuse you a
| partner (and God help you if you were gay or the wrong colour
| or from a "bad" family). Today no one knows or cares. Very
| very decentralized. Ditto employment or housing or crime and
| punishment.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| But also, the wild west was founded upon the US wars with the
| native americans (centralized) and railroad monopolies
| (centralized).
| jryhjythtr wrote:
| Meta and Visa suddenly go permanently offline. What does the
| social and economic landscape look like now?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It's a little rough for about a week and by a month out
| everything's basically completely fine.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| India has its own payment processing stack, UPI so I expect
| Visa going down shouldn't lead to a major disruption. It's
| yet to be tested however so we won't know until Visa actually
| goes down.
|
| WhatsApp going down on the other hand will be a big pain as
| lots of businesses and people rely on it. Though I expect
| them to figure out alternatives within a few weeks.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Meta goes offline, nothing of any importance changes.
|
| Visa goes offline, people switch to mastercard or use cash.
|
| Now compare that to living in the wild west, and the only
| town in 100miles bans you because you're slight different to
| them.
| stickyricky wrote:
| I go to the bank and get cash. Businesses accept that cash
| for goods and services. I observe no difference in my social
| media habits because I do not use Meta products.
| jryhjythtr wrote:
| Good for you, Mr. Exception-to-the-rule. (Btw, the same is
| true for me too).
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| And me. So your "exception" hypothesis is getting weaker
| :)
|
| You've really got me thinking.
|
| Is there a word for that thing when "everyone knows" what
| they think "everyone is doing", but once they start to
| dig deeper it turns out nobody really is? Everyone is
| pretending to, because they think that's what everybody
| should say and do?
|
| Mass delusion? Group fallacy? Fashion? Groupthink? None
| quite capture it.
| jryhjythtr wrote:
| Sample bias. HN crowd != people I know in real life.
| mypalmike wrote:
| I think what's happening here is selection bias. The
| people who proudly have no Meta accounts are replying to
| each other saying "me too". The hundreds of others who
| were reading did not reply.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Sample bias is a thing, sure.
|
| I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope.
|
| We don't have a way to _test_ those hundreds of voices
| comprising the supposed silent majority. I 'm saying that
| when/(BIG if) one does - via some hitherto undevised
| ingenious experiment which always yields truth - we find
| that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but
| mostly going along with what they _think_ the majority
| view is.
|
| I'm sure there's a name/concept for this in group
| dynamics.
|
| Consensus mythology? (I'm just making that up)
|
| A hallmark is that interrogating the group yields one
| answer, but each individual considered privately will
| give you a very different answer.
|
| But it's not "group-think" I'm talking about, because
| that implies a more overt pressure. Rather it emerges in
| the absence of coordination amongst an implied majority
| when there exists a loud propaganda message designating
| some other group a minority.
|
| I think this effect has important implications in the
| kind of 50:50 + swing elections we've seen over the past
| few years. For example, in Brexit, a mass of lethargic
| voters assumed "everyone will vote against" and didn't
| verify the reality by asking lots of diverse friends.
| It's not that people are trapped in actual bubbles so
| much as bubbles of their own mind based on assumptions
| about those around them.
|
| Sorry, that's probably a long and clumsy way of saying
| something obvious.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Just go and get cash during a bank run. How hard can that
| be?
| stickyricky wrote:
| That wasn't provided as a condition. In a bank run,
| Visa's existence or non-existence is irrelevant. Credit
| is frozen.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Do you really think Visa and Meta could go under without
| causing a bank run?
| bombcar wrote:
| By "Visa" do you mean "all payment clearing houses" and
| by Meta do you mean "all social media"?
|
| Because if Visa shits itself (it has) I use Amex,
| Mastercard, cash, debit, or even checks.
|
| And if Meta shits itself I don't even notice except to
| make fun of it.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Think about the situation for a second. You'll be
| switching to other methods, and so will everyone else,
| all at once. Do Amex and Mastercard even have the
| capacity to take up the slack with no notice? Do you
| really think that every critical component of a cost-
| optimised system will have been over-provisioned to be
| able to take on hundreds of millions of additional
| customers in a single day? And if one fails, the demand
| switches to the remainder and crashes them too. It's a
| classic cascade failure.
| gort19 wrote:
| andsoitis wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| LatteLazy wrote:
| In my modern, urban, life I have 1000 different options for
| my food supply or friendships or housing or employment. Aside
| from a very unengaged, far away, government there is no
| centralised entity in my life. And even that I can replace by
| moving country.
|
| 100 years ago, there was one major employer in my area (east
| London), a few grocers and bakers, people's activities were
| tightly controlled and linked to family status. Participation
| in all elements of economic and social life was tightly
| controlled by a small clique of economic, clerical and
| political elites.
|
| People think about centralisation as a corporate or
| government thing and a unitary national authority. But it's
| not. It's part of every later of society. When we lived in
| tribes, the chief had totally centralised power over almost
| everything. Villages were the same with an overlord somewhere
| you'd never see. Towns were lighter but still quite
| centralised. Modern cities and urban life is about as
| decentralized as it is possible to be.
|
| That's my understanding of centralisation. Sorry it's not
| better explained.
| api wrote:
| Decentralization is sort of a bad term in that it can have very
| different contextual meanings and the exact meaning is hard to
| pin down.
|
| I like looking at it from a perspective of privacy,
| ownership/sovereignty, and choice.
|
| A system that has a few dominant centralized players that are
| _interchangeable_ is decentralized as far as I 'm concerned. An
| example would be static web hosting. A system with hosted
| centralized options but where I can also self-host is also
| decentralized. An example would be something like GitLab.
|
| I want systems where I own and control my own data and where it's
| not being data mined without my approval. I want systems where
| someone isn't always looking over my shoulder. I want systems
| that treat me as the customer not the product.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| The author doesn't understand bitcoin; The pie chart is
| misleading. All you have to do to see that it is wrong is see how
| the chart has changed over time. Why isn't one big mining pool
| taking all the others? Why did the miners lose the block-size
| wars?
| cdata wrote:
| Plug: I'm working with the author on a decentralized protocol for
| networked thought and a companion browser called Subconscious.
| We're a very young project and just getting off the ground.
|
| If you're interested in topics like the one in the article, all
| our work is open source and we love getting into it with folks on
| Github or our Discord (link in the README):
| https://github.com/subconsciousnetwork/noosphere
| jessmartin wrote:
| I've been exploring Noosphere as a protocol-level solution to
| the dilemma posed here about centralization. Some really
| interesting tech! Definitely worth checking out if this stuff
| interests you.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| yet you choose two closed source centralized solutions for your
| project: Github and Discord
| openfuture wrote:
| Preach yo! the medium is the message.
| m463 wrote:
| You can centralize things... on yourself or your family.
| Razengan wrote:
| I bet there's a true hive-mind species out there that would
| disagree.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Even bees centralize around the queen bee.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think this is now widely considered to be a false
| anthropomorphization of what's really going on in a hive.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The point of open protocols is not that there will actually be
| many providers, but that one could switch providers easily if
| they do something fishy. It's about the threat, and what can
| happen on margin.
|
| Keeping a sword dangling over the monopolist's head is
| reasonable.
| apichat wrote:
| I agree. A few years ago, I wrote an article on this subject :
|
| _hello@joe -- greeting, editorial rule and name on the
| Internet_
|
| http://apichat.fr/doku.php?id=hello_joe_greeting_editorial_r...
| teddyh wrote:
| Not if the switching cost is high and/or slow. The problems of
| a monarchy will not be solved by setting up a competing
| neighboring kingdom.
|
| To bring the topic back to networking, it has been said that
| decentralization is the worst form of networking except all
| those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
|
| (With apologies to Winston Churchill.)
| neilk wrote:
| You are correct. The greatest threat to someone providing a
| service based on an open protocol is that users might pick up
| and leave.
|
| Consequently, a service provider will plow enormous resources
| into differentiating their service, and generating other lock-
| in effects, so the users find it hard to leave.
|
| A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect playing
| field for a would-be monopolist.
|
| The monopolist can make their service better and better with
| cash and execution, but meanwhile the protocol is stuck at a
| baseline since a varied ecosystem doesn't upgrade itself as
| quickly. So it is less and less attractive.
| the_other wrote:
| > A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect
| playing field for a would-be monopolist.
|
| At first I thought "email seems a good example of this: most
| people don't want to leave Google, I don't want to leave
| FastMail"... but then I remembered that I could just leave
| FastMail and take my email to Google. Which proves the
| upthread point about the open protocol being a safety net for
| users.
|
| Can you talk about some examples of monopolised open
| protocols?
| neilk wrote:
| Email is the paradigmatic example. You can export your
| mailbox and use `pine` if that's your jam. But in the real
| world, most users of Gmail will depend on at least one
| feature of Gmail that isn't easily replicable elsewhere.
| giobox wrote:
| I wonder what gmail's churn rate even is? It is surely
| staggeringly close to zero.
| mkmk3 wrote:
| > A popular open source protocol is actually the perfect
| playing field for a would-be monopolist.
|
| Whereas when there's no popular open source protocol, the OSS
| ecosystem upgrades itself fast, like a cheetah? :P Whatever
| mental model you're using here might just be going over my
| head and I'd appreciate you being more explicit about it
| k__ wrote:
| Plus, if these protocols are built on top of cryptographic
| methods, it might not be so easy for the providers to do
| something fishy in the first place.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Since somebody chose to downvote the above comment, I think
| it bears elaboration for those who might not understand. A
| contemporary example is domain names. The current domain
| system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay companies a
| never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do literally less
| than nothing. A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair
| in a small database. You're paying never-ending rent to them
| for them to _not_ go out of their way to delete your entry.
|
| Relying on a centralized competitor to offer something better
| would be dubious. If they gain substantial marketshare
| there's nothing stopping them from deciding to simply swap
| back to our current system. It could even be done
| retroactively since everybody has those lines in their terms
| and conditions that amount to 'We can do anything, and you
| can't do anything about it.'
|
| But with a decentralized system you have the possibility of a
| new type of domain where while one operator may be able to be
| the only one that can create them, once they transfer that
| domain to you it becomes literally impossible for them to
| access, change, or affect it in any way, shape, or form.
| Decentralization is able to turn various digital goods into
| something much closer to their physical counterpart where you
| are buying something that is no longer connected to the
| seller after checkout. And this can really help ensure the
| integrity of services that otherwise might be susceptible to
| bait and switch business models.
| efsavage wrote:
| I'm not defending registrars/registries per se, but...
|
| > A domain isn't much more than a key/value pair in a small
| database.
|
| No, it's often a huge investment and important part of
| security approaches (certificates, validation, email, etc.)
|
| > You're paying never-ending rent to them for them to not
| go out of their way to delete your entry.
|
| Yes, you're paying them to not update that value to point
| to someone else's server. Just like you pay your landlord
| to not only keep your apartment in working order, but to
| not let someone else live there.
|
| > becomes literally impossible for them to access, change,
| or affect it in any way, shape, or form
|
| How is this a good thing? Someone takes over your domain
| and nobody is able to get it back? You just spent millions
| of dollars on marketing to get people to visit your
| somenameforme.tld and now it points to another site because
| your key leaked. -\\_(tsu)_/-?
| somenameforme wrote:
| Keys don't "leak" but of course they can be stolen - like
| any real product. If you spend $40 million on your Van
| Gogh, and it's stolen - that's not going to be a happy
| moment. Fortunately keeping a key safe is much easier
| than keeping a physical asset safe. And you'd only need
| to access your archive the times when you need to change
| the IP for your domain or are otherwise
| transferring/selling it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Keys can easily leak; there was a high-profile example
| not so long ago where a bunch of GPG public keys shared
| factors due to a bug in generation.
| lob_it wrote:
| SIM swap attacks happening at every level of the mobile
| industry would probably invoke cool rebuttals as well.
|
| https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2019/10/sim-
| swap-sc...
|
| You are not going to be able to pay extra to make rotten
| to the core pretty.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > A contemporary example is domain names. The current
| domain system is a monopoly, and it sucks. You pay
| companies a never-ending and ever-increasing rent to do
| literally less than nothing. A domain isn't much more than
| a key/value pair in a small database.
|
| Is there any legal or technical reason why someone can't
| set up a DNS server that resolves domain names to different
| IP addresses than those traditionally used?
| somenameforme wrote:
| Beyond network effect, nope. This is one of the more
| convenient ways to block in-app ads on mobile. Set your
| DNS to something like AdGuard's servers, and they'll
| resolve ad delivering domains to a no-op. And suddenly
| all major third party ads in apps or the web alike are
| gone.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > Beyond network effect, nope.
|
| So why does no-one do this/ Obviously people do do it for
| ad-blocking, so why not for other purposes? Too difficult
| to get traction, perhaps?
| cestith wrote:
| There are DNS blocklists for mail servers. It's a
| slightly different thing, but basically there's if
| there's an entry it means there's a reputation for the
| mail sender. Some of them are present/not present and
| some have a score. Some are against the IP of the sender
| only, while others are against the domain name or full
| hostname of the sender. You just set your mail server to
| do the right lookup against the right DNS server, and
| incoming mail can be filtered based on the results of the
| DB someone else is maintaining.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are a very few alternate roots that have actually
| gotten traction - the most famous of which is .onion
| teddyh wrote:
| People have tried:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
| npc12345 wrote:
| Sure, Binance could run off with your money tomorrow if they
| wanted you, but if you keep most of your money in your actual
| Bitcoin wallet and only deposit what you need to, your money
| is 100% safe.
| nico wrote:
| Big lesson learned from Mtgox.
|
| Unfortunately wallets have their cons too, and there are a
| lot of people who have lost their passwords or thumbdrives
| and thus access to their crypto.
|
| No silver bullet.
| k__ wrote:
| Web3auth/Torus and Argent trying to solve that problem.
|
| But yeah, the moment you have key recovery, even if it's
| decentralised and requires multiple parties, you aren't
| 100% in charge anymore.
|
| But, it's probably a good alternative to being 0% in
| charge with custodial wallets.
| andirk wrote:
| Didn't the Mtgox people finally get their BTC back but
| only after a few years and the price 100x'd ironically?
| Either way, diversify ones portfolio including where the
| moneys are kept.
| nico wrote:
| Don't know if distribution has happened yet. But there
| were at least a few investors buying claims, so plenty of
| people were able to cash out.
|
| You could say that's actually a better outcome than
| losing your private key.
| bombcar wrote:
| 100% safe from _some forms of loss_ but you still have
| various risks associated with passwords, key phrases,
| wallet phrases, software bugs, backups, etc.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Oh hey super cool, I think these are what you call small-world
| networks which show up in a lot of different places.
|
| I'm actually reading a chapter right now on the architecture of
| the brain that talks a lot about this in the context of our
| neural connections: Chapter 2 or Cycle 2 "Structure Defines
| Function"[0].
|
| [0]:
| https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
| pjkundert wrote:
| That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully
| decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and
| abusiveness of the current centralized offerings.
|
| The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs such
| as Holochain https://holo.host is breathtaking.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| You aren't addressing the points the article made about
| efficiency and other selection pressures.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Classic peer-to-peer networks have low connectivity. Scale-
| free networks are resilient (most nodes don't matter), but
| are vulnerable to attack (kill a few "hubs").
|
| DHTs (such as underlying Holochain) are scale-free, but also
| automatically heal from attacks.
|
| Most importantly, they operate essentially unimpeded even in
| the face of _successful_ network partitioning attacks.
|
| All while each "agent" ( _You_ ) retain complete
| cryptographic control of your data and identity.
|
| And, if/when you want to migrate your data (exfiltrate), re-
| package the functionality (create new clients, or integrate
| multiple networks), or even completely fork the entire
| application -- all of this is at your fingertips, and no
| entity can stop you.
| agreeahmed wrote:
| +1 - author argues that _some degree_ of centralization is a
| natural property of interconnected systems to due the
| aggregated effects of things like preference attachment and
| economies of scale.
| briantakita wrote:
| > That is, until the ease, quality and utility of fully
| decentralized systems exceeds the pain of the fragility and
| abusiveness of the current centralized offerings.
|
| I agree. A centralized system will seek to expand to further
| consolidate control & create cartels which often act against
| the interests of those outside of the cartel. A system of
| decentralized components that becomes centralized can be forked
| to create alternative systems that address the interests of
| those who maintain the alternative systems.
|
| It's like forest garden management technique...using fire to
| create new growth & biodiversity. The mature forest has less
| biodiversity & will eventually die out on it's own, but a fire
| will clear the less "fit" organisms leaving space for new
| organisms to grow.
|
| > The power of unenclosable carriers offered by breakthroughs
| such as Holochain https://holo.host is breathtaking.
|
| Is the Holochain api/architecture stable or is there still
| churn?
| snapcaster wrote:
| This seemed like a cool project that actually had a use for a
| cryptocoin that wasn't pure scamming. Shame it was a scam ponzi
| anyway
| pjkundert wrote:
| Hmm? SDK reaching 1.0.0, almost ready for public beta, and
| capable of deploying global-scale full-stack Apps without
| server infrastructure?
|
| Perhaps you have it confused with another project.
| kkfx wrote:
| Centralization means easier driver for those who centralize and
| SPOFs. We centralize anytime we want an easy path even if it's
| fragile, and always resulting consequences are bad after a short
| "honeymoon" timeframe.
|
| My conclusion then is different: we need _common ideas_ , _common
| tools_ not centralization. What 's wrong with the classic web?
| Well that information access without search engines was a
| nightmare, but there is no need of "central" search engines as
| network hubs. YaCy offer an example FLOSS implementation of a
| distributed search network whose effectiveness much depend on
| numbers of indexing peers. In a fully "common web" all who host
| html pages also participate in the search distributed network and
| search quality became excellent, than some argue we can also
| distribute webpages like the ZeroNet idea and a new VERY FAST and
| VERY EFFECTIVE web is here. Oh, it's utopia just because of big
| players interests against the most and ignorance of the most,
| witch is not a technical thing. And that's just an example.
|
| Logistic networks are another example where the centralized free
| scale network is easier than a hub-less network, but fragile,
| while a hub-less network is hard to keep, especially if not all
| nodes cooperate, but far more resilient.
|
| The same happen in politics with historical absolute monarchy vs
| democracies and pretty anywhere else.
|
| My final reminder: in winter is cold, in summer is hot, sometimes
| is too dry, sometimes too wet, we human as essentially any living
| being have tried our best to "mitigate" such natural phenomenon
| to live better. If certain free-scale networks are a natural
| thing that does not means we have to accept them without trying
| to made something better for us.
| cjtrowbridge wrote:
| Centralization is a prevailing force. There are also many
| countervailing forces.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Hierarchy and centralization are ways to manage complexity and
| stay efficient as the article correctly points out but one
| additional point, topological pressures aside is also division of
| labour and specialization.
|
| Sufficiently large systems benefit more and more from
| specialization, the emergence of content delivery networks on top
| of the more generic internet is an example. As the types of
| content we consume are getting more and more sophisticated,
| bandwidth heavy and capital intensive, specialized infrastructure
| and distribution pays off more and more.
|
| For that reason peertube and other alternatives are pretty much
| structurally doomed. They'll never compete or be as economical as
| services and infrastructure optimized for that task.
| knaekhoved wrote:
| "The highway network is not scale-free" - no shit, highways refer
| to roads of a specific size. You're taking a slice out of the
| road distribution.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| That power-law comparison between major freeways and air travel
| routes is quite misleading, IMO. The highly dense road networks
| surrounding the major cities (i.e. around Los Angeles, Bay Area,
| Seattle, Houston, New York-to-Florida, etc.) are left out, but
| for comparison to air travel they need to be included. Doing so
| would generate a very different map (with a very different power
| law).
|
| The freeway map shown looks like the major truck-freight corridor
| for transporting goods (many collected at coast ports from
| overseas shipping) across the country to warehouses and
| distribution centers, certainly not what most people use for
| travel by car. Hence, comparison to air travel doesn't make much
| sense.
|
| As far as centralization and decentralization, for most things
| this comes down to technological limitations (ignoring the issue
| of economic monopolies blocking local regions from adopting the
| latest technologies). Local agriculture and local energy
| production are a lot easier to maintain (and benefit from no
| transport costs), than say, local chip foundries. Maybe someday
| cheap 3D printers capable of spitting out nanoscale RISC-V
| products in someone's garage will be available, but certainly not
| anytime soon.
| roschdal wrote:
| Centralisation and decentralization goes in cycles. When we
| centralized too much, it breaks down, and the cycle repeats.
| kornhole wrote:
| The pace at which this happens is determined by the barriers
| and limits of the context. This is why centralists want to have
| big barriers such as proprietary technology and government
| backing by laws and other force that protects their monopoly.
| To create a more dynamic environment in which we can swing back
| to more decentralized when a central hub becomes too powerful,
| we need to support communities and open protocols and resist
| the barriers, laws, and policies that prevent.
| ece wrote:
| I can't help but compare to US elections, the higher the bar
| to vote and less registered voters, the more centralization
| Republicans can pull off. The only way Democrats can win is
| if voting and registration are easier and lots of people show
| up to vote, at least nationally.
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