Why Decentralization Matters (medium.com) 93
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.
Isn't true (Score:3)
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.
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Everyone is building for closed, centralized systems.
Citation needed.
The only reason email still exists is because no one has figured out how to displace it.
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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.
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and...
Along these lines, I think it's also worth discussing "the cloud" and "subscriptions", because both are mechanisms where control is deferred to the owner/operator of those things - software / functionality will fail when (not it, but when) the cloud / subscription goes away or changes according to the whim of the operator.
Th
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Back in my day (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Now, if only more people could make the logical connection between "internet centralization bad" and "government power centralization bad", as the same general principles regarding concentration of power & control apply to both.
Strat
Re: Back in my day (Score:2)
Talk like that is how you get flagged for a free prostate exam when you go through the airport security.
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Talk like that is how you get flagged for a free prostate exam when you go through the airport security.
Hahaha! I've posted stuff *way* more anti-authoritarian than that!
Besides, I have no need to fly commercially and take alternate forms of transport if I do need to travel somewhere, if for no other reason than the fact that I don't trust airport baggage handlers and TSA/Customs eco-warriors with my guitars that have rosewood and ebony fingerboards and ivory inlays that have caused airport authorities to seize other musician's instruments, and which are also adverse to being tossed about carelessly as baggag
Re: Back in my day (Score:1)
If you can get a large enough hard and securely locking case (they make them with custom foam), you can put a starter pistol in it (counts as a firearm for the TSA, and legal to posses in every state unlicensed) and declare it at check in.
It'll cost you, but depending on your travel could save you days.
They do an inspection before checking it, and they have to give it social handling and are not allowed to open it at all. You are allowed (required even) to use real locks.
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If you can get a large enough hard and securely locking case (they make them with custom foam), you can put a starter pistol in it (counts as a firearm for the TSA, and legal to posses in every state unlicensed) and declare it at check in.
Not sure, but are you suggesting placing a starter pistol (or actual pistol) in a case along with a guitar to circumvent inspection and possible seizure of the instrument by overzealous agents? You said yourself they will inspect it first, which would defeat the purpose if it is to prevent an instrument's seizure by overzealous agents. Hell, you might even get charged for the attempt to circumvent the regulations.
If you just randomly dropped that whole bit about taking guns as checked baggage, your post see
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That's the idea.
A starter pistol counts as a firearm (for the purposes of flight, but not in any local laws). the inspection happens within your sight. I know photographers that do this with their equipment.
I guess they could still seize it, but they won't "lose" it, and they won't inspect it randomly in transit.
I mean, if you always have enough time to drive, more power to you, but it's a strategy I've seen used when transporting expensive stuff that couldn't be carried on.
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What if you are in an adversarial relationship with the rest of society,
No, the true adversarial relationship is between those in government who seek more power, wealth, and control versus the population they govern. There are plenty of people who, either through ignorance, propaganda, or hopes they can gain favor with TPTB, that side with concentration of government power.
They are the "useful idiots" that those seeking power always rely on. Historically, they have typically been the first to be disposed of when the "revolution" succeeds.
Strat
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You mention in your post "government power centralization bad", but then in your signature seem to imply that Liberalism leads to more authoritarianism. I see things just the opposite, especially in the Trump era. The libertarian wing (I call them the liberals of the right) of the conservative movement is getting more and more marginalized, and Trump seems to be moving the party more an more authoritarian every day.
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Re: Back in my day (Score:3)
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 ma
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It's not even new in technology - google "bell system breakup".
If only you substituted "web-search'' for "google" your assertion would have some lasting value.
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https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
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Non-Sequitur (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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> 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 compe
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I think the disagreement was more with "outpaced the capabilities of open protocols". It's still HTTP under there, after all.
Re: Non-Sequitur (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s worth hashing out the semantics of it.
To that end: where are the open protocols and ubiquitous easy to use third party client apps for sharing pictures, building and maintaining a social network, etc?
THe proprietary implementations of those (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, AIM) outpaced and outmarketed and our innovated the open implementations (if any exist or were attempted). Diaspora comes to mind.
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The open protocol is pretty much http. There used to be things like ftp as well, but http won. All the examples you mention use it exclusively.
The apps are harder. There are some open ones, but they're pretty much flops. There used to be quite a few successful commercial ones though. Then Facebook bought them all.
The original comment was "outpaced the capabilities". I don't think any of the closed solutions, much less the ones that are popular now, outpaced any capabilities. It's not exactly difficul
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I get it. They got some terminology wrong and some folks are stuck on it.
Happens all the time in wide-audience articles about technical or medical or scientific matters.
We're not their target audience, and we're likely to seize up over the imprecision in it. But if you try to get past the semantic problems and see what they're trying to convey... they're making a good point that even us nerds can benefit from thinking about.
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I don't disagree with you that they're making an important point, but I think their error is more than semantic.
Dropping the semantics, they assert that Facebook did something technologically superior. They didn't. Facebook won because they were in the right place at the right time with something that passed the bar of minimal functionality. The reason they're so dominant is that social networks, by their nature, benefit from central coordination. The one that all your friends are on is the one you want
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Switching apps is more about being able to handle the data, and not where that data comes from. Distributed storage only helps for availability, not usability.
Re: Non-Sequitur (Score:2)
This is why we need open standards for data formats. Combine that with safe serverless storage and the current tech titans game gets turned on its head. Suddenly competition is truly only merit based and every geek in their basement apartment can have a go at creating the next big thing in whatever genre theyâ(TM)re inclined to tackle. P
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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.
Yeah... so who vets these apps? Who removes them if they're found to be nefarious? As soon as you think you have the perfect decentralized system worked out, the Average Joe will complain that it's too hard to grok and then some entity rises to the position of One True Gatekeeper. At least, that's why Google is what it is.
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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 o
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Facebook and Twitter didn't take HTTP and build huge services with it?
Yes, on Open protocols. In fact, none of these massive Internet companies could have ever succeeded without these Open protocols' capabilities. It is those Open protocols that underpinned those companies' runaways successes. The API's you referenced sit on top of the Open protocols, rather than replace them.
Re: Non-Sequitur (Score:1)
I don't know about that; one of my friends used medical blockchain to cure his marthambles.
Always wondered what bullshit would supplant "the cloud".
Please fix... (Score:2)
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.
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https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*7lrwGIDbAYk6q7zG.
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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
Ha ha right (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Instead of posting something content free, except an appeal to your own authority, why don't you say something at least worth further conversation? What is it you think git has or is lacking that makes it not a blockchain implementation?
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Instead of posting something content free, except an appeal to your own authority, why don't you say something at least worth further conversation? What is it you think git has or is lacking that makes it not a blockchain implementation?
I think you forgot the sarcasm tag there...if not, git is a scm, it works on diffs and merges diffs from different sources together. Git has nothing to do with a blockchain which is an entirely different thing.
Re:Ha ha right (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
Sure. But he probably has 10 venture capitalists lined up outside his door right now trying to throw money at him.
We had an article in a local paper a couple of weeks ago about a company that was doing blockchain stuff. I mean, "stuff". The article was basically bullshit and to my trained nose it was obvious that they're taking venture capitalists to the cleaners and probably laughing about it daily.
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I used to respond to blockchain letters until I found out that the Post Office frowned upon them.
Talk the talk, walk the walk (Score:2)
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,
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No need. There are a bunch out there. People didn't like them. And with good reason: centralization is convenient and allows easy discoverability.
Every once in a while someone comes along and decides they're going to invent the next social network app and it will be way better than Facebook because something something, and won't be abusive at all (how are you going to pay for it?). This one just has blockchain!
At least the idea of an open Facebook has merit, even if it seems to be impractical. A block
see also (Score:2)
Why Decentralization Is Bad (Score:3)
Hackers Hijacked Tesla's Amazon Cloud Account To Mine Cryptocurrency [slashdot.org]
If you become too decentralized you get to the point that no one track was is going on.
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That same case could also be taken for a case for de-centralization: It was a low priority system, completely segregated from the rest of their systems.
Yes, decentralization adds complexity in a central administration context, but it also provides for compartmentalization.
Dont build on sand (Score:3)
Orbital Content (Score:1)
https://alistapart.com/article... [alistapart.com]
So Many Buzzwards. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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"Decentralization" is just "Disruption" reframed.. (Score:1)
Book recommendation (Score:1)
trust (Score:2)
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
meh (Score:2)
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. des