

Evolution of the Internet: From Decentralized to Centralized - muneeb
http://blog.onename.com/evolution-of-the-internet/

======
nly
> Recent advancements in Bitcoin/Blockchain have the potential to take us back
> to the promised land of a truly decentralized, free, and open Internet.

I keep hearing this, but really, how? The only useful thing on this front to
fall out of the blockchain is Namecoin and, despite being a really good idea,
nobody knows how to stop name hoarding. There will also never be a mechanism
for name dispute resolution... and who wants to register a name that could
cost $5 this year and $1000 to renew next?

Bitcoin itself has and likely will continue to trend toward centralization
because of the tendency for people want want lightweight clients and instant
transactions. Services like Bitpay already consolidate merchant interaction,
and too many people already accept the Gmailification of wallets by holding
web wallets. This is probably for the best because people can't be trusted to
guard their own keys. It's also debatable whether total blockchain
decentralization is a good thing, given that currently the hash power is all
held by a bunch of very dodgy unknown Chinese ASIC mining shops instead of a
bunch of very dodgy but well-known multinational banks.

------
lghh
> The promise of centralized services boils down to choosing convenience over
> decentralization.

The issue with the entire post is that you can have both. I can use Facebook
messaging to talk to my family while using IRC to answer questions about Java
or talk to strangers about video games. They are not mutually exclusive. Just
because there are these centralized, mega-services does not mean that the
decentralized ones stop existing.

~~~
liotier
> They are not mutually exclusive

Diminishing the active population of a service may result in less software
development targeting it - resulting in a death spiral to the profit of the
centralized services who reached critical mass.

Even when the open protocol becomes dominant through network effect, when a
major service provider attracts a significant population fraction he can fork
into a centralized proprietary direction : see for example how Google used
XMPP to strengthen its initial Google Talk user base and then cut them off
from the rest of the XMPP world... Embrace, extend, extinguish.

I'm still using IRC - but it is an IT ghetto. I'm still using XMPP - but only
with technophile friends, my family or other people to whom I am a
prescriptor. This decline may be caused by chat no longer being considered a
standalone functionality but an adjunct to web applications that implement a
social network...

------
TeMPOraL
Some of the things need to be centralized to work. The post mentioned GMail
spam filtering - it's hard to make a good filter without the level of data
Google has. Cloudflare's ability to protect you from threats is another great
example - by centralizing traffic of so many web services under one command,
they can notice the threat against one and immediately set up defenses for
everyone.

Another benefit of centralization is efficiency - when everything is
distributed, everyone does all the same work over and over again, which could
be done just once.

The question is, how can we keep centralized just the things that (users of
them) really benefit from it, and let the rest be decentralized?

~~~
skizm
> Buttflare's....

Ummm what?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Sorry. A weird mishap with Cloud-to-Butt extension I use. Fixed now.

