
Why Decentralization Matters - imb
https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e
======
infowl
Don't mistake "Cryptonetworks" as being decentralized.

If you follow this history of previous popular open source decentralized
software projects, you can see how easily a few participants can manipulate
the entire ecosystem with no accountability.

Censorship, astroturfing, manipulative code and backdoors... negligence or
malicious plausible deniability.

How do you hold bad actors accountable in decentralized networks?

Vote?

With money? (Hash power is simply a mask for existing capital)

Vote with (pseudo)anonymous accounts? ...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack)

Vote with points earned though early adoption?

Vote by being on the team of developers?

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Nursie
That article reads like one long logical fallacy and a whole heap of
handwaving.

It contrasts cathedral style development practices against blockchain, neatly
attributing open-source, collaborative development solely to blockchain
technologies.

The very first section makes no sense - in the _first_ era of the internet,
decentralised protocols allowed companies like yahoo and google to win out
while centralised entities like AOL diminished? So presumably AOL rose to
prominence in era zero? And everything before that was in era negative one?

There are so many bizarre, unevidenced claims thrown in... This is pure
evangelism.

~~~
woodandsteel
> So presumably AOL rose to prominence in era zero?

Yes, it rose to prominence in the bbs era that preceded the big public success
of the WWW.

~~~
Nursie
Internet, not web.

Sure, it rose to prominence before the likes of google, but not really in the
first era of the internet. While it may well have preceded the 'big public
success' of the world wide web, the internet had arguably already had a few
different eras before then anyway. And equally based on open protocols like
gopher and nntp.

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skybrian
"In cryptonetworks, these decisions are made by the community, using open and
transparent mechanisms."

Or maybe, depending on the coin, through infighting among insiders and
forking. There is apparently no guarantee of transparency or good governance.

------
jwr
Write an article about decentralization, post it on Medium. I feel like I am
being trolled.

~~~
woodandsteel
Or maybe the author is cleverly using centralization against itself.

------
thisisit
I think no one disagrees on "why" of the decentralization. Too big to fail is
a problem.

The real question is "how to decentralize?". How will disputes be solved in a
decentralized economy? Many of the answers hover around - well, the code and
game theory will take care of it.

And that IMO, shows a weak understanding of human nature. Nature is
unpredictable, people will find a way to overt a decentralized economy while
playing within rules.

A good example is mining. The manipulation of Status ICO by F2Pool:

[https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-
manipulates-u...](https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-
usd1-2-million-on-the-ethereum-blockchain-during-the-status-im-ico)

They had only 25% ie less than 51% of hashing power but were still able to
avert network rules.

------
pascalxus
I think decentralization has already "won the hearts and minds of developers."
the question is, will it win the hearts and minds of consumers.

~~~
CM30
Honestly, most consumers don't know or care what decentralisation (or
centralisation/federation/whatever) actually is. For them, if the product or
service does what they need it to, that's fine.

So the answer is "It'll win the hearts and minds of consumers, if the other
selling points win the hearts and minds of consumers by letting them do
something the existing systems can't/won't"

~~~
woodandsteel
>So the answer is "It'll win the hearts and minds of consumers, if the other
selling points win the hearts and minds of consumers by letting them do
something the existing systems can't/won't"

Agreed. So far the the focus as been getting the technology to work, and the
sort of techies who can do that are generally not very good at figuring out
what ordinary people need and how to sell it to them. Once the tech is good
enough, we will see people who are good at the latter getting involved.

~~~
Nursie
"So Far" has been almost ten years, and we have yet to see anything much you
could call a killer app.

