>The “why” is not technical.
This is one of thr few essays about decentralization that understands that the problem isn’t technical.
However, I’d go further than his explanations of incentives and say that the fundamental problem is that decentralized technical protocols do not solve the centralization of how money is spent.
Examples of that misunderstanding:
– SMTP the protocol is decentralized (technical) and yet we have giant email providers GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo which is centralized (money). The big providers spent $$$ on 1 gigabyte mail storage + backups + convenience. SMTP specifies how fields are laid out but it doesn’t put money in everyone’s bank account so they can run residential SMTP servers so the email ecosystem stays decentralized.
– Git the protocol is decentralized (technical) but Github the service is centralized (money). Why? Because Git the technical protocol is not a bank fund that gives every programmer a free $10 VPS account to host their own git repo. The centralization of money spent (Github invests in a datacenter but individual programmers do not) results in centralization.
– Bitcoin protocol is decentralized (technical) and yet the phenomenon of giant China “mining pools” emerges which is centralization (money). The ability to spend money on liquid cooled ASIC chips in a datacenter located near the Artic Circle is “centralized” to the entities that can spend that vast amount of money. The exceeds the ability for the home enthusiasts to compute hashes on a spare computer in their bedroom.
The common theme: technical protocols can be decentralized but the real-world implementation of those protocols end up centralized because physical things like cpus, harddrives, network bandwidth, etc cost money.
This pattern of decentralized technical protocols vs centralized economic behavior is ignored by virtually all decentralization enthusiasts.
So the real puzzle to decentralization is, “How do we _decentralize economic behavior_ when everybody doesn’t have the same amount of money to spend?” Nobody I’ve read about so far has figured that out . That includes Sandstorm/IPFS/Filecoin/Mastadon/Diaspora/Ethereum etc.
Gzip/mod_deflate not Working? Check your Proxy Server
After scratching my head for a while, I finally figured out the problem, hinted at by a comment on a question on Stack Overflow. Our work’s proxy server was blocking the ‘Accept-Encoding’ http header that is sent along with every file request; this prevented a gzipped transfer of any file, thus Yslow gave an F.
I set up a secure tunnel (using SSH) from my computer to the web server directly, and then reloaded the page in FireFox, and re-ran YSlow:
Much happier now. I’ve contacted our IT department to see if it’s possible to allow the proxy server to pass through the Accept-Encoding headers, but for now, I’ll know to watch out for false positives on the YSlow test, and check from multiple locations.
Ev Williams became a billionaire by helping to create the free and open web. Now, he’s betting against it.
you might expect someone to recognize him. But as he gets on a downtown train, no one turns a head.
Despite serving as a board member at one of the five largest social networks, and a mainstay of the Bay Area tech industry for almost two decades, the kind of fame attached to the names of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, or the “Google guys” has eluded Williams.
.. His startups have nearly all specialized in the same abstract medium: text boxes.
.. In fact, you are reading this very story on the open web—unless you found it on the Facebook app on your phone, in which case you are reading a copy nearly identical to the open-web version of the story, except that yours loaded much faster and lives on Facebook’s servers.)
.. “I think the distribution points are going to consolidate.”
The distribution points are the search engines and the social networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, and the messaging apps. Also on that list are YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Facebook), Whatsapp (also owned by Facebook), and Facebook Messenger (ditto). By linking the web together, or hosting normally data-heavy content for free, these distribution nodes seize more and more users. And because each of the nodes is more interesting than any one individual’s personal site, people who used to go to personal sites wind up at the nodes instead.
.. The developers who wrote Drupal and WordPress, two important pieces of blogging software, both recently expressed anxiety over the open web’s future.
.. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, argues in his book The Master Switch that every major telecommunications technology has followed the same pattern: a brief, thrilling period of openness, followed by a monopolistic and increasingly atrophied closedness
.. “Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale,” he told me.
.. Josh Benton, a media critic at Harvard, once described Medium as “YouTube for prose,”
.. “I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people,”
.. They don’t have personal sites. … They don’t get personal.”
.. For all the talk of their radical openness, blogs had mostly been the domain of those with hosting space, programming experience, and the time to write them.
.. Odeo wanted to be to podcasts what Blogger was to blogs, but internet audio was still too disorganized for a business to succeed.
.. the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007—was the most heated the aughts ever got in Silicon Valley. In this period, Google acquired YouTube, an 18-month-old company, for $1.6 billion. Facebook opened to all users, not just college students. TIME declared “You” the Person of the Year, a silly gimmick that nonetheless initiated the era of social-media hype. And Apple debuted the first iPhone.
.. the internet of 2008 can seem distant. That year’s presidential election was famously waged via web blogs. By 2012, much of the conversation had moved to Twitter.
.. “If your job was to feed people, but you were only measured by the efficiency of calories delivered, you may learn over time that high-calorie, high-processed foods were the most efficient ways to deliver calories,” he says
.. Medium’s marketing position isn’t far from Whole Foods either—it wants to be the big corporation that upscale customers trust.
.. Each of these sites still lives on its own domain name, but in terms of design and function, each is essentially a Medium page. Their stories also live on Medium’s servers.
.. Two years later, he founded Medium, describing it as a place for content that was too short for Blogger and too long for Twitter.
.. This is Medium’s reason for existing: to protect individual writers in the fierce and nasty content jungles.
.. It wants to do so by adopting many of the tics and habits of the original blogosphere—the intertextuality, the back-and-forth, the sense of amateurism
.. Medium, yes, will just be another platform, but it will run the open web in an emulator.
.. Google and Facebook, just two companies, send more than 80 percent of all traffic to news sites.
.. The web of 2008—the web that helped elect President Obama—has already withered.
.. but ours had more creativity, ours weren’t just for the money.
ZeroNet
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No hosting costs
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People use gmail and hotmail, not just because they don’t want to pay for the computer, it’s because they trust these companies will do it properly and reliably.
Github isn’t the best example either. It didn’t spring up because of the economics of running a git server. It got big largely because of its social features, and also because it was a pretty trustworthy git repository. I feel far more confident pushing to a git repo than to some physical server somewhere. There’s a trust aspect.
I’ll skip Bitcoin and got to another mostly decentralized system: paper currency. Exchanging paper currency is largely decentralized, but most people deposit it in a bank, in part due to interest, but largely due to the trust the bank provides.
The common theme to centralized services isn’t the cost of computing hardware, but rather raising trust/reliability in the service, outsourcing expertise, and risk mitigation. Big central service providers are good at exactly this.