Why Decentralization Matters
medium.com
medium.com
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
Vote with points earned though early adoption?
Vote by being on the team of developers?
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.
Yes, it rose to prominence in the bbs era that preceded the big public success of the WWW.
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.
Or maybe, depending on the coin, through infighting among insiders and forking. There is apparently no guarantee of transparency or good governance.
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...
They had only 25% ie less than 51% of hashing power but were still able to avert network rules.
To the customer it is at best a feature. 99.99% of DNS or email users probably have no idea it's distributed and don't want to know.
Look at the marketing around the cloud: I'm pretty sure that 99.9999% of people who use the term never read its original use in the early TCP-Internet papers and RFC and no idea what the term really meant.
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.