Hacker News Reader

Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization? The list of problems I can think of and for which the best solution is decentralization, is a rather short list. End in the realm of mass market consumer products it gets even shorter and could very well be empty.

View on HN

I might say that anything relating to content would be a prime benefactor of decentralization. If you wish to control your own data be it cat pictures, a video channel, streams, email, website, payment method or whatever then the only sure way to prevent other people's ideas, ideals or ideology from affecting your data is to not cede authority over it to anything or anyone.

For an oversimplified example I could, in theory, be in control of my input on this site with a nifty membership hook for publishing (or revoking) my interactions with it by working in my own "shared" instance of HN using a mutually agreed upon distribution protocol wherein each comment is published and "owned" by the commenter without HN having to pony up the resources to store or display it. Which could possibly include some potential for eliminating "acceptance critereon" altogether. ie. HN would have to ask me directly to manipulate my input for anything other than ranking or basic community acceptance. Wherein, ultimately, HN could pull the plug whenever but my "shared" instance could live on with others' until I, alone, pull my own plug which could even result in "comment deleted" throughout all live instances for all prior comments. And so on.

> What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization?

If you are following the rise of "dapps" or blockchain applications (circa 2017) then I would answer your question with "almost anything Internet-related".

Some examples:

* Decentralized Storage (IPFS)

* Decentralized Computation (Golem)

* Decentralized Professional Networking (Indorse)

There are many other examples, but a lot of them are vaporware and not worth mentioning.

That are solutions, what are the problems they tried to solve? What is wrong with storing your files on Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3? What is the advantage of IPFS?

https://ipfs.io/#uses

Those points are neither specific to IPFS nor to a decentralized solution and they do not really highlight any advantage of IPFS over something like Dropbox to begin with. The best point is probably saving bandwidth due to its peer-to-peer nature. There are certainly more traditional solutions where you can save bandwidth if you can convince other people to provide it for you, for example classical FTP mirrors, but this is certainly a valid use case for a distributed solution. It however is more to the benefit of the service provider and not the user and it really hinges on the popularity of that data you want distribute, if it is not really popular just using a file server will most likely provide a better user experience as compared to depending on a few potentially low bandwidth peers.

The two problems I care about most that decentralization is trying to solve are privacy and censorship. Another important one is not having something important disappear, like happened to millions of websites when Geocities went out of business. Also there is good connectivity for populations that presently lack it, like in African countries. Also there is connectivity during emergencies that cut off the centralized web.

I am a bit surprised you are not aware of all of these, since they have been extensively discussed in the last few years.

> What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization?

oh, just systemic hierarchy.

I am not exactly sure what you mean with that, but what is the problem with it that requires a solution? Can you give a concrete example?

you only have to look back as far as Exodus 18:17 to understand where the literal patriarchy comes from in the christian tradition. I like to imagine the story was not created then, but written down & translated a handful of times out of oral histories. oral histories that helped our ancestors survive & coordinate.

to me it looks like our systems for coordinating as humans aren't really well suited for anything _other_ than hierarchy.

so we're in the process of finding out (now) whether our ancestors will have the ability to coordinate in an evolutionarily competitive way (as in a decentralized way), or if we'll be subsumed by the machine in some less competitive way.

and I wonder how they'll look back on our religious traditions when they consider us then...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com