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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

I've read dozens if not hundreds of threads (on HN) about the benefits of decentralization. Can some of you give me the run down on the benefits of centralization?

I think that discussion needs to happen as well for both discussions to be valid.

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I'm pro-decentralization for a lot of things, but one big benefit of centralization is speed. It's a lot easier for one "node" to change something than a whole system.

A real-world analog would be like a dictatorship vs a democracy. The dictatorship can make faster decisions but the democracy often makes better decisions.

I think one of the reasons decentralisation makes better decisions, is that every node has equal say in the decision.

Whereas a centralised system may not ignore a lot of the nodes when making a decision.

Isn't this also its biggest drawback? If every node has equal say we need to have additional complicated logic to ensure consensus, while in a centralized system we do not need to this, since a centralized system is a source of truth and the only writer?

The same logic applies to less decentralized systems like NEO that have a predefined set of voting nodes. Less nodes, means that we need less effort to achieve consensus, hence higher performance.

So the question is: in what use cases truly decentralized systems cannot be replaced with not so decentralized systems?

Precisely, centralization provides a simple architecture for the system.

However, since all the power is concentrated to one "source of truth", it can lead to unfair decisions for the rest of the network.

Decentralized systems are ideal went you want to ensure there's fair decisions for the whole network. It's much more complicated to build, but worth it in some cases eg; crypto currencies, governments etc.

Also it's not strictly a black and white categorization, systems can have levels of decentralization; eg: the internet

> Can some of you give me the run down on the benefits of centralization?

At the moment the benefits are pretty clear. Centralized systems like YouTube, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Amazon.com, and many others simply work. They scale fantastically, have low latency, provide good service and satisfy actual customers needs. Yes, they are not perfect, but nothing in the world is perfect.

I think it is not a crazy assumption that a centralized system will always have a higher performance than a decentralized one. It also may be a fair assumption that developing a centralized application is easier than a decentralized one.

On the other hand, fully decentralized applications do not work at the moment. I don't know a single decentralized work that can work on anything close to Amazon or Airbnb scale. While blockchain implementations can theoretically scale, do we need to stampede to have all our apps decentralized? If Booking.com works in a centralized fashion will a decentralized version be significantly better from a customer's perspective? Will decentralized system address some actual significant pain points?

Also, we have somewhat decentralized systems like Ripple and NEO that at least theoretically should give both the benefits of decentralization and high performance. Why are these systems not sufficient for practical purposes?

- Speed, Visa can (and does) process more TPS than any decentralized system - Simplicity, centralized system are simple to manage and well understood - Cheaper, owning a centralized db is a lot cheaper than paying gas/fees on decentralized platforms. - More human, forget your password? made an error? it's reversible. - Reputation, centralized systems have built up reputation for being trustworthy and reliable for consumers (ex. the fed), the scandals that plague ICOs/exchanges and volatility are obviously bad.

There's plenty of theoretical arguments to be made against the above points, but in practice today, I think they're valid.

To me it's obvious that centralisation benefits from having a simpler master-slave architecture. This makes centralised systems easier to control, update, etc. As only one part of the system controls the rest.

Conversely, decentralised systems have no master, so decisions are relatively harder to make in the system.

However, in reality centralisation is harder to scale, due to the bottle necks on the central parts of the system. Decentralisation can be theoretical easier to scale, as bottlenecks don't occur as easily.

No, Bitcoin is having a hell of a time trying to scale it even split into 2 coins.

Under decentralized system they have to have quite a duplication of data even each nodes are much weaker than the one in a centralized system, they can't simply say, double the disk and be done with it.

> However, in reality centralisation is harder to scale, due to the bottle necks on the central parts of the system. Decentralisation can be theoretical easier to scale, as bottlenecks don't occur as easily.

There is a difference between "distributed" and "decentralized". Uber, Amazon.com, Booking.com are distributed applications that can process a tremendous amount of transactions per second. At the same time, Amazon.com is owned by a single organization that controls data, hardware and makes all the decisions.

On the other hand, Bitcoin/Ethereum are decentralized: there is no single actor that is performing all state changes.

I think for any system with user generated content, abusive usage will be an enormous (possibly intractable) problem for completely decentralized systems. It is an enormous problem for centralized systems as well, but it is a bit more tractable because there is a controlling entity that can set and enforce policies. Advocates of decentralization largely seem to see this as a feature rather than a bug. I think that's short-sighted.

Efficiency.

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