1 big data centre is cheaper
than 1000 little ones
everyone buys and sells through
Amazon because thats where you
find the most buyers and sellers
They will remain idle unltil untethered energy and bandwidth become free.
I won't let you use my phone's spare cycles and murder my battery while we're still using lipo cells that degrade after 2 years with regular use.
unless you tie it to an incentive, and thus you arrive at cryptocurrencies
That used to be popular (for instance, distributed.net) back when the processors used the same power whether they were idle or not. Nowadays, there is a huge difference in power usage and heat output between an idle or mostly idle processor, and a fully loaded one.
(My first desktop had a processor without a fan or even a heat spreader, and came with an operating system which had a busy loop as its idle loop.)
Re: Amazon: Most of the other venues you mention are secondary markets for the exact same sellers. People have their own Shopify, Etsy, Ebay, etc., storefront but then also sell on Amazon because that's where so much of the market is. As far as I can tell it's an increasing trend in that direction.
Peer-to-peer models last thrived when connectivity was predominantly symmetric (e.g., the early days of DSL) and faded quickly as asymmetric connectivity became mainstream. I think the decline of decentralization and the rise of asymmetric connectivity are intertwined; neither necessarily caused the other, but they are correlated. One could argue asymmetric connectivity became popular because users only wanted to consume rather than share/serve. But similarly, people stopped sharing and serving because their connectivity discouraged that use case.
Today, symmetric connectivity is returning, such as in the form of 1G/1G fiber connections to the home. Combine this with infinite static IP addresses, and ever rising edge compute capacity, and I think decentralization is inevitable. I won't predict the magnitude, but as a fan of decentralization, I personally hope it is at least significant.
Network effects of centralization explain why current big companies prefer to build centralized services -- but the next big idea never comes from existing big companies, anyway.
My 30,000' view of computing history is that big companies, as a rule, don't create big ideas that survive. They pick up small ideas that work and scale them up (Gall's Law). Git and HTTP and Python didn't come from Microsoft or Google or Amazon, but those companies took them once they were already popular and made them scale -- in large part by making them work well in a centralized architecture.
The software that comes next won't win because FAANG like it better for building centralized architectures. It'll win because everybody and their dog will be using it at home. Then companies like FAANG will see that and pick it up and try to centralize it. Then the cycle will repeat.
We've already got a billion tiny data centers -- the powerful computers and smartphones in our houses and pockets. All we need is the right software, and the desire to not have every service delivered free-with-ads-over-the-web from big corporations.
With asymmetric up/download speeds.
Who authors and maintains this software? And what is their incentive?
Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage.
I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services.
And that's effectively free because I already have it.
Yes, strictly. A 20W average laptop would cost approx 3-4GBP per month to leave on all the time in the UK, a modest desktop perhaps 10-15GBP.
It's been a measurement error in my power budget as far back as I can remember. Sure, you can go and compare it to EC2 or whatever if you like, but that's just silliness. It's a big mac meal.
My Threadripper box with a shitton of HDD's and RAM etc moves the needle because it has high idle consumption. I'll probably be getting rid of that soon; but it's still a low cost relative to purchase price.