Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

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I've noticed the debate around (de)centralization always seems to focus on purely technical issues, or on economic issues (which are technicalities of another sort). In other words, it's always the following two points that are debated:

1. Economies of Scale

2. Network Properties (robustness, scalability, latency, etc.)

It seems to me that a crucial element is missing from these analyses: organizational policy. All other things being equal (which they may not be), it seems like decentralization appeals to those trying to restrict top-down control. Historically, this has been an ideological thing (e.g. bittorrent's copyleft slant), but more recently I've seen mainstream endorsement of concepts such as "flat hierarchy", "distributed workforce", "collaborative work", etc. Interestingly, I don't see this discourse being picked up by decentralization evangelists, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Off the cuff, it seems like decentralized storage tech has a compelling story to tell about small distributed teams, working in a loose, peer-to-peer organizational structure. In this context, my mind immediately goes to the functional centralization of cloud storage. In general, the Cloud tries to concentrate control over computing resources in a single department (i.e. the devops team). But what happens when a bunch of freelancers collaborate on a project-by-project basis? From what I've seen, either (1) they use cloud providers, but the account is under the client's name or (2) they use some kind of SaaS solution with support for sharing or other forms of collaboration. With decentralized storage, it seems like a "bring your own cloud" approach is possible in principle, where these freelancers would pool resources (storage, compute, etc.). Are there any pain-points here? Is there perhaps a business problem that needs solving?

The question for me is whether these new patterns of collaboration are really becoming a thing, or whether it's a fad amongst business-school graduates.

At any rate, this comment is an invitation for y'all to opine on the subject. I feel like a good analysis of organizational policy could help us decide whether a decentralized web is economically viable, but I'm kinda stumped.

a classic essay discussing the real ground truth problems of decentralized anything is by Jo Freeman, called the tyranny of structurelessness [0].

though most of the punches land toward the end, it is a fascinating and short read, in which she dissects, with the sober disappointment of a former optimistic evangelist, exactly why structureless ("decentralized" before that term became vogue) movements are never what they claim to be, and indeed cannot be.

why? because structureless coordination of groups above a handful members doesn't scale beyond the achievement of the simplest kinds of goals, such as consciousness-raising (or, in crypto-promoter terms, spreading "adoption").

any group objective requiring specialization of labor, coordination of resources and responsibility inevitably succumbs to the insidious creep of informal, but officially disavaowed structural networks of insiders.

it is especially pernicious for newcomers, who have been heavily messaged about "decentralization" or "structurelessness" and engage themselves with the groups identity without any awareness of these cryptic back channel networks that actually govern its operation. only after they are committed do they slowly find out there really is a hierarchy and a command structure.

i highly recommend a quick read for anyone considering the merits of a given groups' claims of being decentralized.

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Structurelessness and decentralization are only related in that structureless things are decentralized. Decentralized things are rarely structureless. Whether a networking protocol is decentralized or not, it's definitely not structureless; it's nothing but structure, it's a protocol.

Well put. Thanks for putting words on that.

The confusion between structurelessness and decentralization is interesting in and of itself, though. It seems like it is exactly this conflation that prevents people from asking the interesting question: when does a centrally-organized social system (e.g. a business) benefit from a decentralized protocol?

It seems like this should have something to do with usage/access patterns within the business, yet we never hear about this.

Here's an example: Cash decentralizes credit.

"Cash and carry" grocery outlets were a 20th century innovation. [0] Before that, the norm was to have a line of credit with the business, and in many cases, to accept their terms for delivery. Cash transactions anonymize, since settlement is done at the counter. You don't have to assess the buyer, you just need to verify the bills and change are real.

However, that isn't the entire story. While there were businesses using cash before this, they faced difficulties with accounting, supply logistics, and other elements that made it hard to conceive of something like a "supermarket", carrying a vast variety and quantity of goods on a daily basis. So then we have to look at all the pieces that fell into place to make it possible.

The automobile decentralized access to mobility, making carry-away a real possibility for more people, and thus making it possible to apply cash-and-carry in more places. Supporting elements like cash registers and refrigeration were becoming mature enough to support new forms of retail and allow more parts of the transaction to be delegated to local outlets and low-wage employees. The inter-war years really saw a whole set of technological innovations that were used in combinations to propel social changes and different categories of business(e.g. fast food), many of them decentralized in some respects but centralized in others - supermarket chains, as opposed to local markets.

These are the kinds of changes that are hardest to assess in full; when you decentralize one thing, centralization is "squeezed" into other parts of the economy, it seems. The obvious example for this phenomenon is Amazon, leveraging an apparently decentralizing mechanism(online retail - premised on an internet with sufficient bandwidth and security to list goods and take payments) into becoming the world's largest retailer. So it's centralized on one axis, but decentralized on others - a buyer no longer has to go to a particular physical location to purchase something, when all of it can be delivered to the doorstep.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_and_carry_(wholesale)

You can have structure without centralization - see for example federated systems like email. However, the lack of a centralized authority comes with its own issues - see for example federated systems like email.

I won't disagree with your summary of the situation with email, but I think I would add that it is possible to have federated reputation systems which would solve much of the spam problem with email, at least.

To give more detail about the sort of system I mean, here is an excellent description of the approach favoured by the team behind the Matrix communication protocol:

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...

I'm familiar with this essay, and agree with most of its conclusions.

However, I am not convinced it is exactly applicable to the situation I have in mind. Freeman's point pertains to extreme decentralization of organizational policy, i.e. the flat hierarchy. These are arguably not even organizations; the essence of organization is precisely hierarchy!

I'm more interested in organizations that do have some degree of centralization. My hypothetical freelancers are certainly not disorganized. What I'm trying to grasp is the conditions under which any group -- especially one with centralized policymaking -- may seek decentralized infrastructure.

In other words: when does decentralized infrastructure serve the goals of a well-organized group?

I believe such infrastructure is better thought of as distributed, rather than decentralized. decentralization is a tendency to resist centralizing forces, it is not an intentional policy of a group. as soon as an identifiable organ in the organization is charged with twiddling the policy knobs that govern control over group resource access, this organ is now distributing this access and it can no longer be considered decentralization.

the paradox is simply this: decentralization implies the absence of a decentralizer. there can be no "center of decentralization."

I contend that the term is much closer to incantation than implementation in practice.

> I believe such infrastructure is better thought of as distributed, rather than decentralized.

Hmm, I'm not sure I follow. On a technical level, a pure p2p system continues to function without central coordination even if each individual node is "owned" by the same entity. These seem to be two very different levels of analysis. If I understand your claim correctly, you are pointing out that this hypothetical entity is centralized -- and I agree -- but that doesn't magically turn the p2p system in question into something else.

To reformulate the question: when is it advantageous for this abstract entity to use a p2p system in this way rather than a client-server system?

Is it e.g. a question of scale?

I have a nagging suspicion that it's partly a question of usage-patterns, though I'm struggling to put my finger on it. This is what I mean by "organizational policy" (which is admittedly an opaque term...)

I think its a question of how you reason about technology. I see technology as an extension of the agency of those who created and operate it, not as even in theory) an autonomous entity distinct from its users. in this view, who is operating the network is where the decentralization-or-not analysis belongs.

p2p requires peers, so called for good reason, because their interests and cost/benefits must align sufficiently for them to engage in using the same protocol. thus, "who these people are" dominates the question of control over the network.

tl;dr behavior of users networked by a putatively decentralized protocol will ultimately conform to the social organization of those users, not to the rules of the protocol. these will be routed around or backgrounded as needed to achieve the objectives of the dominant members of the group hierarchy.

Addendum:

I think I could get excited about FileCoin if it allowed me to pool storage with friends and colleagues. I've been wanting to have a distributed hacker-garage for a while [0].

Importantly, I want it to be independent of any cloud provider because (1) it's hard to freely experiment/prototype when you have to keep track of billing and (2) functional centralization makes the AWS/GCE admin de facto responsible for everything running under the account. This is great for large enterprises that want to virtualize their IT department, but it really goes against the grain for hackers, freelancers, and -- IMHO -- startup founders.

Returning to Filecoin, I feel like all the *coin ventures make the same fundamental mistake of over-estimating how much we care about money. I really don't care about pimping out my hard-drive for a couple of cents. I'm motivated by gains on the order of several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. The counter-argument I usually hear is that there will be more interest in developing nations, but then I don't want to store my data in e.g. Pakistan. I want data for pet projects in my own hacker-garage, and I want production data close to the end-user.

/rant

[0] Incidentally, I'm working on a project to do exactly this. It's a way of clustering a set of computers over the internet to produce a virtual cloud. It would be super cool to use FileCoin as a block storage layer in this context, but restricted to the hardware we own.

This speaks to the disingenuity of a lot of the decentralization talk in the crypto space. The Beaker browser and the hyperdrive protocol (formerly DAT) is an interesting case study. It has a level of maturity and delivers on many of the ideas that helped filecoin and other token-financed projects raise hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is relatively obscure and I don’t think I know anyone who has used it other than the people I’ve encouraged to check it out. If there were actual demand for dweb technology then it and other projects like it should be getting a lot more attention since it’s a free and relatively user friendly platform compared to services that require managing token exchange risk, accounting, and hassle.

https://beakerbrowser.com/

I've been keeping my eyes on https://cobox.cloud/ - it's run by some very smart people who have had their brains in the decentralization (not blockchain) space for a while now.

The alpha already lets you do what you're talking about, but I haven't used it yet and so I can't speak to its current stability.

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