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Comment by Ambolia | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, seems kind of a stretch to say crypto is decentralized because everybody uses the same protocol. Is the IP protocol centralized too by that standard?

On the other side yeah, most of the goals of decentralization could be achieved by looking at things like the Bittorrent / Pirate / Scihub projects which have been delivering content consistently in a distributed way for decades.

A blockchain is only necessary if you need an immutable history for some reason for a specific part of a process that you want to implement, but every other part of the process can live apart and work without any blockchain tech.

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There are a lot of bullshit blockchain projects.

That said, the reason tokens are tied to so many of these projects is to act as incentive and to quantify participation. There is no reason for people to, say, seed torrents aside from feeling good about sharing with other people.

Financializing this process brings an incentive to participate in decentralized projects that otherwise would have no way to exist. Sure, most of the projects will fail and perhaps only existed in the first place to enrich the founders, but isn't that true of the startup space as well?

The projects that succeed will succeed big, but I estimate we are still years away from an example that will be overwhelmingly convincing. By then most the profit will have been made and there will still be people on HN saying the whole cryptocurrency space is a scam. It is my opinion they are wrong, let history be the judge.

Funny that one of the most successful decentralised technologies (torrents) has no token for incentives.

While torrents are great for some things (wrote my own bare bones client off of libtorrent and use it to send files to friends as well as download stuff, as well as merged it to work with my fork of opentraker that has a built in LSA search from hash-metadata mappings [0: that can also be distributed via torrents]), they are pretty poor at incentivizing people to seed unpopular content and have it be widely accessible, and tokens on various networks seems to have addressed that for specific applications (there are a bunch of decentralized aws-like type stuff popping up that involve a token, but I still think it will take some time for things to pan out).

Would be great if we could incentive via tokens people to run mastodon instances where people can log in with their address (and multiple chains tokens are recognized) because I personally have no desire for onchain social media like i do for onchain derivatives and exchange functionality.

[0] https://github.com/cinquemb/opentracker

What makes you think they are the most successful when Bitcoin has a near $1 trillion market cap? Even if you think its worth $0, you cannot deny that it securely locks up all that money despite the hacker honeypot. That seems like an accomplishment.

I felt the same way… it’s arguing that cryptocurrency is not decentralized because there’s a general consensus on the protocol?

By that measure, parent comment is right, IP isn’t decentralized either because we agreed on it?

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