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Comment by throwaway0asd | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your definition of decentralization. Everybody seems to have either a personal best definition or simply aligns to some trendy product (that likely isn’t at all decentralized).

My personal definition of decentralization is peer to peer without a server in the middle, like a telephone call. Nobody seems to like that definition because it’s extremely non-commercial.

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> like a telephone call

Which is routed through centralized exchanges ...

Routed through, not terminated at. Important distinction. Modern web is more like everyone calling through a handful of major PBXes.

If I pull the cable out of the back of the exchange / pbx what happens? The phone doesnt work.

A router is not a server.

In the context of censorship-resistant technologies, this is both technologically and semantically incorrect.

That makes no sense. A router is a box with routing rules and a few NICs on it. I have one setup in my house that's routing packets from an overlay LAN onto my home LAN. It is very much a piece of infrastructure that I own, and if I didn't control both ends, I would certainly want to be careful with operating it. If packets were E2E encrypted, I'd still be able to shut off my server and sever the link.

If you want true P2P with no intermediaries, then you need a direct P2P technology like a direct Ethernet connection or an L1 radio link with encrypted packets (and even this is fraught with a single RF collision domain.) Otherwise you are also just using a "personal definition of decentralization" that you gatekept about in your comment.

Intermediaries cannot be avoided. Signals between devices are always open to interception whether that medium in between is copper, air, water, something else. That is completely out of scope. The goal is to prevent deliberate third parties and regard unintended third parties as security consideration.

The internet is composed of routers and switches, but those aren’t application servers. Telephones have a start point and an end point without a telephone server in the middle.

Agreed that everyone has their own personal definition. With that in mind, I would never think of telephone as decentralized, at least not more than any other service provided by a company.

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