Hacker News Reader

Most people probably don't care about nor want decentralization. They want predictable. They want to make sure they get paid on time.

They don't care whether the government nor Zuckerberg is spying on them. They just want to get on with their lives and anything that causes friction is annoying.

Accordingly, this is why hardly anyone's dumping a ton of effort into decentralized services. There's no profit incentive.

It's also massively hard to get right. Preventing or punishing bad actors is way easier in centralized systems

Not to mention that in centralized systems there's an ultimate authority who's willing to sacrifice a little of their profit as a cost of doing business in order to make sure that real customers that were scammed or had an issue of some kind have a good experience.

And yet even with an essentially centralized service like Zelle, the system is rife with abuse: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/10/report-big-u-s-banks-are...

... except when the bad actors are the central authority.

Centralised systems seem to trend towards something like a protection racket.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford

What most people want isn't the most important piece of information for innovators and leaders. You have to know it so that you don't get so far away from what they want that they don't gang up and destroy you, but the reality is, most people don't have very big thoughts about the present or the future.

Most people don't value decentralization because they live small lives focused on their individual problems. Nothing wrong with that, but somebody has to think about the larger problems of civilization resiliency and improvement. It's these people who think big who pull all of us forward towards a hopefully better future.

The consistent problem with decentralized everything is fraud. Centralized organizations spend immense amounts of time and effort fighting fraud and ultimately eating some of it as a cost of doing business. As soon as you start decentralizing, either fraud needs to be eliminated entirely (good fucking luck with that lol, if you have a way to do this there are easily millions in it for you elsewhere) or it's going to be shouldered by users.

But who will guard the guards?

In a centralized business, it's a standard corporate governance model. Which works great except for all the times it doesn't lol, but it's a known quantity. I've never heard of a decentralized equivalent that isn't just centralization with some extra steps.

What exactly is precluding someone from building this today, regardless of the tumor?

It exists. There have been a number of decentralized cab hailing apps. I was never able to get a single cab on any of them.

The problem is decentralized apps have shit advertising budgets.

Which is because there's no money in it.

If you build a centralized platform, you get to act as a middle man and skim off profit off every transaction, which you then reinvest in advertising and feature development.

On the other hand, if you build a decentralized platform, you've essentially commoditized yourself: you can't skim off profits, because if you do, a cheaper node will just pop up, leading to a race to the bottom.

Ironically, the actual system that exists and existed pre-Uber in NYC (TLC) is about as close to a real decentralized system as you're going to get. Like most good decentralized systems, it relies on a small centralized core (the government) to enforce a few basic invariants (taxi drivers must be trained, licensed, pass background checks, vehicles require insurance and must pick up passengers in certain zones and not in others, etc) and offer a few basic primitive operations (get driver license, get FHV car license, get base license, etc) to get involved with the market.

Beyond that it's all decentralized -- anyone can, after jumping through the right hoops, buy a taxicab or medalliion, affiliate with a base, become a driver, etc. A passenger can easily find a car by walking about half a block to the nearest avenue, putting their arm up in the air (in much of Manhattan) or by using the Curb app (in less busy areas).

The total number of cabs and the prices they charge being set by a central authority is decentralized?

I don't believe this would have been legal in many places. At least in the US, most cities have regulations on drivers and vehicles that are allowed to be used for ride-sharing and commercial purposes in general. For better or worse, the central arbiters that own ride-share apps verify that drivers and vehicles meet those requirements. A cab hailing protocol can't give you that, as you need some authority that has the ability to check whether you meet requirements before allowing you on the platform and it needs to have the ability to remove you as well. Being able to do that requires that there be a platform.

The roads have similar requirements (licensing, etc) and the way it is policed is with police. Similar methods can be done for other systems, if desired.

But it's much simpler and easier to deal with a single or a few entities, and so things collect and congeal.

> If there was a protocol for cab hailing, and anyone could roll it out for someone to connect to their network (like xmpp), and anyone could offer to become a driver or play another role like customer support, they earn their local currency and are a part of their local economy.

I think this overlooks the methods Uber used to build the market for app based cab hailing. Things that aren't core to running a cab hailing business (or protocol) but were important to getting a network started. Two things in particular - cash incentives for both drivers and passengers, and ignoring existing regulations.

In the early days Uber gave free cell phones to many drivers, offered tons of cash bonuses to them as well, and offered tons of discounts to passengers. They aggressively recruited drivers from existing car services, offering the owners increased utilization rates of their cars.

It also just walked into markets and setup shop in flagrant disregard for the rules. Importantly, it then aggressively encouraged users to protest when cities tried to crack down on it.

Both of these would have been difficult for a protocol without Uber's level of funding to accomplish. Maybe a protocol could be launched now that the model has become normalized, but it would still be difficult to grow a network from scratch without funding. Decentralization and capital investment are tough partners. Hence most "decentralized" businesses actually being pretty centralized.

>I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from growing into the current tumor it has become.

I wish I could go back and time and just curb the federal government and the multitude of 3-letter agencies that make up the massive police into from growing into the current tumor they have become. Doing this would be far better of the country and the world than anything crypto-related. The problem isn't that power is centralized by corporations or a proposed "super ap" like Musk dreams of. The problem is centralized power - period.

> I wish I could go back in time and just curb crypto from growing into the current tumor it has become.

Some of us have been against it since day one. Yet it still happened.

My liberty will not be constrained by your desire to force your “righteousness” on me and my family.

Sorry if that enrages you.

> If there was a protocol for cab hailing, and anyone could roll it out for someone to connect to their network (like xmpp), and anyone could offer to become a driver or play another role like customer support, they earn their local currency and are a part of their local economy.

How do you prevent fraud? How you fight bad actors on both sides? How would you track reputation ? How would you prevent from someone botting their way to 5 stars while scamming customers on every step (our outright robbing) ?

Such wishy-washy "oh if it was DECENTRALIZED it would EMPOWER everyone to get into the business" falls apart pretty quickly when hitting reality.

I think etherium's path was the right one. Set it up to transition to PoS after enough buy in has happened on a PoW cluster.

BTC is a disaster because that wasn't built in from the start.

PoW doesn’t magically address the interface problem with the real world.

I have to assume by now that any responses in the crypto world that amount to “this coin will fix it” are made by people that own that coin. No further analysis is necessary at this point.

> PoW doesn’t magically address the interface problem with the real world.

I didn't claim it did? PoW solves the "how can we trust this transaction should have happened" problem which prevents some centralized org from stealing coins from your wallet. However, it does that at a huge power cost (it has to, by design).

PoS solves the power cost problem, but cannot be initiated until there is enough stake holders with enough to lose. Start with PoS and you are basically asking for your centralized management to be trusted. The PoS transition has to be planned pretty much from the coin's foundation.

Of course, there's also traditional banking which I think are generally the better idea. Not because they are more trustworthy necessarily, but there are 3rd party enforcement mechanisms which are hard to stop if a bank becomes a bad actor. (the legal system). That, of course, assumes a functioning gov, but my assumption is that's what most HN commenters live in.

The major problem with crypto is that 3rd party enforcement is not possible (by design). So, if someone steals or scams you out of money, you are SoL.

The usual answer is third party reputation tracking and resultant self-regulation as a silver bullet.

Hopefully the Yelp mafia have disabused people of that notion.

I mean it's nice to have those things but you make it sound like it would be impossible without, which is unrealistic... cash worked (and continues to work) for a very veeeery long time and has mostly the same disadvantages. You can still use cash in most places for a taxi (some cities in China being the major exception where they will outright reject you without wechat).

More generally speaking, fraud is not prevented by digitally traceable transactions. It's still something that happens and businesses have to accept as a cost for ease of use: see "the optimal level of fraud is non zero".

That's ignoring alot of antifraud mechanism in money.

1. face to face transactions are alot harder to defraud someone. 2. coins a hard to make and scales were used too. 3. there's a lot of anti fraud in paper money also.

Anti-fraud in cash is limited to authenticity, something that any half decent crypto currency can accommodate as a fundamental.

There is no conceptual reason why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions. In realty crypto has many other issues, but not this one.

Yeah there is? Gold is valuable because it's made of physical atoms that are hard to reproduce, this dynamic doesn't apply to information.

The value of information is realized through other means that make a distributed information based currency impractical. Even Ethereum recognizes that some, non-zero, degree of centralization is required.

I did not compare it to gold.

Lack of intrinsic value applies to both cash and crypto. The main difference is that one is backed by a government and is globally recognised whereas the stability of crypto's value is beholden purely to the market. Centralisation is actually incidental here, the government makes certain guarantees that makes it's cash currency more stable.

FYI, I'm just playing devils advocate here, I think all crypto so far has utterly failed at providing an alternative to cash even though in theory it's entirely capable, and that's because the main barrier to entry is government recognition... it's a classic failure of "we can solve this with tech and sidestep regulation", but when replacing one piece of information (as you put it) with another, then it turns out that recognition by authorities and regulation is integral to it's success regardless of any technical advantages.

Cash is also made of physical atoms that are hard to reproduce, I chose gold because it's intuitively obvious to everyone whereas some folks may think it's easy to counterfeit cash.

It's much more difficult to copy cash then copy information.

For crypto, copy != counterfeit.

So? The statement that cash is a lot harder to copy than information still stands.

High resolution color printers are orders of magnitude more difficult to access then similar tools for information.

Yes, and the sky is blue. You keep bringing up straw men and then pivoting. I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve.

> It's much more difficult to copy cash then copy information. > The statement that cash is a lot harder to copy than information still stands.

My last two comments do not seem to be 'pivoting' at all. Nor do they appear to be bringing up 'straw men', a non-substantiated claim isn't credible.

> I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve.

I was trying to achieve a response to your comment that: 'There is no conceptual reason why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions. In realty crypto has many other issues, but not this one.'

There is in fact at least one conceptual reason 'why a distributed cryptographic currency could not take the place of cash for in person transactions'.

> How do you prevent fraud?

By principle, you want the government doing this.

lol

I'm beginning to understand, how is it (and thus, why is it) that decentralization is doomed to fail under our current culture.

decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power. that's it. that's the only reason necessary to explain why it'll never be allowed to stay decentralized (and decentralizing). in many countries/cities, cab liceneses are quite a corrupt business; it comes down to who you know that can hook you up with one (kinda like drugs but without the raw illegality). typically the driver does not own neither the cab nor the licence; they're just some poor employee without many options.

>It would be fully decentralized, except for the payment part. If you have everyone on your platform you don’t need to issue tokens and other bullshit. Just build something useful and they will come.

sounds naive, you know who will also come if you start to get popular with your platform? the government/police who really act quite like a mob. them people who want/need/like to be powerful. because any such platform which is popular has power, power ripe for 'centralizing'; just say it's for safey and legality instead of 'centralizing'.

Rather than looking at it as "decentralizing dilutes power, and so the evil cabal doesn't allow it", I would present your insight differently.

Decentralizing dilutes power, and power wants to agglomerate, so decentralizing is often like asking water to flow uphill.

that makes it sound like a natural law, an inevitable process. is it, though?

At least within social structures, I would argue it is, much like power vacuums and game theory.

Even monkey troupes and wolf packs have central power figures.

first we should clarify what we mean by 'power'

in this context, 'energy over time' is not what we are talking about.

I'll leap to say ultimately, it's probably quite like mass and gravity; the end observed effect of mass lumping together is like this 'observed' effect of power agglutinating. but which is the mass? and which is the gravity?

Yep, so it doesn't "just happen" - you need to build a pump first, and you need to keep it running for the water to flow uphill.

But it can be done.

The switch for the water pump, electricity connection, etc., must necessarily be centralized.

It's impractical to design a pump operated by millions of switches or fed by millions of electrical cables.

It's less efficient, sure. But it's eminently practical if your goal is to avoid hydraulic despotism long term.

It would be so less efficient that you could simply buy a 1000x more water pumps for the same price. No one sane would choose a water pump with a million switches over 1000 of the same pumps with 1 switch each.

> decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power. that's it. that's the only reason necessary to explain why it'll never be allowed to stay decentralized (and decentralizing).

You have to also look at the other side of the equation, the user. The user often doesn't care about decentralization, but about convenience. And a single, central point to say, order stuff, or food, or a taxi is a convenient thing.

Think about say, ordering food by searching by hand for every business within a given radius around you, going to their own website, looking at the offering, and entering your details. And then doing it differently the next time when you feel like eating something else. It's a pain, and a centralized delivery system makes things a lot more convenient.

Decentralization often implies choice paralysis. Which Mastodon server do you register on? Which email provider? Which XMPP server? And what if your server of choice isn't being kept up to date, or doesn't support X extension popular service Y wants? A centralized service everyone uses quickly becomes attractive.

Another issue in this mix is the prevalence of mobile devices, which are only active for short intervals and otherwise mostly sleep. They can't be true peers on the internet due to this, and need external supporting services. This also leads to centralization.

> Think about say, ordering food by searching by hand for every business within a given radius around you, going to their own website, looking at the offering, and entering your details. And then doing it differently the next time when you feel like eating something else.

This is exactly what I do, and it's completely fine. My desktop web browser can even save my credit card details (but I have mine memorized so I don't do that) and does save my address to make it just as easy as GrubHub or whatever. Three different restaurants have thanked me for using their website rather than the other services that they go through because it's cheaper to them.

> decentralization, like what you describe in cab services, dilutes power

Exactly. It dilutes the cabbies power of negotiation, collective bargaining, unionization in general. It's bad for workers rights.