Comment by yellsatclouds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellsatclouds | Hacker News Reader

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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'.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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