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Comment by iamcurious | Hacker News Reader

I really hope the current centralization of the web is an evolutionary step.

The degree of centralization is directly correlated with its reach. It was decentralized when most people in it were tech savvy, it became centralized as more people got in that are not tech savvy. To make it decentralized again we could 1) expel all non tech savvy people 2) increase the level of tech savvyness 3) create a parallel web where mostl people are tech savvy. I don't see either 1 or 2 happening any time soon. (3) is happening with bitcoin and tor, but as soon as they get popular enough they get centralized again.

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So you're saying its impossible to have decentralized software that non-tech-savvy people can use? That seems a little backwards from a cause and effect perspective.

Making software centralized makes it easier for non-tech-savvy people to use, as there are incentives to people to make their websites more accessible (larger profits). Decentralized services aren't somehow fundamentally incompatible with usability—its just a challenge we haven't tackled yet.

So you're saying its impossible to have decentralized software that non-tech-savvy people can use?

Decentralized services aren't somehow fundamentally incompatible with usability—its just a challenge we haven't tackled yet.

I don't say it is impossible. Just a lot harder due, for example, to the CAP theorem and friends. But that isn't that important because...

Making software centralized makes it easier for non-tech-savvy people to use, as there are incentives to people to make their websites more accessible (larger profits).

Yes! It isn't a matter of usability but of incentives. By having more tech savvy people you change the incentives, there is less to win by centralization (because they can do it alone) and more to lose (for instance they can't fiddle with it any longer). Also it is less attractive to make a centralization because a larger percent of the users will work around the attempts to control them.

I think it's more like, non-tech-savvy people don't care about centralization. And decentralized things are harder to build. So, the natural tendency is to do the easier thing (build a centralized service) if-and-when the people you want to target will put up with it.

I think this is a straw man, because whether the internet is centralised or decentraised doesn't depend on how knowledgeable its users are.

We have a decentralised transport system, and modern vehicles are very sophisticated, but that doesn't mean that every driver needs to be an expert mechanic or embedded systems engineer.

Most people understand the basics of car security much more than they understand the basics of computer security. It is much easier to see that losing control of your car is dangerous. It is much easier to recognize when you are losing control of the car. There is a tangible sense of being in power of their own vehicle that is really hard to convey with something as abstract as a general purpose computer network.

Even so, as cars gets more complicated there is a tendency for centralization. There are more laws and regulations, there is a bigger dependency on the company that designed it, some cars even update their firmware remotely, and so on.

>(3) is happening with bitcoin and tor

You can't centralize bitcoin, that would be like trying to centralize p2p sharing, the protocol doesn't allow it. An alternative digital currency may emerge that is centralized, or more likely, a single currency exchange will dominate bitcoin. But in reality exchanges would become obsolete if bitcoin really took off (you would just get paid and purchase goods all in bitcoin, no need to exchange to another currency).

You can't centralize bitcoin, that would be like trying to centralize p2p sharing, the protocol doesn't allow it.

You can't centralize the protocol, but you can centralize the most popular exchanges. You still got the protocol down there, but it is wrapped up in a nice centralized single point of failure interface.

It is about Blockchain and Xapo wallets or even about centralized validation in wallets like Mycelium.

Such centralized systems had not existed in Bitcoin before it became popular.

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