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Comment by normalhuman | Hacker News Reader

It's a tragedy of the commons situation.

Even if you understand the downside of centralized systems (and most people really do not), you cannot individually do anything to stop them. So you use them out of convenience.

"Decentralized" people are out of touch only to the degree that they believe that they can change the world based on collective altruism. That is an uphill battle. They are not out of touch in realizing the dystopia that we are heading towards.

I imagine two possible scenarios for decentralized systems to take over:

a) Dystopia goes mainstream -- one scenario: "social credit scores" become common practice and people start to fear using the web to an extreme degree;

b) Someone comes up with a decentralized system that is able to do something, only possible with decentralization, that everyone really really wants.

I hope b) happens first.

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(B) is what Bitcoin did with drugs, assassination, etc. and BitTorrent did with file pirating.

That said I agree with you and that was exactly my point. Instead of coming from altruism they should build something genuinely useful that's only possible as a decentralized system.

> assassination

Do you have any evidence that this ever happened?

First, I am speaking from my own browsing experience on the now-dead silkroad.

Second, I'm not trying to disagree with you at all. It was to point out that there are definitely use cases for decentralized technologies where centralized systems can't go (although a lot have been negative so far)

I know you are not trying to disagree -- and if you were, that would also be fine, of course :)

Mine was not a rhetorical question. People keep mentioning assassination markets but it always sounds like a urban myth to me. I would like to know if there are documented cases or not.

Just because you see an advertisement on something like silk road, doesn't mean that it's not some kid playing pretend.

Trying to buy a hitman was how they caught the creator of the silk road.

idk how legitimate they are, but hidden wiki does have entries for forums for this.

It's possible to deploy SaaS software on-prem now. There's a c) solution that takes the middle path where we all win. Unfortunately it takes implementing a type of "suffering currency" to enable how people pay for it. If they are willing to slow down a little for reliability, they get more reliability. If they insist on running recursive workloads, and in general just chew up a bunch of resources for no gain, they get their workloads slowed a little. Works with the Open Source model too.

People would change the way they use the web, not stop using it.

Yes, that is precisely my argument. Make the normal web sufficiently oppressive, and the freedom provided by decentralization becomes so compelling that people switch to it.

Do you seriously expect that in dystopian scenario altenative going to be available? Even if decentralized services going to remain available do you think people will risk using them?

Most likely they won't going to do that. This is proved by China and more extreme example of North Korea also available.

Or just look at any country with totalitarian regime: they increase regulations really slowly so people "too busy" to think about that, but at some point they simply too scared to do anything.

You have a point. What I imagine is that some underground "resistance" would develop and use such systems, and once the authoritarianism eventually collapses, the mainstream will then be afraid of centralization.

Take as an example the Germans' insistence on privacy, to extents that even seem ridiculous to a lot of people (e.g. the right to blur your house in Google maps), and then consider their historical context.

China would seem to prove the opposite: extensive controls are in place, yet many people find ways around those controls.

Reportedly teenagers, who are much more aware of networks' downsides by having grown up with them, are trying harder and harder to turn off or at least reduce their network footprint. See for example the rise of ephemeral services like Snapchat, 4chan, pastebin and so on.

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