Why Decentralization Matters (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why Decentralization Matters (2018)

onezero.medium.com

my biggest issue with this is that i don't believe democracy really works at scale.

wikipedia vs encarta is used as an example of the success of a decentralised network effect in adoption and growth vs the centralised much more limited encarta. i think you could argue that wikipedia is just as centralised as encarta ever was.

i think any decentralised network will eventually skew towards increased centralisation. something we see already in the centralisation of mining and/or network validators.

> i think any decentralised network will eventually skew towards increased centralisation. something we see already in the centralisation of mining and/or network validators.

This is not exactly a decentralized network, more like federated, with large servers and many more users. Have a look at I2P for a truly decentralized design.

> i think any decentralised network will eventually skew towards increased centralisation. something we see already in the centralisation of mining and/or network validators.

This actually happened to Mastodon (decentralized social media). Suddenly out of nowhere a new Mastodon Instance/Server become big in Japan, bigger than the server hosted by the Mastodon developer themselves.

However it got blacklisted by the Mastodon developer because certain content "that are legal in Japan" are problematic/illegal in the West. So the network are split in two despite using the same software. Which is ironic since Mastodon are created to make decentralized social media that can't be censored.

Here if you want to read more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064

It's not fully ironic but somewhat works great. Previously US-based centerized service should just ban such users even though they are non US-based, but now they can live their local instances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com