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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor.

It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant.

In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.

Much of the disappointment with government and their three-letter agencies, is the growing belief (and mounting evidence) of long-term, wide-spread larceny, mischief and even evil on the part of government agents -- with the knowledge, support and protection of the government.

It is critical to use systems that make bad behaviour impossible to hide.

This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour), but decentralized KNOWLEDGE (large numbers of random actors, confirming that behaviours meet the standards).

> This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour)

yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public.

whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.

wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.

one more example to drive this home:

"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.

I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."

-- Wendy Liu, https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...

> people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of

the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently. And it is this constraint that prevents people from "building systems with great (positive) social impact that they can be proud of".

> the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently.

well yes, that's what happens when the means of production are privately owned: workers have to sell their labor.

> malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.

This is a naïve claim which is disproved by all available evidence.

Markets without central regulation are always exploited by participants with more knowledge. Regulations are required to keep the playing field level.

Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary by jurisdiction so it’s also decentralised in implementation.

True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.

While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.

The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.

A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).

> The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accumulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.

Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.

This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.

What we actually have is representative democracy, where the choice is often nominal, and leaders generally come from the same class in practice (and represent the interests of that class). So the fact that people don't "vote them out" is not an indication that they don't care enough - they might care but not have the choice that would reflect it.

It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.

They can't do whatever they want. They can do more than you'd want them to be able to do, but they can't just take billions of dollars and put them in their own pockets. Company bribes makes every American politician a multi millionaire, sure, but if they could do what they wanted they would be multi billionaires like the rulers of Russia and China.

that's half true.

every actor in the system has its own ledger and they reconcile transactions at a given point in time.

you don't need to know what others are doing or who they are.

your bank authorize your transactions and then some other bank receives the order to deposit the money on another account they control.

in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one true ledger to rule them all"

I was referring to 'larceny' in my comment as being a centralized rule.

One person can hit another person over the head without any centralized authority being involved. So I don't think your claim is correct at all. Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

>Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

If this is possible, then it is equally possible to just hit anyone you please with stick so that they are forced to do what you want.

Which means, the most violent eager person gets to rule. Which is what people who prefer court system don't want.

If you just hit people with sticks, they are bound to hit back. I don't understand your example.

I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?

No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.

This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.

Except there are still warlords, and drug cartels. And police beating black fellows more often than the average.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/africas-top-10-dictator...

You need commanders for war.

Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.

Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.

> inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.

and produce the court-based system we see today, with enforcement of the stick centralized to an authority that everyone agreed to (implicitly).

Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break down as factionalism spontaneously emerges: within our tribe we handle things via social cohesion and weak displays of symbolic force, outside our tribe we handle things via stronger displays of retribution

Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.

If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually

I guess you could argue the set of laws is the central authority that produces a two-party system, even though it may not have been intentional. Presumably you could adjust the laws so that other constellations would emerge.

Also why do people have to live in societies of millions of individuals? Perhaps smaller units would be better. To some degree that is already what happens, as for example villages can decide some things for themselves. The question is just who should get to decide what.

> Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

But that's not a society any of us want to live in.

I didn't say you should run society like that. I only provided an example to prove that centralized control is not necessary to enforce rules.

Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch to groups whose rules align with their own preferences.

It is not an all or nothing, there can be degrees of centralization and decentralization.

Of course we can not escape the laws of nature in the end.

Centralized authority is definitely necessary to enforce rules in any practical sense.

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