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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

It's creative destruction. When you decentralize, you are destroying institutions and tradition that are slowing us down. That doesn't mean you don't want new ones to rise up in their place. It's not that centralization is bad, it's just that _sometimes you centralize the wrong thing_ and this is how you fix it.

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I think it's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too little centralization and things are nearly impossible to do because you have to host your own email, website, blockchain, VOIP, photos, etc. Too much centralization and you have a single dinosaur of a corporation controlling everything and probably doing it poorly for a high cost to the consumer. You need something in the middle where you have ample competition, choice, and variety.

What do you think "in the middle" means? Everything is semi centralized? No, it means we've centralized the right things and not the wrong things.

Sorry, it just bugs me when people talk like this. Politics, too. People want us to do things "in the middle". What does that mean? Like a single payer system that pays for half of everything? What people actually mean is, they want a better solution that works for everyone. It's not a split the difference situation.

In the middle means that you have a large number of small centralized services that are interoperable. That way you get most of the benefits of centralization e.g. someone else manages the technical details, you benefit from the network effects of the service, the service can provide things at scale that you can't on your own and you get most of the benefits of decentralization e.g. you get to choose a service that is more in alignment with your principles, has the bucket of features you prefer, has the community you want to interact with, you can switch to a new service whenever you like. You also have to lose something in exchange, you can't fully customize everything the way you like and not everyone in the world will have exactly the same features available to them. It's a compromise. The key to making it work is having a common protocol and everyone agreeing to at least speak to each other rather than building their own walled garden Utopia™.

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