Thanks for this… but how do you square geographical diversity of nodes against owners of the severs (i.e Amazon with AWS)? Decentralized anti-fragile networks should avoid consolidation around some centralized host… no?
Efficiency always finds a way. Right now the cloud providers are the most efficient at enabling infrastructure. The pendulum will swing back to build your own servers, I suspect. But right now, I suggest be comfortable with the cloud.
I agree and also I can see this as a liability. Cloud infrastructure is more efficient because giant companies with the requisite capital and infrastructure can exploit their service offerings through bulk packaging - they win through economics of scale which is why we use them.
This is why I see it as a liability in the efforts to create decentralized systems that should represent a diversity of individuals, services, and unique implementations. When the economics of implementation are concerned, I can see a consolidation around 3rd party services which are simply better/cheaper than homespun equivalents.
This is actually addressed in one of Vitalik’s Medium posts where he states:
“Consensus protocols that work as-fast-as-possible have risks and should be approached very carefully if at all* , because if the possibility to be very fast is tied to incentives to do so, the combination will reward very high and systemic-risk-inducing levels of network-level centralization (eg. all validators running from the same hosting provider).*”
This may not be a major issue… and likely unavoidable in the short term… but the ideal in any decentralized system should be to obtain a sufficient and diverse variety of nodes where no central power/agency/company can take down the system.
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It may is like bringing your family day after day to the McDonalds restaurant, while believing you can feed your lovelies.
But in fact a very lot of people have no idea about farming, slaughtering and preparing food. It’s more efficient to order the XL meal-server.
Only when more and more inefficient “non-cloud” infrastructures stopped remembering their former know how McDonalds will turn into Mother Theresa and offer free courses and hardware to regain some independence.
We all talk so much about decentralisation. Yeah! Important! When finally!?
Email was pretty decentralised from the very beginning on and this lasted for decades. But in the current decade we see moving and merging and melting all together to gmail and o365.
I would be interested to hear people’s view on the following question.
What objective does decentralisation achieve?
Given that there are different types of decentralisation, I think this question is important to help decide which one should be the focus. If people are going to be passionate about some of the underlying ideals, it helps to ensure it is grounded in truths about value it can bring. There are many people in this industry that fight for a capability that has a philosophical importance, but practically offers very little value.
For me it’s resistance to intentional or unintentional interruption of service.
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