Decentralized systems are WAY harder to build and this seems to always affect UX. If easier to use centralized systems exist, users always prefer them. Decentralization is like regulatory compliance: it isn't a feature that attracts users, you just do it to stay alive.
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Word. And today's contenders with the "slightly less decentralized" quality, like Stellar and Eos, are super promising contenders.
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Yeah, this is a really solid contrarian argument for those projects actually. Great point
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They went to the least decentralized system that still got the job done. What is the “job” of crypto currency platforms? I say censorship resistance but if it’s just somewhat decentralized value transfer stellar has been the best for that basically since launch.
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The boundary between what people want to exist and what the Government won’t allow to exist in a centralized way but won’t kill if it is decentralized
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I agree. I felt that was such a bright line but the government seems to have mostly given up. Maybe they’re just waiting.
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Yeah I don’t know, but as I’ve argued in past tweets I think waiting is probably a better strategy than killing early stuff and defining a playbook for future tech in the process
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BitTorrent was actually extremely decentralised, especially with the dht based swarm connection establishment mechanism!
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Yes, but less in 2005. Originally, it was one tracker per torrent, no DHT, no PEX. Those came with time
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Yeah sure buy at one point it was both popular and had decentralised swarm peer discovery mechanisms.
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Right but my point is the interesting transition point where it was less decentralized and yet better protected from a legal stance
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Than what?
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Kazaa, Gnutella
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Id agree that it was more centralised than gnutella but not more centralised than kazza, it was controlled by a company and was proprietary software
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BitTorrent traffic was between 55% and 67.5% global internet traffic in 2007. I don't see it as a failure. I think it won. One of the screenshots is from 2005 when BitTorrent's usage dropped temporarily due to key search engine takedowns
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I guess a general point is that most of the world doesn't really care about decentralisation... at least from a consumer perspective, some other factors play a role like a convenience (UX) and whether something is cheaper (pricing/accessibility).
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Exactly
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Search isn’t and in 2005 torrent trackers weren’t. BitTorrent decentralized more later with trackerless torrents, but compared to previous p2p protocols it was much more centralizsx by requiring centralized torrent search engines
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