Eric Florenzano

What specific permission do you need from Google, Apple, or Facebook to do the innovation that you want to do?

"Can I make my software available for users on your platform?" And it doesn't count if they have to flip a scare switch that allows external sources first.

Are there decentralization components that are in competition with their core business interests (like a conflict of interest)? Or is it that they're trying to maintain an arbitrary threshold of quality in UX, design, or security? Or is it that you actually have no idea why?

We had no real idea how to do decentralized stuff before 2008, and this current crop of bigcos came up earlier, so their centralized way of doing things is baked in. Now we have one or two ideas how to do it (Nakamoto consensus, Proof of Stake) but the UX has a lot of work to go.

We had plenty of distributed things before 2008, we just didn't really have a scheme to monetize them in a way that was also decentralized until that point :)

I think that's a fair distinction. Given our society, it's no wonder this restriction handicapped these types of systems in the past. I'd also argue that UX holds these distributed systems back, but again I think a key reason was lack of economic incentives to fix the UX.

DNS and CAs are still my 2 biggest concerns wrt centralized trust in tech.

Yep and BGP for me too

The open web enabled permissionless innovation. That lasted until major apps built on top of the open web amassed meaningful audiences that future innovators wanted access to: Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. Won't that just happen again?

Yes. My big problem with the decentralization religion is that the group tends to think it’s a technical problem but in reality it’s a social and perhaps legislative one.

My problem with either is that technically it is really hard to build some things decentralized and/or permissionless. For example, the permissionless model of WebAssembly requires security checks that slows it down. For some applications, not all.

People act like you can just will it into existence but there is a ton of technical engineering work that goes into supporting all the things you might want from the system.

exactly. there is a reason for the trend towards centralization and consolidation.

The work will be done, finally, now. The economics are now finally there from crypto. Especially while companies like Oculus keep preventing developers like me from publishing our apps. That's quite galvanizing.

I hate closed app stores too (though don’t know anything about vr) but how does crypto change anything? Can’t you get paid through stripe or PayPal faster and cheaper and serve a wider audience?

I think he meant crypto as a reward incentive to run nodes to make the decentralized system more robust. Something that was always lacking in older decentralized systems which made them slow and unreliable (gnutella, freenet etc) as they relied on charity to run nodes.