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Decentralization doctrine causing a mental block? (self.ethereum)

Dunning_Krugerrands が 投稿

The main advertised promise of ethereum is of decentralised autonomous applications. However I note that:

  • digix.io it is not decentralised (gold is stored somewhere) but it is useful.
  • Individual API's which use Ether API's will not be decentralised (the servers providing web services are individually owned) but they will be useful.
  • Individual sites hosted on swarm and/or merchants with ERC20 shopping cart functionality will not be decentralised (they will be fully owned by their owners).
  • The flight delay insurance app resolves centrally

So there are plently of value adding applications which don't require full decentralisation. I worry that the doctrine of decentralisation is slightly missleading and is causing something of a mental block that:

  • Focusses people on decentralized 'x' rather than new value propositions.
  • Prevents quick market tests
  • Encourages design complexity.
  • Paradoxically encourages monolithic apps which try to solve everything rather than plugging into other services (since some required decentralised services may not exist yet).
  • Bogs people down in the search for a trustless solution rather than leveraging other forms of trust.
  • Makes people miss low hanging fruit, apologise for or abandon projects because they cannot be completely decentralised.

So my questions are:

  • Are there some things we are missing because we are too focussed on the goal of fully decentralised apps?
  • Does the concept of decentralisation need to be unpacked, made more nuanced, and based on an fuller understanding of the benefits and where they actually matter?
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[–]DeviateFish_ 8ポイント9ポイント  (2子コメント)

Absolutely this. I've lost count of the number of ideas people have thrown out that literally have no thought behind them other than "we should make the decentralized x", where x is something that only actually functions well because it's not decentralized.

When you ask them what decentralization offers, they respond with the typical canned responses of "trustless" and "open", etc, without actually answering the question.

[E] accidentally a word

[E2] "because it's decentralized" -> "because it's not decentralized." One day I'll learn to English.

[–]Boop-Noodle 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

I think people are always looking for "it". That one thing that's going to make everything better, decentralization is that right now in some circles of the tech / entrepreneurial world.

[–]DeviateFish_ 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yeah, I think that's pretty spot-on. It sounds like the kind of FOMO that's kind of common in the startup scene. Same thing is going on with "sharing economy", "network effect", and whatever other flavor of the month buzzword happens to be popular.

[–]LarsPensjo 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Centralization is used as a rhetorics for something bad. The main issue with centralization is if it means there is a single point of failure. An app having a single point of failure can still be fine, but it adds a risk that you must assess.

Ethereum protocol development is highly centralized today. As can be seen in some other cryptocurrencies, this can in worst case lead to a high degree of discontent in some groups. In the case of Ethereum, I would say it has been proven that it is not a severe problem, as in the case of ETC. That is, there was an effective split.

Mining centralization can indeed be a problem. For Bitcoin, some see it as a problem that mining is, to some extent, "centralized" to China. It can be argued whether that really is a centralization. For Ethereum, miners are sometimes regarded as hired workers. If most of them are located somewhere where price of electric is low, that is fine. At least as long as we are not talking about a single miner.

[–]edmundedgar 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

I agree with this but think a lot of these central points of failure will end in tears. If the flight insurance DApp was used at scale somebody would complain and the API would get blocked. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make it that way, but what you've made is a demo, not a scalable product.

What we're missing is the middle ground of m of n trusted parties. Part of the problem with this is that people like to be original and dislike copying each other's interfaces, but ultimately it's what we'll need.

[–]LordNoOne 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

IMO, a fully decentralized app would require you to already have a fully functioning decentralized society.

[–]hodlor 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

When dapps start appealing to a larger user base (not just crypto people), this bias will disappear like a puff of smoke. Dapps that wish to have mass appeal do not even have to worry about this.

[–]TTPrograms 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

Based on my understanding, it's very hard to make a decentralized app that is profitable. I.e., if I want to make some sort of decentralized twitter and include ads in it to fund development then it would be very easy for someone to fork the contract and make a new one where the ads were removed or under their own purview.

As a result basically all the companies making products have to have some centralized control in order to make a profit. This shouldn't indicate that centralization is preferable or superior, necessarily - just that it's necessary for functioning companies.

[–]decyphaEthereum - Viktor Trón 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

As a result basically all the companies making products have to have some centralized control in order to make a profit.

The interesting part is the extent to which this does not stand. by attracting more users the value of the platform grows and as a result your position appreciates. The funny thing is it does not have to be your (company's) users any more. By sharing the platform any value contribution across businesses is not lost profit which incentivises transparency, collaboration and coordination as opposed to secrecy and competition. This is more so the more the business relies on adoption.

The more you plan to rely on transactional income (rent seeking), the more vulnerable you become, and therefore the more competitive and exlusive and political you need to be.

we are lucky.

[–]malefizer 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

The function of language tokens is indeed to exclude possibilities. We have learned a lesson with Immutability already. With theDAO fork, we have learned that there are more degrees of mutability hardness to debate than the indicated word includes. Interestingly there was another confounder notably involved in the discussions at the time: the mix between social norm vs factual premise. The "thou shalt no change the protocol" vs "Is it possible to change it?". Some persons felt strongly that a tabu of immutability was broken, but the very point of the technology behind it was to factually prevent make it hard to do so.
Decentralization is subject so a similar confrontation of social norm vs factual premise. A factual limit is the number of nodes, currently 6028. An other factual limit is posed by the EthHash algorithm and its (de-)centralization economics. Now a infinite decentralized system would not be able to hard fork. Perfect imutability reached! But since we want progress, we want a good degree of centralization. This applies also for the DApp space. The "kill switch pattern" became very popular among Solidity programmers after theDAO. Given a decentralization problem, for orientation one can ask the following questions: (1) How much trustlessness is needed?. An example that I've discovered only yesterday due to a language constraint in Solidity is the following: when creating a chapter of a Decentralized Political Party do I need to control the whole sequence of creating a local chapter and add it to the global organization? Or is it enough if I can prove that the chapter was created in a secondary trusted (but trustless) contract and a centralized service adds it to the global organization? Or instead of creating it trustless, could I just verify that certain specifications are fulfilled? Could I not control at all and let people vote with their membership if they find the chapter trustworthy? It's indeed a question of what needs to be trustless and what should be trustful, but also how much centralized trust is good. (2) How much trustlessness can be acheived at all? We see how bitcoin decentralized to a degree of seven mining operations. A power law situation, with a huge tail of micro mines and seven leaders. What are the economical limits of PoS in decentralization? Why will the power law situation not happen? Will we wake up and discover that true decentralization is not realistic?

TL;DR: see decentralizion not as binary option, maybe not even as a factual option.

[–]meziti 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

who is we? you ask, are there some things WE are missing?