Dire Wolff
Aug 22, 2017 · 1 min read

I really dislike this term because there has yet to be any good way of defining what it means nor whether the economics of maintaining a system that has achieved this ever make sense. Do 2 nodes make a system decentralized? Do 10? Do 10K? Centralization was an answer to economies of scale, where decentralization distribute this cost across nodes, but make no node as powerful as a centralized one. Is Google a centralized or a decentralized system operator? Think carefully before answering that one. I fear that everyone wants to decentralize everything without giving much thought to why or when it truly makes sense. As well, decentralized systems in a capitalist system serve mostly as a tactic to attack centralized participants and are a transitory state. As nodes need to grow, they either do by having more resources put into them or by acquiring competing nodes, slowly moving things back towards centralization. This is happening with mining in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

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    Dire Wolff

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    addicted kitesurfer, snowboarder, privacy wonk

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