On Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:21:30 +0100 rysiek <rysiek@hackerspace.pl> wrote:
The BitCoin example is particularily complex, as there's no good way to tell, on the protocol level, "all those nodes are part of a single cartel, controlled by a single entity". But maybe there is a way of basing this on behaviour? If nodes X, Y, Z behave in a very similar manner, lower their weight in consensual decisions?
That's a good idea. It would need to be fine-tuned, though; I'm reminded of the days when I used Windows with antivirus software that would very often false-flag and delete things that I needed. Although, I suppose the consequences wouldn't nearly be as severe.
I see economies of scale driving a lot of not-so-great outcomes (centralisation of e-mail providers; centralisation of ISPs and the general Internet infrastructure, introducing single points of failure in many places). And that makes me wonder what can be done about it.
Maybe decentralization ought to be left to communications only?
How so?
I was going to say that because the simple sharing of information from one person to another doesn't rely on messy things like consensus that come from managing a distributed database like the BitCoin block chain, it's thus immune to economies of scale and fits snugly and easily into the decentralization model, but I didn't really think of the physical infrastructure of communication. Mesh networks do effectively address the problem of centralized infrastructure, though, but it's unfortunate that they aren't yet popular or saturated with resources enough to serve as a viable alternative in most cases. freifunk.net in Germany is a good example. I guess this goes back to your example of GMail again. Mesh networks aren't viable yet because tons of people don't use them yet, and tons of people don't use them yet because tons of people don't use them yet. The network effect is very unfortunate.