Dnia niedziela, 6 marca 2016 11:20:54 piszesz:
There's always things like TorChat for instant messaging and IPFS for content distribution. There's no concept of any centralisation in either - they're completely peer-to-peer.
Such was also the idea in BitCoin. As we can see, there's a secondary (not protocol-level) centralisation happening there. Cartels emerge, because economy of scale makes them viable, and indeed profitable. Yes, TorChat, IPFS, Tox are good examples. I'd be hard-pressed to identify any economy of scale possible there, I guess.
I'm not sure why you drew a comparison to e-mail - it's inherently centralized, just among several servers.
It's not centralized in a way Facebook is, for example. While e-mail was obviously never a p2p system, it was not a centralized system. The idea was decentralized, federated among *many* servers. But economy of scale did its magic and now we have a small number of companies controlling almost all of it. -- Pozdrawiam, Michał "rysiek" Woźniak Zmieniam klucz GPG :: http://rys.io/pl/147 GPG Key Transition :: http://rys.io/en/147