Distributed protocols that combat economy of scale

rysiek rysiek at hackerspace.pl
Sun Mar 6 13:13:41 PST 2016


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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 931 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20160306/d85867f6/attachment-0003.sig>


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list