Distributed protocols that combat economy of scale

agave agave at openmailbox.org
Sun Mar 6 18:52:25 PST 2016


On Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:21:30 +0100
rysiek <rysiek at 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.



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