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David's avatar

This is a provocative point of view for sure. But I think it dismisses (or excludes) the economic effects of distribution of computing and the extent to which necessity is sometimes the mother of invention (eg: TCP/IP). At every point in time across the arc of computing, some form of standard connectivity was required to hit the next plateau of scale and scale is almost never viewed absent of the cost component.

Consider for example how the scale-out approach to compute has almost entirely overtaken the scale-up approach. Scale-up (eg: AWS style autoscaling to meet inbound web demand) requires standard connectivity like TCP. Scale up (eg: an Oracle cluster or a faster chip from Intel) is proprietary. I'm not arguing that there wasn't some countercultural influence involved in the invention of technologies like TCP that achieve distribution and democratization. After all, it all came from the same counter cultural area of the country. But the driving force was to scratch a technical itch and it is very well documented.

What is true though is the cyclical push-me pull-you effect where, every time a promising decentralizing, distributing, and democratizing technology threatened the profits of the status quo, the status quo at the time moved to re-centralize it, de-distribute it, and de-democratize it as a means to preserving profits and there are many examples of this like when Bill Gates woke up one morning and realized all of Microsoft had to pivot to deal with the Internet. His fortune up until that point was built on Microsoft's control of the distributed, democratized, and decentralized effect of personal computers (just one example of the full cycle). All of these cycles -- including distributed ledgers -- have driven cost out of scale. IOW, economics.

I have no doubt of the role that counterculture played in getting us to where we are with cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and distributed ledgers. But Bitcoin also solved a massive technical problem that's intermingled with economics and that similarly drives cost out of scale. The world is globalizing with no single fiat currency and, as the world globalizes and money is exchanging hands across borders in ways that it never has before (more entities right down to individuals), the cost of that scale was once again blocker that blockchain solves for. Maybe the best way to capture characterize the counterculture you speak of is "Everyone resists the cost of participation. So where the current culture is accepting of that cost, the counterculture will find a way to work around it."

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Itai's avatar

Thanks for thoughtful piece. I’m not an expert on network theory (or anything for that matter) but if we imagine decentralisation on a spectrum then surely what BTC and ETH present are networks that are more decentralised than a FB, Twitter or sub stack - and that’s enough to call the “movement” successful?

The ETH example is good, because imagine if 4,5% of FB users (30mn humans) had a say in how the news feed algorithm serves information to billions of people. That would be better than just Zuck deciding, right?

There’s always a utopian stretch goal and a few in the crowd reaching for it, but most people will be satisfied if the movement just dilutes power compared to the status quo.

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