The Limits to Blockchain Scalability
The notion of &#x27;decentraliztion&#x27; as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist&#x2F;absolutist, and it&#x27;s ruining their own projects.<p>Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we&#x27;d fall down instantly.<p>To require a system of &#x27;absolute decentralization&#x27; when &#x27;partial decentralization&#x27; would work just as well, doesn&#x27;t make sense.<p>We technical people have an odd way of falling into these kind of traps - we&#x27;re trapped in theory, unable to map to the real world pragmatically.<p>DNS on the internet works on the basis of &#x27;partial decentralization&#x27; and it works very well. There wouldn&#x27;t be that much point in making it &#x27;fully decentralized&#x27;. We could push it maybe a few inches more that way, but there&#x27;s zero requirement to go &#x27;fully decentralized&#x27; for it.<p>You get vastly diminishing marginal returns to effort when you start to go absolutist.<p>Much like Rust, which has some very nice outcomes but trades absolutely everything for those outcomes, some small tradeoffs in decentralization for Blockchain would yield probably some big benefits.