The importance of decentralisation
It&#x27;s sort of an ongoing hobby of mine to study the forces of decentralization vs centralization.<p>This article about decentralization does what many other evangelism articles do:  <i>talk about the ideals and benefits</i>.<p>However, I believed what&#x27;s rarely discussed but more important is the <i>economic forces</i> that prevent decentralization from fulfilling the idealists&#x27; vision.  Yes, decentralization will be in effect for niche groups but I don&#x27;t see it becoming mainstream.<p>To purposely be provocative to spur discussion, I will make a bold claim:  <i>Decentralization is an unstable equilibrium.  It&#x27;s the centralization that becomes the stable status quo.</i><p>If tpcip protocol and http protocol are <i>already decentralized</i>, why do we have centralized services that have &quot;too much power&quot; such as Facebook&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Youtube?  It&#x27;s because different actors can <i>spend more money</i> on their particular http node than other http nodes.  Those <i>unequal economic forces</i> is what makes decentralization tend towards centralization.  There is no technical protocol specification that can prevent that.<p>E.g. if Git protocol is decentralized, why is there so much concentration on Github?  It&#x27;s because John doesn&#x27;t want to install a git server on his laptop and punch a DMZ hole through his home router and leave his laptop up &amp; running 24 hours a day to serve up his git repo.  He&#x27;d rather spend the weekend playing with his children.  And Jane doesn&#x27;t want to spend $30 on a Raspberry Pi and install Gitlab on it to serve up her git repo.  Multiply John and Jane&#x27;s by a million other devs with their own various reasons for not serving up their git repos in a decentralized manner and the emergent phenomenon you get is something like Github.<p>See the trend?  Centralization is a <i>natural outcome</i> of millions of people not wanting to (1) spend money and (2) not wanting to spend extra time -- to fulfill ideals of decentralization.<p>I wish we would discuss the above factors much more often and there were more articles about it.