[Fice]

Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it.

No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wallet provider. This will not change until new ethics of decentralization forms in the society. And that will happen eventually, but it could take a lot of time.

[6stringmerc]

So I agree with you in general and also wish to un-pack a little of what you mention based on my personal growing up alongside internet access. As in, I can do the 2400 baud modem handshake from memory, ran a server on a cable modem, and now consider myself more a user/consumer of technology than a creator/in the field.

Traditionally access to the WWW had a pretty high threshold of combined factors: Cost for hardware and communications, time and effort to understand how things worked, and a still pretty basic group of sites and such. Lee is wrong in that the Web used to be 'more open' from a general social sense - it was AOL chat rooms before Snapchat, it was GeoCities before Facebook, and on and on and on. Large organizations like Dropbox have made it competitive and a more intelligent decision than trying to set up a personal server and jump through all sorts of intellectual and digital hoops to make it work.

Or, in other words, the easier something is to use, the more idiots are going to get their hands on it and use it. The Web is simply a reflection of the human species. Both stunningly beautiful and tragically ugly, it's certainly evidence to me that Utopia is, fundamentally, irrational and likely impossible without exlcusion and selection bias.

[zanny]

Bitcoin already is. Blockstream LLC employs a majority of core developers with commit access, and thus can effectively hold the protocol ransom for profit, and they have been doing so for over a year now. Good luck ever getting a fee-less transaction accepted, and even at "standard" fee rates your transaction may not be accepted into a block for hours due to the backlog because they have intentionally kept the maximum block size at 1MB, intending to sell for-profit centralized corporate services that "guarantee" rapid block acceptance on their own lightning platform.