| > Then there is the question of how decentralised services will earn their keep. [...] More fundamentally, an internet that eschews control points may be one that affords firms less opportunity to build profits. To create a return that makes venture capitalists happy, the new tech firms will almost certainly come under pressure to get ever bigger. This seems to me the core problem and contradiction of the current initiative: As I understand it, the whole promise of decentralized services is that: 1) Because most of the logic is run by peers, the "upkeep" for the designers of the system is very low, if existent at all. Ideally, the system is completely self-sustaining (as long as there are peers) and the designers don't have to do anything to keep it running.
(In the face of bugs and hackers this is probably utopic as you'd need at least some way to do security patches. It should however be significantly less than to run/rent servers) 2) Because most of the logic is run by peers, its the peers who decide how the system evolves, not the original designers. One consequence of this (and the main reason why users would want a decentralized system) is that the designers can't change the system for political/strategic/profit reasons. If VCs are now pushing startups in building decentralized products with the traditional expectations of growth and/or profit, I don't see how we can get a product that satisfies point (2). My fear is that anything that comes out of such a partnership would be "flawed by design" in the same way that DRM and many IoT products are: Such a product would look on the surface just like a "real" decentralized system, except with the one thing removed that makes decentralized system more useful than centralized ones: The lack of control points. Because you'd need such a control point to actually steer the system in a direction that satisfies investors. |
I think it is the misunderstanding of how decentralized applications work. The seeds decide about nothing during runtime. In an ideal scenario the seeds execute the application without being able to make any decisions terms of the business logic. That's how the trust between seeds can be established by executing the common functions i.e. Bitcoin mining or performing the Ethereum smart contracts by executing the application.
The issue is, we do not want the peers decide anything or be able to modify anything term of business logic. The objective is that all seeds execute "the" honest, published version of the software. Because such cannot be guaranteed, fundamental security issues exist in decentralized computing, some node can act dishonestly, and therefore vulnerability to 51% attacks and Byzantine Generals Problem exist.