| Author here. I'm mainly writing about decentralization that is supposed to be mainstream while also looking for historical examples. With that in mind, I've looked at: - Dozens of file sharing apps and their protocols (focus on Napster, Gnutella, FastTrack, and BitTorrent)
- Tor, I2P
- Tor hidden services
- Original p2p Skype If we generalize "decentralization" into "creative uses of distributed systems and/or cryptography for the sake of privacy and resilience" then we can include a bit more: - PGP
- Willfully blind centralized systems like mega.nz Then finally if I dip into older attempts that IMO didn't get real adoption, we can include some other interesting examples: - Freenet
- Tribler
- Mojonation There are systems like Diaspora and Mastodon, but they're too close to the present IMO to use as historical examples. There are also obviously decentralized/distributed systems that serve as the backbone of the internet and I do want to allocate more time to learning these deeper, but they don't feel the same. --- Anyways, I'm not even really disagreeing with you but mainly trying to point out that I'm trying to draw from as much as possible. The original Skype stands out as a case where it seems to have no relationship with the law (https://twitter.com/backus/status/1014726515592818688). If you have examples (failed or successful) that you recommend looking into, I'm all ears. As I've pointed out in a few other places, my point regarding the law isn't to say that this is all decentralization will ever be for. Instead, I'm saying this seems like the main point in the past for mainstream applications. Maybe decentralized apps will work as well as centralized apps in the future, but it seems like this might be far enough out that it would be incredibly risky for a startup to decentralize today when it doesn't need to. I could say more, but this is already a lot. Thanks for reading my article! |