[andrewjl]

I don't think they do, at least in the long term. In the short and medium term its arguable either way. We're still at the very beginning of the era of truly distributed computing and what it tends to do when it spreads is replace centralized entities with protocols.

If this sounds like a very played out line of thinking, that's because we're now in the trough of disappointment of the hype cycle. You can't expect any fundamental new tech to live up to its hype only a few decades after invention. Also not all the pieces needed have been invented yet.