[bufbupa]

Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. Personally I've always internalized decentralized vs centralized arguments not as "all nodes communicate peer-to-peer" vs "all nodes negotiate through common mediums" but rather as a "power is distributed to leaf nodes" vs "power is consolidated at root nodes".

I think you're right in that peer-to-peer doesn't scale. I also don't think many (reasonable) individualist ideologies espouse that it does either. Individualism isn't renouncing hierarchical power structures, but rather asserting that the power rests with the hierarchy's leaves (individuals) not with the root nodes (collectives). It's the same way the west leverages a republic rather than direct democracy for it's legal system.

Or put another way, the individual leaves should be in control of the nodes higher up in the hierarchy, not visa versa. Imo, your interpretation of the debate is missing the real argument being had here. Decentralization in this a political context is saying "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible". Naturally, those leaves will still organize themselves hierarchically in the name of efficiency (ie: I'll elect this official to make decisions on my behalf because i don't have the time to contemplate every bill/law being proposed myself). But that hierarchical delegation is still a distributed/decentralized power structure as long as the people can freely re-organize into a different hierarchy or elect a new representative at will.

[pphysch]

> "power should be distributed to leaf nodes as much as possible"

I don't see how this works in practice. Power manifests in subtle ways. For example, you can have a pure direct democracy where individual voters nominally carry all the political power...

...but who decides what is on the ballot? Who determines the ontology of current and future policy decisions? Are closely-worded policies X ("ban abortion") and Y ("restrict abortion") the same policy with shared vote counts or different policies with separate vote counts?

If you democratize that power, you are subscribing for literally endless arguments over semantics.

See also district gerrymandering.

[igorkraw]

To answer just what you have in your post with what is the lives reality of people of Switzerland:

- anyone who can get 100k people to agree with them decides what to put on the ballot

- the parliament, which can shunt responsibility to the people after a best effort

- courts, politicians, in the end additional referenda settle disputes

District gerrymandering is also a uniquely Anglosphere-related problem that doesn't cause nearly as many problems in Germany, Switzerland etc

With no offense intended, us nerds on Hackernews tend to lose track of the simple solution ala "just ask people", "let people have a discussion", "common sense will sort it out over decades" while the rest of the population has no problems with things which aren't easily formalized

[pphysch]

I agree for the most part, but keep in mind that "old" nations like Switzerland and Germany have a distinct advantage here. Family relationships trace back literally centuries and there is a strong sense of national tradition, which implies some level of ontological agreement and makes democracy possible to some extent. This shortcut does not apply to implementing a functioning democracy in, say, some "nation" of diverse ethnic groups arbitrarily carved out by British imperialists in the 19th or 20th century (see Africa and West Asia).

> "common sense will sort it out over decades"

More like centuries. USA has been a nation for 250 years yet we are teasing a second crisis of separatism. Immigration definitely plays a big role here. Political consensus takes generations to settle.

[igorkraw]

Families yes, but I nees to push back against the idea of national tradition and ethnic homogeneity mattering here.

The nation thing is very much not the case for Germany and Switzerland at least. France more, and for homogeneous population maybe the nordics but the myth of the ethnically homogeneous long nation state is something that I mainly hear from conservative/right wingers who want to claim diversity doesn't work (not implying you are, just in general). The comparison with a colonial overlord carving out a centralised nation is also not too relevant, except that I agree that was bad and trying to impose European civic systems without also building the infrastructure and economy to support them doesn't work?

But Germany the nation was born in the late 19th century (Bismarck, Prussia taking over etc) and modern Germany has a complicated relationship to the old nation and nationalism in general. In Switzerland, they are literally 4 ethnic groups with regional fracfionalism tied together by will and democratic traditions, any ethnic stuff doesn't really apply there.

[bufbupa]

I definitely don't have a formulaic answer to that question, but here are some heuristics that I'll posit drive us in the right general direction:

- Freedom of information So that leaves can error correct when corruption is detected

- Freedom to re-associate So that leaves can re-organize when the existing power structure becomes destructive to the leave's objectives. This may be a contextual or cultural shift rather than a direct form of corruption. (Eg: climate change may change many individual's priorities going forward). Imo pursuing this heuristic should preclude most forms of identity politics; I'd rather the leaves associate on philosophical priorities rather than on innate physical characteristics

- No special rules for leaves vs nodes higher in the hierarchy Or perhaps only more restrictive rules for nodes higher in the hierarchy

Your examples seem to have went back to a peer-to-peer model of decentralization; which I was agreed is inherently inefficient and untenable at scale. You need some hierarchical distribution of power, it's just that it needs to stay beholden to the leaves in the hierarchy. The person who decides what's on the ballot is the individual(s) elected/appointed to have that job. That person(s) is likely beholden to some pre-agreed upon rules for how to phrase questions, and any individual in the society can cry afoul if they abuse their position or if we need to update the rules with new considerations. All other leaves can choose to listen if they want, and choose to respond if they want, at whatever level of the hierarchy they believe is best suited to respond to the corruption. The hierarchy is not rigid, it's dynamic, evolves, and must be allowed to error correct as each individual sees fit. The only way that's possible is if it's driven bottom up rather than top down.

The objective should be to distribute and localize power as much as possible, because the more power is centralized, the more prone to corruption, less efficient, and less responsive to nuance it becomes. The exact laws and regulations that achieve that objective? Society is still working that out, but I'd argue separate judicial, legislative, and executive branches was a good move in the right direction. I'd also argue trial by a jury of your peers was also a solid move in the grand scheme of things.

I'd argue that same objective holds true for technological networks as well.

[afiori]

for a decentralized social-like network nodes closer to the root need to have influence on nodes closer to the leafs, but leafs also need to move around and maybe connect to multiple root-like nodes simultaneously.

One of most successful decentralized system that is useful for what it was meant to do is DNS, which has this tree-like delegation in its core