[babelchips]

No, today we have servers with some form of leader or centralised point of failure.

With a properly decentralised network any node can be taken down without taking down the entire network.

Not all public DLTs are born equal however. Leaderless networks which are not vulnerable to DDOS attacks are the dream.

[Zababa]

What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.

[nobody9999]

>What is this single point of failure? You can take any server down on the internet and it will be fine. The DNS may be a more vulnerable point, but still, lots of different organisations have DNS servers on lots of different places.

Not single points of failure, but a few major (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.

Take any one or more of these down and there are major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and communications.

Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.

Any real decentralization solution will require ubiquitous (multi-)gigabit symmetric links to/from the Internet on commercial and consumer connections.

Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.

tl;dr: If you want real decentralization, you need to provide the resources to do so at all levels of the networking/application stack.

Edit: Fixed usage: Symmetric vs. synchronous.

[Zababa]

According to wikipedia:

> A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.

Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. People that depends on X with X being the major clouds may be considered a point of failure for your specific application, but that's just your application, not the internet itself. Internet is already decentralized by nature.

> Sure, there are other hosting providers, but there's far too much centralization of Internet resources on those four platforms.

Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.

> Because if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll need to host your content/resources in "the cloud" (read: someone else's servers). And that locks all of us into centralized platforms.

Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.

What Web3 seems to be trying to do is to have the convinience of centralization with the resilience of decentralization. For example, distributed authentity and payments. That's a great and noble goal! But I wish people would come forward about that and the tradeoffs involved instead of just talking about decentralization. Internet is decentralized by nature.

[nobody9999]

Note that I said:

   Not single points of failure, but a few major 
   (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare) points of failure.

And I most certainly didn't say or imply that such failures would "take down the internet." Rather, I said:

   Take any one or more of these down and there are 
   major disruptions in commerce, connectivity and 
   communications.

That's very different from what you appear to think I said.

>Because it's convenient. Decentralization has a constant cost. Centralization benefits from economics of scale.

But there are costs to that centralization too. Not measured in dollars, but in freedom, creativity and choice.

>Peer-to-peer solutions work fine, and you don't need multi gigabit synchronous links for that.

Do they? If that were the case, we wouldn't have these behemoth tech corporations.

Decentralized solutions exist, but aren't currently viable for a variety of reasons. I chose to pick on asymmetric network links (the asymmetric part is the important bit, not necessarily total bandwidth, although that's important too) as a blocker to decentralization.

Feel free to disagree, but decentralization needs to be about more than just distributed block chains and services hosted on centralized server plantations.

Edit: Fixed usage: Asymmetric, not asynchronous. Sorry, still drinking coffee here.