Kind of like how git made tools for decentralized development widespread, so nobody uses centralized intermediaries to host their repositories any more.
You make that comment sarcastically, but git has in fact made decentralized development easier, and is in fact used that way by some projects such as the Linux kernel.
That many people choose to use it though centralized services such as Github doesn't diminish its power as a tool for decentralized software development compared with earlier tools such as cvs and svn.
Likewise, Bitcoin and Ethereum also enable decentralized coordination that wasn't previously practical, and the fact that accessing them via centralized middlemen is currently popular doesn't change that.
I don't think the /s is needed, decentralisation of "power" or "authority" has never worked. Decentralised protocols can work, such as Git, but people in general are both lazy and don't care. They will always gravitate towards the easy option, which is giving someone else control.
What does work is centralise powder and authority with democratically chosen rules and regulations. It's the easy option, and it works. Fundamentally that's the thing "crypto" misses, those democratically created rules are there to protect the masses from the few. Unwittingly (?) the creators of Bitcoin actually created the greatest tool ever for financial crime and defrauding the unwitting general public when they were actually trying to empower them.
I don't think the /s is needed, decentralization of "power" or "authority" has never worked.
Yes it most likely has. It's just not absolute. There's a very strong argument that all of history is supporting data for all societies and governments being on a spectrum of centralized power, with the more decentralized ones being better for the common person.
At what population size is democracy acceptable? Is it bad to say live in a world with decentralized democracies i.e. say the US and Sweden are separate entities?
A side-effect of developing from a normal-sized git repo is that you have a copy of your "blockchain" locally.
I won't claim that github/gitlab couldn't somehow do evil remotely and cause you to nuke the code history next time you build from a hacked pull request or something. But even then there's a decent chance at least one developer hasn't done the evil git pull. And if that's the case I just copy it from them and I'm back where I was.
If I understand correctly, nothing at all like that was possible in the FTX case.
I mean, at least git is easily "re-decentralizable" if you have to: Just add another remote to your working copy and push your state.
I also believe there are lots of companies who run their own internal git services to not be dependent on GitHub.
I agree though, in theory, git would allow some fully p2p working mode, where each developer just adds the machines of the other developers as remotes and there is no "authoritative" remote at all. If that was ever seriously proposed as a real working mode, it definitely didn't catch on, due to it quickly becoming extremely confusing.
In practice, having one universally agreed upon "authoritative" location of the project repo gives you an enormous amount of advantages, more than a p2p setup would give you.
I think as long as you can freely choose where to host that authoritative version and can quickly change its location if need be, I'd still consider git to be decentralised in practice.
> I also believe there are lots of companies who run their own internal git services to not be dependent on GitHub.
The same is true of Subversion or CVS or Perforce, which are all very centralized source control systems. Relying on Github.com itself is another level of centralization over and above the near-universal industry pattern of having a centralized repo.
> I agree though, in theory, git would allow some fully p2p working mode, where each developer just adds the machines of the other developers as remotes and there is no "authoritative" remote at all. If that was ever seriously proposed as a real working mode, it definitely didn't catch on, due to it quickly becoming extremely confusing.
That is more or less how Linux kernel development works, with Linus' own repo just being more respected than others, but with many entities maintaining their own central repos (e.g. many distros and larger organizations only manually take patches or merges from Linus' repo, they don't otherwise rely on it in their automation). Changes are often collaboratively worked on for months or even years outside in sine of these repos before being sent to one of the official maintainers for inclusion in Linus' repo.
Now, this practice makes no sense at all for a centralized entity like a company, which is why virtually all companies used centralized repos where all code and collaboration happens by mandate - whether using Hg, Git, or SVN.
> but with many entities maintaining their own central repos
This sounds more "federated" than p2p though. I imagine each organisation has again a centralized hub for coordinating their own development on the kernel. So the collaboration between those different orgs (and eventually with Linus) is sort of a layer on top of the normal git workflow.
I think you can see "federation" patterns (i.e. where orgs/servers/hubs/etc are p2p but each user belongs to a particular hub) pretty often in decentralised systems - and my subjective impression is that they are a lot more successful than "true" p2p systems (where users themselves are p2p).
Other examples of that pattern would be IRC, Mastodon, email and in a limited sense the web itself (users are bound to a platform but platforms can interface with other platforms via APIs)
Crypto (and git) would be sort of hybrids: It's technically possible to use the system without a hub, but the vast majority of users goes through a hub - for crypto, those would be cloud wallets and the exchanges we're talking about...
One of the best features of git that every cloned repo is a full copy. Now having a separate backup of the golden repo itself is also a good idea, but if shit hits the proverbial fan you at least have the full history up to your latest git fetch on your laptop.
One could spin it like: thanks to git reducing the requirement for servers for more of the development experience, it has reduced the reason for companies to self-host repository servers.
That many people choose to use it though centralized services such as Github doesn't diminish its power as a tool for decentralized software development compared with earlier tools such as cvs and svn.
Likewise, Bitcoin and Ethereum also enable decentralized coordination that wasn't previously practical, and the fact that accessing them via centralized middlemen is currently popular doesn't change that.