Should Everything Be Decentralized?

[WhalingWhales]

I would actually like everything to be centralized, but by someone who could insure everything when using their services. In that, they charge you a fee or a monthly invoice for somewhat of an insurance.

That almost made me sick, yuk. Don't bring that off topic crap here. Bitcoin was never meant for none of that so if that is what you really want you better run back to the fiat train bro because the future will be decentralized like it should

[maku]

Bitcoin has no dominant control: no prime repository of information, no central management, and, what it she most important thing, no central point of failure. As you may know, most of the actual services and businesses built within the Bitcoin ecosystem are centralized I have no problem with that.
They are run by specific people, in specific locations, with specific computer systems, and they are susceptible to specific legal "difficulties".
That is the reason decentralization is so important for bitcoin and it can't fail.

[Bizmark13]

What many people here seem to be missing is that decentralization has a very real additional cost associated with it which would make it uncompetitive against centralized competitors except in very specialized applications. Money is one example where decentralization has concrete benefits over centralized solutions but there aren't that many others I can think of.

Consider YouTube as an extreme example. Could we decentralize that? Well, yes, we can create a decentralized YouTube where the blockchain consists of videos that people have uploaded but the end result would be slow, cumbersome, and above all, bloody expensive. Videos on YouTube are hosted on centralized servers. While a decentralized version would be far less prone to censorship, the fact that every single video would have to copied over and over ad infinitum would mean that the resources required to host even a small collection of videos would make it very expensive to operate. Consider the electricity and bandwidth costs involved across the whole network and you can see how expensive and horribly inefficient the whole thing would be compared to its centralized rivals.

Or if you want an actual real world example, compare Freenet with the wider non-decentralized Internet. Freenet is slow and bandwidth-intensive because websites are copied over and over again and stored on many different computers around the world. In contrast, centralized websites such as YouTube and Facebook are very fast and comparatively far more efficient. Freenet does have its advantages but the wider public likely won't care.

[Amph]

Something should be centralized.
Not everyone is educated.

Look at those scammers and thieves who are on always on a prowl for unsecured sites, they do it because there is no central entity that will fuck him up if he did those things.

So, we sometimes need it.

Like it or not we are heading towards a totally decentralized technological future, or at least the option of being at a totally decentralized internet.

Yes of course, the idea of decentralize everything is good but the process might be very very difficult because some people dont like to "decentralize" all the life aspect (yes I know it is hard to understand, but this is true). The freedom and the decentralization are really correlated.

some people don't like decentralization, because it take away the security, you need always to trust a third party with decentralized system, that's the only problem i can see, otherwise decentralization is the future

[redsn0w]

Something should be centralized.
Not everyone is educated.

Look at those scammers and thieves who are on always on a prowl for unsecured sites, they do it because there is no central entity that will fuck him up if he did those things.

So, we sometimes need it.

Like it or not we are heading towards a totally decentralized technological future, or at least the option of being at a totally decentralized internet.

Yes of course, the idea of decentralize everything is good but the process might be very very difficult because some people dont like to "decentralize" all the life aspect (yes I know it is hard to understand, but this is true). The freedom and the decentralization are really correlated.

some people don't like decentralization, because it take away the security, you need always to trust a third party with decentralized system, that's the only problem i can see, otherwise decentralization is the future

Yes of course but if you know that "part" is honest because is governed by a code and you know this code because it is open source you should not have to worry. The hack of those various exchange aren't related with the bitcoin code itself, isn't it? However I agree with you, the future is not more centalized .

[Bizmark13]

some people don't like decentralization, because it take away the security, you need always to trust a third party with decentralized system, that's the only problem i can see, otherwise decentralization is the future

Can you clarify this point? One of the key innovations of Bitcoin's decentralized consensus model is that it does away with the need to trust third parties in a transaction.

[BeetcoinScummer]

some people don't like decentralization, because it take away the security, you need always to trust a third party with decentralized system, that's the only problem i can see, otherwise decentralization is the future

Can you clarify this point? One of the key innovations of Bitcoin's decentralized consensus model is that it does away with the need to trust third parties in a transaction.

I think he is referring to paying using Bitcoin vs. paying using Visa or MasterCard, where the credit card company will usually refund the transaction in the event that there is fraud on the part of the seller. So to get back that assurance, you would need to use a trusted intermediary like an escrow.

[bitgolden]

Decentralization is good. No power to a single party instead all powers to everybody. But it would take more time to achieve this. But I believe this one must be the so stable model and working too....

[BillyBobZorton]

Decentralization is good. No power to a single party instead all powers to everybody. But it would take more time to achieve this. But I believe this one must be the so stable model and working too....

We are headed towards it but it will take a long time for it to catch up with the general public, but people like Kim Dotcom will help to achieve it because he is really famous and he is into it.

[Lorenzo]

Something should be centralized.
Not everyone is educated.

Look at those scammers and thieves who are on always on a prowl for unsecured sites, they do it because there is no central entity that will fuck him up if he did those things.

So, we sometimes need it.

Like it or not we are heading towards a totally decentralized technological future, or at least the option of being at a totally decentralized internet.

Yes of course, the idea of decentralize everything is good but the process might be very very difficult because some people dont like to "decentralize" all the life aspect (yes I know it is hard to understand, but this is true). The freedom and the decentralization are really correlated.

some people don't like decentralization, because it take away the security, you need always to trust a third party with decentralized system, that's the only problem i can see, otherwise decentralization is the future

Yes of course but if you know that "part" is honest because is governed by a code and you know this code because it is open source you should not have to worry. The hack of those various exchange aren't related with the bitcoin code itself, isn't it? However I agree with you, the future is not more centalized .

Fiat isn't really "code" though. Even when digitized, it's an entry in a centralized database. I don't think the problem of exchanging fiat to BTC and vice versa will ever be solved in a decentralized and trustless manner for various reasons. Ripple's distributed ledger model is probably the closest thing to a decentralized fiat-BTC exchange that we can achieve right now and even so, it's not actually decentralized but instead distributed and you still need to trust the gateway that converts the IOUs into actual funds:

http://ripplefederation.org/forum/why-must-end-users-be-forced-to-trust-gateways