> because decentralization doesn't _automatically and inherently_ solve hard problems _merely due to the technology being decentralized_, we should not waste time working on decentralized systems and instead work on and support centralized ones (one would imagine, particularly his)
That is an extraordinary mischaracterization of his talk. What he actually says is that decentralization makes many desirable characteristics -- enumerated at some length in this video -- more difficult. The implicit argument, then, is since we're struggling to achieve certain desirable characteristics even in centralized systems, we should focus our efforts there first.
One point I've made in alignment with this is to ask why decentralized systems are inherently more private.
Most decentralized systems seem to have more surface area for surveillance, not less. Why couldn't surveillance agencies and data-grabbing corporations just launch a bunch of "Sybil" nodes to surveil everyone? These would be virtually undetectable as they would be otherwise well behaved nodes and could be put behind ordinary looking cloud or ISP connections. Most shared data stores can be trivially scanned and data mined, decentralized networks like DHTs can be crawled, decentralized apps can be MITMed with Sybils and honey pots, and so on.
I predict that if any decentralized or federated system really becomes popular enough to merit attention from data-grabbers we will see the launch of an industry of companies and consulting services dedicated to mining and surveilling it. Security is hard, and security across a heterogenous decentralized network run by users and volunteers is many times harder.
I suppose you can see something analogous in the cryptocurrency space. I've argued for a while that Bitcoin and similar CC systems were in fact rapidly compromised, but not by attacking their cryptography or protocols. They were compromised via social engineering and financial game playing that transformed them from currencies of the sort they were intended to be into decentralized Ponzi schemes and money laundering vehicles. They were taken over and repurposed, not taken down or hacked in the conventional sense. The same thing would probably happen to e.g. Matrix or Mastodon if it got popular enough. Companies and governments would just assimilate and repurpose these things into surveillance and spam-delivery vehicles. With superior resources and economic forcing functions this would be quite easy.
A centralized system has a single point of failure, but that also limits attack surface. I assume centralized systems to be surveilled by their own operators and their host countries, but it's a lot harder for other actors to do so.
1) It's a reasonable comparison of centralised and decentralised systems.
2) It's a way to discredit decentralised systems so people move to Signal because Moxie is a corporate / government shill or want to be the personal Jesus or something.
Which explanation looks more likely to someone, is mostly based on how they personally trust Moxie. And a lot of people in the community don't consider Moxie trustworthy.
In my personal opinion, this talk made a lot of people angry, precisely because Moxie went to Anarchist club (CCC) and had a talk that can be summarised (again, in my personal opinion) as "give up on decentralisation, give all power to ME ME ME and I'll take care of you, pinky swear." Of course Anarchists don't want to hear that.
But to someone who trusts Moxie or centralised power in general, this might seem like a crazy interpretation.
3) Sharing his belief that centralized trumps decentralized for a bunch of practical reasons and of course Signal is going to be a centralized system based on this belief.
(I don't necessarily agree with Moxie but I saw his talk as neither of your 2 points.)
> And a lot of people in the community don't consider Moxie trustworthy.
What gives you that impression? I've heard many cryptographers say a good first step is to "just trust moxie and install his stuff". He's certainly better regarded than Pavel Durov (Telegram).
He definitely states for each of his points that the people working on decentralized systems are misguided because decentralization doesn't automatically solve these hard problems; and while his thesis is what you state--that solving these problems is easier as a centralized system because you are more agile--other than a few awkward straw positions (many of which I addressed, and which aren't even really arguments but just anthropic assertions based on misstatements of history) he doesn't really have much to say on the idea that decentralization makes the problem harder. Hell: I'll admit he could have... I have myself given talks about issues with federated systems (vs. "truly distributed systems", which I think are very different than federated systems) and the pain of trying to deal with things like metadata privacy (something the people behind Matrix actually admit in some of their internal talks), but all of his positions here (with again, exceptions where he just ignores transport privacy or goes down rabbit holes of false tangents about phone numbers) really came down to a repetitive phrasing like "decentralized systems are not inherently encrypted, in fact most decentralized systems are not inherently encrypted by default; there's nothing about decentralization that makes things encrypted, you know?" (exact quote) that are later followed with a couple unrelated points and then a restatement of the (incorrectly argued) thesis that decentralized systems can't change and centralized systems are the only way to get new technology. It is like claiming "decentralized currencies don't automatically cause privacy or anonymity, and in fact the vast majority of cryptocurrencies provide more public records than your existing bank" while just flat out ignoring that things like Zcash not only could exist but in fact already exist.
> (something the people behind Matrix actually admit in some of their internal talks)
Actually, we've been quite clear publicly that Matrix's initial incarnation didn't try to deal with metadata privacy, e.g. this presentation taken from a 2015 talk at the Jardin Entropique cryptography conference in Rennes: https://matrix.org/~matthew/2016-12-22%20Matrix%20Balancing%...
The fun thing is these days we've got to the point of building out metadata-preserving federation transports in Matrix (I just spent the Christmas break working on the stuff outlined in https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/dip_p2p_matrix/).
It feels like we (as Matrix) should do a formal response to moxie's "ecosystem is moving" stuff at some point, not least because the original blog post was written in response to me mailing him to consider linking Signal into Matrix :/
> It feels like we (as Matrix) should do a formal response to moxie's "ecosystem is moving" stuff at some point, not least because the original blog post was written in response to me mailing him to consider linking Signal into Matrix :/
That is an extraordinary mischaracterization of his talk. What he actually says is that decentralization makes many desirable characteristics -- enumerated at some length in this video -- more difficult. The implicit argument, then, is since we're struggling to achieve certain desirable characteristics even in centralized systems, we should focus our efforts there first.