Decentralization has never worked in human history beyond hunter gatherers.
It’s continually amazing to me that people listen to people like Musk and Dorsey as if they have a clue they know what they’re talking about. You can tell they have full confidence that they do, trapped in their bubble of fame.
Because centralization works REALLY well, right? That's why the US practices decentralized command, that's why centralized economies have been so successful. This idea that decentralization has never worked is insane.
That's always an important question to ask when we discuss new ideas. New ideas doesn't arise for no reason. There are problems and people will ignore (not negate) them to defend the status quo when discussing alternative paths. As always, the truth lies somewhere between and that's why we love HN. We're not twitter.
I didn’t say centralization works well. My point is that anything “decentralized” becomes not so or if not, doesn’t work well.
Do you have examples of something decentralized that has stayed so and was not taken over by centralization or became highly bottlenecked or continued to work well?
Capitalism is inherently decentralized. Even just currency lets you separate production and consumption in time and space, which decentralized trade. Writing, even with manual copies but certainly with the printing press, decentralized learning to great effect.
In theory. The wealth gap and inequality would say otherwise. The percentage of people who own as much as the bottom 60% is in the sub thousandths of a percentage. It’s so small I can’t remember the amount of zeros after the decimal point.
That wasn't my point. The lack of equality means that the very few make all the decisions in this "decentralized" capitalism. The decisions that control and influence capitalism are highly centralized among a comparatively small group.
It sounds like you're just saying it's a winner-takes-all system. That's not inconsistent with decentralized decisionmaking. It's a virtue vs consequentialism thing - you can either maximize the amount of decentralization produced, which often requires some centralization to defeat network effects, or you can build systems that act in decentralized ways, which commonly leads to centralization of power due to winner-takes-all effects.
Compare recently how the decentralized nature of the internet led to centralization of services.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Inequality is clearly a problem but at least way more people have basic necessities and modern conveniences than at any point in history. Capitalism isn't perfect but it is immensely more positive than anything else that has been tried.
> but at least way more people have basic necessities and modern conveniences than at any point in history
Maybe, but that's just because of the scale of our population. By the same token, more people are considered starving today than there were people even alive just around 200 years ago.
It’s continually amazing to me that people listen to people like Musk and Dorsey as if they have a clue they know what they’re talking about. You can tell they have full confidence that they do, trapped in their bubble of fame.