will
@w
what Solana did with Ethereum? 😅 😬 😥 (from https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/)
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shazow
@shazow.eth
I shared that post mainly because I disagreed with most of it. :) But above all, federation is not decentralization. Fiat is centralized, SWIFT is federated, Ethereum is decentralized.
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will
@w
have you written your disagreement in longer form? I'd love to read it. I'm not sure where I shake out atm, but I do find a lot of his points compelling
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shazow
@shazow.eth
I honestly don't think moxie is willing to entertain the differences. It's a false dichotomy as I said in the other thread with @links (centralized vs federated, ignoring decentralization). I am not advocating for federation. Yes, it's sometimes faster to iterate when you're centralized, but here's a strong counterexample: permissive open source is as decentralized as it gets, and it almost always wins in open market conditions against centralized proprietary competitors. Have to build abusive monopolies and walled gardens to keep an edge. It's not my fav post anymore but this 2021 era piece talks about it too: https://shazow.net/posts/decentralization/
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will
@w
i'll check it out, thanks OSS is interesting because it is often actually quite centralized in terms of roadmap (linus was a dictator..), and it often gets eaten by adjacent layers (e.g. many successful OSS projects are moving away from it as they get eaten by ~AWS; uniswap also moved off to BUSL, etc) it is not a network so it doesn't actually fit in this dichotomy i think (signal itself, which he runs, is built on plenty of OSS..?)
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shazow
@shazow.eth
That is an incorrect conception of centralization. Someone being a leader in a decentralized system does not make the system centralized. Gotta consider it through the lens of failure modes: What power does Linus have over you that is not protected by the license? Can he stop you from using Linux? Can he stop you from extending it? Etc.
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will
@w
He's talking about networks, you're talking about software. You can't compare the two. Software is something that can be forked, a network is not. this is ~why federated services happen on top of decentralized protocols (e.g. gmail and smtp), and his contention is that this ~always happens (e.g. alchemy/infura on top of ethereum) which you aren't addressing at all
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