Why am I so passionate about decentralization? Because I believe some of
today’s most profound problems with networked applications are caused by
centralization.
Generically, a centralized political or economic system permits only one
answer to a question, while decentralization permits many separate
agents to hold different opinions of the same matter. In the specific
context of software, centralized variables can only contain one valid
value at a time. That limits us to only representing information A)
according to the beliefs of a single agency, and B) that changes more
slowly than it takes to propagate. Nevertheless, centralization is the
basis for today’s most popular architectural style for developing
network applications: client-server interaction using request-response
communication protocols.
I believe these are profound limitations, which we are already
encountering in practice. Spam, for example, is in the eye of the
beholder, yet our email protocols and tools do not acknowledge the
separate interests of senders and receivers. Slamming, for another,
unfairly advantages the bidder with the lowest-latency connection to a
centralized auction server. Sharing ad-hoc wireless networks is yet a
third example of decentralized resource allocation. Furthermore, as
abstract as centralization-induced failures might seem today, these
limits will _not_ improve as the cost of computing, storage, and
communication bandwidth continue to plummet. Instead, the speed of light
and human independence constitute _fundamental_ limits to centralized
information representation, and hence centralized software architecture.

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