Dear Readers,
“Decentralization” is all the rage these days and will likely go down as the biggest buzzword of the decade, and with good reason: centralized systems have extracted massive amounts of data and value from societies, and when they go down, the world notices. Who can forget when most of the U.S. government was shut down in late 2018 over a funding dispute between a handful of congressional leaders and the President? Certainly not the hundreds of thousands of government employees who went without paychecks for weeks on end. Even more recent examples are available, such as Facebook’s outage across its suite of apps in October of this year and the Amazon Web Services outage last week. Both outages resulted in billions of users and millions of businesses being unable to access the services on which they’ve come to rely.
Each of the above incidents demonstrates the primary weaknesses of centralized organizations. First and foremost, they are always controlled by small groups of people, politicians in the case of governments and executives in the case of corporations, who make decisions that impact billions of people who had no say in the matter. Secondly, they are reliant on single points of failure that all go down eventually and leave users high and dry. No wonder humanity is abandoning centralized structures as quickly as possible.
