0 sats \ 4 replies \ @DiracDelta 14 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: What Does Stacker.news Look Like in a Post Nostr World? meta
Nostr is not decentralized. There are distinct relays that are owned by a person who can do whatever they want, and does not need to maintain consensus with anyone else. The same is true of a client, which can be closed source.
Nostr is distributed: there are many relays and clients, which are distributed, and you can choose from the ones you want.
Been thinking about this and I think we are both right here. As a user of Nostr you could use it in a centralized way but it is not not decentralized. The fact that individual relays can do what they want has nothing to do with decentralization. It is distributed and decentralized. I can't see how one could say the protocol is centralized because if one says it is NOT decentralized you are inherently saying it is centralized. Like Git you could use Nostr in a centralized way but the protocol itself is not centralized.
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Decentralized and distributed are synonyms, for all practical purposes. Your take is the right take. One of my fervent btc wishes is that we stop talking about decentralization as if it's a discrete state (e.g., a system is or it isn't) but that would require people to actually understand the concept and the reason why it's [sometimes] desirable.
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Yeah I agree with you. There's a lot of components to decentralization and its not really on/off. One thing I do think about this topic is that plenty of centrally controlled systems are distributed. An example would be the web sites I work on. They are hosted in a distributed way. Databases, applications, and files are all distributed across many servers in many datacenters. But they are at same time highly centralized. They are not decentralized.
Look at the web though. It is decentralized. There are points of centralization and choke points but really it is decentralized on the whole. It could be improved. DNS is the obvious one that comes to mind. We can get stuck in the weeds on this though when talking to no devs. The most important thing is not having an org/company/individual that has central control. Or even a small number that do. These are weak points that can be attacked. The fact that people can do what they want. Block some users really isn't the point. I can do that myself in many ways. The point is can someone block something for everyone. Do they really have control in a meaningful way. Bitcoiners should get this point and focus on that.
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A key thing is that centralization / distributed-ness is fundamentally relative, and is defined in terms of something. Are 100 nodes, scattered in every part of the world and on every continent, decentralized? They are with respect to geography. But what if they're all owned by the same dude? Then they're not with respect to ownership. What if they're all running Bitcoin Knots? Then they're not wrt software. What if they're owned by 100 random people, but they're all Americans, or they're all employed by Square, or ...
You get the point.
Even going back to the idea that the nodes are spread evenly across the globe, in a sense, they're still not decentralized wrt geography bc they're all on the same planet. This seems a stupid distinction, and at the moment it is stupid, because we're all living on this same planet and their location on this planet makes no functional difference to any interaction someone would have with them. But it's not hard to imagine a context in which having everything collected on the same planet would no longer be decentralized from a relevant functional perspective.
This is what's so important about your last point -- whether some entity or cohort can achieve some goal (blocking something for everyone, in your example.) Decentralization (across the relevant functionality) is a state of organization that makes attacks of that kind difficult. It also makes development, deployment, testing, etc. slow and difficult. But the network lives with the latter drawbacks to realize the former benefits.
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