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Subject: why is decentralization worth worrying about?
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From: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
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Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 17:09:00 -0700
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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.


