Posted on 12/02/2022 5:39:37 AM PST by FarCenter
Internet pioneer Radia Perlman has argued in favor of centralized infrastructure, while speaking at the International Symposium on Blockchain Advancements in Singapore on Friday.
Perlman said that conventional wisdom poses centralised systems as “bad” and decentralized as “good,” however decentralized entities are inherently problematic in multiple ways.
“Blockchain as a buzzword started as the technology behind Bitcoin. People made money on Bitcoin and the more hyped it was, the more start-ups leveraged the hype to claim their product has something to do with Blockchain” explained Perlman. “If you hear so much hype, eventually you assume well, it must be incredibly important.”
“I think pianos are wonderful, but I wouldn't use them for mass transportation. Everything has a purpose,” added the inventor of the spanning-tree protocol (STP).
Perlman said the purpose of Bitcoin’s blockchain was to evade governing organizations like countries or banks, and while those systems can at times be corrupt, they also have their uses.
“Centralized means one organization is in charge. It usually does mean that there are multiple servers so it doesn’t mean single point of failure. And usually means that the data is stored in lots of places, so your data is not going to get lost. And especially if your data is stored in a public cloud,” said Perlman.
The author and academic added that other added benefits are its clear who to blame when things go wrong and most applications require “adult supervision,” or someone to answer for the system’s problems.
“Now if you're using Bitcoin I'm not sure what you would buy with Bitcoin, probably something like a hitman. And if he doesn't kill, who could you complain to? How do you get your money back? So most of the time, centralized is exactly what you want,” she further reasoned.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.com ...
“Centralized means one organization is in charge. It usually ...doesn’t mean single point of failure.”
I think in this case it DOES. Lots of gov’t want to make sure we don’t know what they’re planning to do to us.
About the only thing that needs to be “centralized” is a city sewer system. She should be put in charge of one.
Any replacement system would have to do something better. Blockchain systems claim privacy and decentalization so you can't be targetted to be locked out of the financial system, but the transactions are more difficult and probably more expensive to run if you had the buyer and seller paying the expense rather than some "miners" doing it for them.
I expect that a governmental digital system would be harder to use than the current system, but not have the privacy and non-exclusion advantages of private cybercurrency. If you don't pay your taxes they will be taken just like the IRS can drain your current bank account.
Decentralized networks are how free peoples were able to share information with each other without any single one of them being responsible for dissemination. They hay day of p2p decentralized networks was in the early 2000s, and that was when just about everything was available. This put decentralized interests of the masses at direct loggerheads with centralized accumulated powers... or what I call the barons of artificial scarcity... who have spent decades if not centuries creating the infrastructure to block people’s access to things so that they have to go through their gateways for them, and thus be forced to pay artificially inflated prices for them.
If you buy an orchard, and cell cider, you have every right to sell your product in the free and open market for whatever people’s demand will garner.
If you buy all the orchards, shut many of them down, and restrict everyone’s access to cider, except through you, that is not a noble service.
Decentralization definitely has it’s cons. I am not an anarchist. To continue with the metaphor, an anarchist would say the orchard belongs to the land and the people, and it doesn’t matter who grew the trees and made the cider, they can take what they want. If a movie studio spent millions to make a product, I do not believe anyone and everyone should be able to take a copy for free. But there is a difference between ‘intellectual property’ rights and monopolized markets. The people who really want centralization want the power that comes from monopoly. That’s my opinion.
Her comments are somewhat naive, or perhaps do not put much thought into the realities of government oversight and interference.
Centralization would be great if you could absolutely trust the government to adhere to its own rules. Current and historic events show that such is almost never the case. While the government is saying YOU can’t do this, it is hiding the fact that it is doing that exact thing. History is replete with examples of this. A great example is how the current US government is making negative, even free-speech-chilling comments about twitter, when Musk has merely stated that he wants freedom of speech within the extents allowable by the law on that platform. Why would the US government be constrained by the 1st Amendment yet also try to censor, or allude to censoring, a company who allows for such freedom of speech.
Since trusting the government to “do the right thing” is pure foolishness, a distributed environment is needed, and it needs to be architected in a manner that makes cheating the system near impossible. While it’s likely that blockchain in its many current iterations is incapable of doing this on the scale needed, some similar tech is likely to be created that will do this.
They don’t need a digital system to accomplish the same now. They just print (or add to their electronically stored balance) as many dollars as they wish and spend them. Their purchasing power comes from reducing the purchasing power of the money you hold.
A decentralized, block chain secured, cryptocurrency like bitcoin prevents this ‘taxation via inflation’ that has funded government debt for over a decade by giving them no avenues to inflate the money supply and confer upon themselves the new bitcoin. They have no ability to seize or freeze anyone else’s balance in bitcoin.
“The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.” - Alan Greenspan, 1966
“I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can’t stop.” - Friedrich Hayek, 1984
I think Dr. Hayek could appreciate what bitcoin has accomplished.
“Centralized means one organization is in charge...so your data is not going to get lost.”
You’ll just wish it would.
The decentralized part of the blockchain is what makes it a good thing.
Centralized means controlled. If you are entrusting your networks to a single, centralized control...then it can be shut off.
Bitcoin or not...thats a canard, the blockchain tech is good because its robust, decentralized, and open sourced. It hasn’t been hacked yet...and its been attempted several hundred times a day for ten years. (Don’t mistake exchange hacks for blockchain hacks.)
The bulls!t these folks spout is amazing. They should know better—and most of the time they do.
“Blockchain systems claim privacy”
Blockchain systems are based on a very public ledger. They are anything but private. This should be exposed any every opportunity—and the public nature (if you know the address of the party) is a strength in terms of proving the transaction and provided an immutable record of it.
This very nature of blockchain makes it very useful for things like property ownership. If you could all real estate records on a blockchain, things like “Title Searches” would take seconds and cost nothing. That is just one example.
Blockchain is a technology that bitcoin runs on...not the other way around.
Hi.
Did Radia Perlman work for DARPA?
5.56mm
>Did Radia Perlman work for DARPA?
Never heard of he/she/it. Perhaps Bill Joy could tell us.
Going from there to network protocols was totally unplanned. I was in grad school, and had done everything but a thesis, but never had an advisor, and I had no idea how to start on a thesis. At this point I confided to an old friend that I was kind of stuck in grad school, and he said, “How about joining our group at BBN” [Bolt, Berenek, Newman, a government contractor that developed software for network equipment]? And that turned out to be designing routing protocols for the ARPA packet radio network. And so it was then that I discovered that I loved protocols. But the real opportunity for changing the world was when Digital Equipment Corporation [DEC]offered me the job of being the person to design routing for DECnet. It was exactly the right place at the right time.
https://medium.com/swlh/radia-perlman-how-this-woman-transformed-the-internet-e55aa4f52b5
Her start at BBN was undoubtedly ARPA funded, but her work at DEC, Sun, etc. was probably also on ARPA grants.
ARPA gets things done by funding other organizations such as universities, government labs, corporations.
Noooooooo.
Systems fail; massive systems fail massively.
Central systems are a tyrant’s dream. Smaller and localized is better.
Isn’t she kind of horning in on Algore’s turf?
Centralization is control, control is power, and power corrupts. Did anyone in 1913 imagine what the IRS would become when they were promoting the 16th Amendment?
Sound like a good plan. How about putting the kill switches at Mar-a-Lago?
I want to know who is paying him to say this. It is absolutely idiotic. Shockingly juvenile in thought.
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