It's a mistake to conflate "decentralization" with "blockchain". One is not necessary for the other and decentralization has not fallen apart. I'm not even talking talking about mastodon either. I don't use it. The many to many relationship that torrenting is the epitome of decentralization, is very effective and has been around for nearly two decades at this point.
I'm just a random guy on the internet but who is this guy to talk about these subjects in such broad terms? Lay off the misused hyped up tech, please.
> I'm just a random guy on the internet but who is this guy to talk about these subjects in such broad terms? Lay off the misused hyped up tech, please.
He's a Princeton professor who's written a book about blockchain technology and taught several university courses about it. And he's been studying decentralization issues for a long time.
I don't think that Prof. Narayanan means to say here that decentralization requires blockchains, but rather than the optimism that blockchains provide a comprehensive solution to incentive, coordination, and scalability problems in decentralized systems has run up against very serious problems and counterexamples.
If you want to see some of his broader concerns about the tradeoffs of decentralization in other contexts, you should ask him, since he's reading this HN thread. :-) (edit: and he posted it himself)
I'm just a random guy on the internet but who is this guy to talk about these subjects in such broad terms? Lay off the misused hyped up tech, please.