Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The basic way you do “decentralized” or “distributed” is to avoid ever having a single point of failure (SPOF) for anything (the difference between the two I think boils down to how easy it is to assemble 2 or more fully redundant manifestations of a full system but the distinction is irrelevant for discussing SPOFs) But critical path theory/theory of constraints suggests that any system with a closed boundary (closed in what sense? 🤔) will always have a bottleneck. At best you can make sure it moves around, which is an indicator of growth. Can you be truly SPOF-resistant? Or will you always have things like Infura or L2 sequencers etc, to take Ethereum as an example.
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
One way to model this is that adding additional cross-checks/validators just adds resilience to that SPOF. The chain is still a SPOF with many validators, it's just harder to fail. Your node is still a SPOF if you self-host, you just don't have to trust someone else's infra. Also, cross-checks always add latency, which cannot be regained by adding protocol. This is maybe while I believe that in addition to SPOF-resilience measures (like democracy), I have made a personal focus on SPOF-mobility. Delegation/revocation, permissionless interfaces, these can be used to nimbly adapt to SPOF failures when they do happen.
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
> cross-checks always add latency, which cannot be regained by adding protocol Correction: Can be regained by introducing delegation to a lighter-weight protocol.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I don’t think personal nodes count as spof if you can fail over to peers. True spofs are global singletons within a trust space. Like Intel fabs and Boeing are spof for us economy.
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
If that's true, then Infura shouldn't have been one of the initial examples, since it's always implemented a standard interface to allow easy swapping (unlike the new norm around wc infra...)
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Infura would be a business/org spof not technical
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