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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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The latency point feels important and cap-theoremish? Also a local spof may become effectively global if there isn’t sufficient partition resistance. No use in failover nodes if you can’t reach them.
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
That's a good set of ingredients. So there's three dimensions I'm counting, for each component of a system: - Resilience of the SPOF - Availability of Alternatives - Ease of Transition
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Dan Finlay 🦊
@danfinlay
I like this because while I'd previously identified these two categories as two distinct types of decentralization, and had adopted some terminology from Mark Miller ("strongly coupled" vs "weakly coupled" decentralization), that didn't feel quite right, b/c they aren't alternatives: They're measures of different parts of a system. "Strong coupling" = Adding resilience/hardness to the SPOF, potentially at some cost. Maybe should just be called "Resilience" or something, which itself should probably refer to the specific conditions this system is resilient against. This is what I see Ethereum as maximizing: Ensuring there is a SPOF some where with the highest public guarantees that can be offered. "Weak coupling" = Easier to route around other nodes. Here lightness/consent/configurability matters most. More related to the availability of alternatives & cost effectiveness of switching. This is the kind of thing I'm trying to bring to eth via gator.metamask.io
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