The road to decentralization is long and hard. Let’s map out the way to get there. The journey will necessitate some key innovations.
Today’s Big Tech platforms exert centralized control over the service, the protocol, and the software mechanisms for our applications. These are vulnerable to government coercion and force to deprive us of rights, such as through censorship, denial of service, embargos, or deprivation of rights. A truly decentralized architecture could not be coerced or forced to obey any law or authority. Code is law, and code can have a life of its own once unleashed so that even if you imprison or kill some coders, you could not control what people choose to run.
Similarly, markets are free. No amount of government regulations and laws can deny the truth that the more tyrannical control is exerted over legal markets (such as with restrictions or bans), the greater such markets fall outside of the government’s control, as demand will motivate supply to shift to black markets.
Cryptography
The fight for freedom requires many technologies. Chief among them is cryptography from which the “code is free speech” mantra was born to protect cryptographic algorithms from being controlled by government as munitions. Internet commerce is built on this foundation.
Decentralization
However, decentralization is not yet at its infancy. The Internet has evolved in the direction of centralization (Big Tech service providers), which positions platforms to become tools of tyranny. We have not yet built a sufficient system of technologies to decentralize the applications we are accustomed to.
Money
We are beginning to see Bitcoin as sound censorship-resistant money evolve toward being usable. It has a ways to go. The hurdles will be immense, as the goal is necessarily to burn the current system to the ground. We know it. They know it. Resistance is futile, as the system is burning itself without regard for BTC. But the incumbents will hang on in desperation until the bitter end.
Identity
We are confused by digital identity. Having a technology for identity is essential, but we know a government-imposed technology would be dangerous. Bitcoin has one of its own. We need a generalized mechanism so you can own your data and your access to your application services. This depends on having some mechanism to identify you. However, we must not adopt any tech that entrusts the government. Central control (by government or a corporation) over identity would make you vulnerable to being unpersoned by that authority. We need Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), where the person owns their own credentials (create and hold your own private key). Prolific SSI technology does not exist yet. Some point to a Nostr nsec/npub pair with hope.
Social Network
Having identity we can now form relationships. Connections between people enable social interactions. You need to be able to take your connections with you, so your social network is not held hostage by any platform.
Self-Sovereign Data
Your identity enables ownership over your data. This includes access control, privacy, and integrity. You need to be able to store your data securely (encrypted with your key, replicated), so that it is broadly accessible by all your applications (in the cloud). Everything associated with you on every application should be considered your own, including your profile, settings, preferences, social network, authorizations, and your application data (e.g., content, documents). No one should be able to rug-pull you or hold your data hostage.
Web of Trust
With a social network that we can take with us to any application without worrying about rug-pulls, we can rely more heavily on it. If everyone carefully curates their connections for credibility and reputation, we now have a Web of Trust. This is useful for calculating how trustworthy another person is based on intermediate relationships. This also gives us a good mechanism for distinguishing legitimate content from spam.
Unstoppable Services
There will be many more protocols (especially to enable peer-to-peer), platform capabilities (i.e., higher level virtual machines that span infrastructure providers), and architectural patterns that need to be invented to enable application components to become unstoppable by state and other malicious actors. Everything needs to be built to be resistant to censorship, denial of service, and deprivation of rights. Users must have an exit to take their business elsewhere.
Alternatives should be ubiquitous. Protocols and standard interfaces should enable uniformity so that platforms can be commoditized. That way if one provider does not live up to their promises, users can take their identity and data to a competitor or to a platform for self-hosting. Open source applications are preferred for self-hosting, but it’s foreseeable that as decentralization becomes the norm, commercial services will enable self-hosting as well. This reverses the shift to SaaS, but increases demand for IaaS and PaaS for self-hosting.
We have much work to do to manifest this vision. We are years away. Perhaps the time line we should expect is somewhat aligned to the burning down of the fiat world. The rise of decentralization of money should be accompanied by the decentralization of everything money can buy.