Are we decentralized yet?

So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.

> except tracker sites

There are loads of different tracker sites. Many private. If one goes bad, others pop up to replace it. This is decentralised - there is not one player that strangles the ecosystem.

Anyone can construct a service like Coinbase, and in fact there are numerous such sites available; at this point, you can even use PayPal! You don't even have to continue using the same one you started with: you can buy Bitcoin with PayPal and then sell it with Coinbase. It seems like a very strange definition of centralized to say that this causes any kind of centralization on Bitcoin...

Everything you listed IS centralized, though.

Well git was not really an attempt at decentralization so there is that.

And in many ways it actually is remarkably meaningfully decentralized - or perhaps "effectively" decentralized - in terms of every node having a full working copy of entire repositories that can be trivially cloned to another provider or stood up on a self-hosted server.

I’d say the opposite. Git is defacto centralized. And I’d go further and say that attempting decentralization is the biggest problem with Git. It maybe makes sense for Linux. But for 99.999% of projects it makes everything so much worse.

> There are loads of different tracker sites

Not to mention the mainline DHT. Not impossible or even very resource hungry to run a scraper/crawler/listener and be able to search via it, like bitmagnet (https://bitmagnet.io/) that has some fun pipe-dreams like federation of indexers and something like an decentralized private tracker.

> Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.

It's important to note that this isn't "you have to be big in order to be able to filter spam". That's not true at all; decentralized anti-spam lists have been a thing for decades and the big sites don't have any significant advantage in filtering spam.

It's allegedly that big sites will mark small sites as spam even when they're not, which makes it hard to run a small mail server. And there is some of that -- they also have a perverse incentive to do it on purpose because it kills their smaller competitors.

But it's also somewhat overstated. If you have a reverse DNS entry pointing back at your mail server and have properly configured DKIM, it's not inherently the case that you're always going to be marked as spam. And it's not inherently the case that you won't just because you use one of the big services -- they have the same incentive to do that to each other, after all.

Git is decentralized in exactly the way it was intended to be. I do all my development on my own host. I collaborate with a lot of different remotes. Even when a project insists on using Github, I contribute by forking to my own host, push patches to the forge of my choice, and invite the maintainer to pull from there if they like. A lot of maintainers just mirror to Github and/or Gitlab.

Sure, a lot of people pick one center and stare at it. But there are plenty of centers and that situation is getting better recently. Some even integrate git with ATProto or ActivityPub.

The link back to the real world is money in your bank account. While Coinbase is not the only market player who can provide that (put money in your bank in exchange for bitcoin), it's the biggest, and so there is (to a degree) de facto centralization. More so given that if Coinbase fell (due to government seizure or similar), it's likely sibling services would fall as well.

Ofc, your bitcoin would still be "safe" and still be "yours" on the chain assuming you owned your wallets directly, but those guarantees would now lack meaning or real world consequences. At least until another link to the real world could be established.

Sure, but how many email users have a reverse DNS entry or even know what that is? DKIM? It is, de facto, beyond the reach of 99.9 % of all email users.

But, Coinbase is not, actually, the biggest... not by far? Binance is like, 20x larger. And it isn't even as if you need to get dollars for your Bitcoin, in case the United States government decides to go aggro, so you can find someone in another country to convert you out through another currency. If this is our definition of centralized, then it is difficult to believe that anything is decentralized. There are enough numerous legitimate reasons to be angry at Bitcoin -- hell: even numerous legitimate reasons to say it is centralized -- that we shouldn't start making some up.

Right but if you are going to run and operate server infrastructure for yourself you need to know about that stuff.

You saying the average admin is gonna have no issue setting up their MX records but “won’t even know” what a reverse DNS entry is?

What? Most people are either incapable or unwilling to run their own mail servers. People could hack together their own social media or messaging sites in PHP, that doesn't mean Facebook and Twitter aren't centralized. That's what de facto means.

I was using Coinbase as a placeholder -- I am not up on current market share status but most people I know in the US use Coinbase. The point stands.

> so you can find someone in another country to convert you out through another currency

This is not so easy for large amounts -- the whole reason to use a Coinbase is institutional trust -- and is certainly inconvenient. In practical terms, across the ecosystem of users, it would not be some small roadbump but a massive problem.

I think git is a successful attempt despite existing centralized hubs. git over ssh just works. Decentralized does not mean federated