Complete decentralization as a philosophical and absolute goal misses the point. There are great benefits to decentralization, for sure, just as there are benefits to centralization. Projects that aim to decentralize everything “for the sake of it” are doomed to failure. I want control over my privacy, my spending, my choice of content. But at the same time, I want a great user interface; I want curated content; I want performance. I want a service, and I’m willing to pay for it. I don’t have a fundamental problem that there are big companies out there who provide that service to me, and who make money doing so. Even, in some cases, a whole lot of money. Good for them.

It boils down to: what’s the best way to provide services that I want?

I’m working on a project to provide a decentralized marketplace for software and infrastructure services, competing with AWS and Azure. The marketplace itself is blockchain-based: partially decentralized, but with a permissioned blockchain that still allows governance, legal compliance, removal of bad actors, KYC compliance, etc. The kind of things that customers (corporations) need for them to use the marketplace.

I think we need to be pragmatic about it and figure out where technologies like blockchains can help build better services, instead of trying to cram decentralized systems into everything whether it makes sense or not.