Quote:
Originally posted by TankGirl
Decentralization means that there will be no outside authority – VeriSign, MicroSoft or Napster - to keep books of who is who in the network. No trusted third party will be there to guarantee that peers really are really whom they claim to be. We have to know it and remember it ourselves. To do that we need unique, permanent and verifiable peer identities. Nicks (even with random additions such as we have seen in WinMX's WPN) are unsuitable for this as peers can pick and change their nicks freely, and there will be no outside authority to prevent nick collisions.
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Decentralization does not necessarily mean that there cannot be any authority at all, even if not an "outside" one.
Decentralization, to me, means that the functions normally assumed by one central server, or several ones, should simply be taken over by *every* peer in the network.
This means that these functions will have to be inbuilt in the p2p software itself so that it is actually its *own* central server.
Problems like those arising from nicks, queueing, and so on would be treated by the very software you are using on your computer. That, to me, is true "decentralization".
Just eliminating the central server(s) does not make a decentralized network ; it results in an *uncontrolled* network, which is different.