Irrelevant, but just thought I'd say: If it's impractical to decentralise, it should be owned publicly e.g. open source, cooperative, mutual or government business model
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2021
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My experience comes from working as a medical assistant and nursing student in the US.
Medical records. When a patient seeks care from a new provider the practitioner often needs access to their complete history to treat conditions that may appear trivial at first glance, but might be a symptom of something more serious.
The current medical record system in the US allows for a patient to hop from care provider to care provider, selectively disclosing their medical history so that no single provider has a complete medical record. This design has been preserved from a time before a universal medical records were possible in order to address valid patient privacy concerns, but from a providers perspective it makes practicing medicine far more dangerous.
If a patient presents for a sinus infection and is prescribed a penicillin derivative without ever disclosing that they are allergic, and then the patient dies of an anaphylactic reaction, the patient's family is likely to sue for malpractice. Did the patient simply forget to mention they were allergic or did they decide their last reaction was so long ago that they were no longer allergic? It doesn't matter, the family's lawyers will scrounge for a medical record, or several, documenting the penicillin allergy. Even if the practitioner's documentation of the visit is perfect, and the patient's family loses the case, it's still a soul-crushing and expensive experience for everyone involved.
In another situation a patient with an opioid addiction may visit many providers in their region in order to receive multiple prescriptions for painkillers, this is very common.
Without a seamless medical record system these and other preventable outcomes will continue to cause misery to patients and providers. I believe a central medical record database would drastically improve the quality of healthcare in the US.
Decentralization of medical records is a single factor contributing to the fact that US doctors and nurses commit suicide at a rate about three times higher than the general population.
While I'm on the soap box: Medicare for all is the single most important change to push for. If you live in a country with socialist healthcare, please protect it.
Applications that rely on a central authority. For example, the current NFT artwork mania runs on a couple of centrally-operated websites. Once those sites go down, most of the URLs that those NFTs are linked to are going to stop resolving. It'd be way cheaper and environmentally safer to just use a centrally-operated RDBMS (disclaimer: I think NFTs and most cryptocurrency stuff is absolute bunk).
Holy shit, you're right: most NFTs are just URLs! I thought the images themselves, or at least the hashes of the images, would be stored in the blockchain. The stupidity of altcoin developers never ceases to amaze.
I wouldn't say they are stupid, they achieved what they wanted, namely making a shitton of money
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Healthcare for example, government should provide gratis (free as in price) healthcare for everyone
Search engines. It just doesn't work.
SearX is decentralized meta-search engine
YaCy is decentralized true search engine (i think)
Yeah that's an accurate way of putting it.
Has it been tried? it might require re-thinking how search engines work. If the databases were all formatted consistently, it seems possible.
There's Yacy. It worked ok when I was running it locally, but the moment I connected it to the rest of the network my search results were dominated by porn and spam sites.
Search engines are incredibly conplex. the problem might not be decentralization, but just proper investment and development.
I agree. I think it's sad that YaCy never worked as well as the alternatives, but it is a very cool project nonetheless!
Maybe in the future someone will try the concept again and succeed.
Also: Google is getting worse and worse, so it'll get easier over time ;)
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My google and duckduckgo search results are also dominated by porn sites.
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Yes, there is YaCy. And it sucks. It brings like 10 results in single word searches, usually none of which are relevant. When you write a sentence of sorts it just freezes.
Backend is implied here (quasi-decentralised frontends can be great), and agreed itβs incredibly valuable to have a central index of content, rankings, answers. Maybe it can be overcome by advances in data transfer speeds and some talent taking interest in the project (for example, would centralised search be used on Mars?)
The postal system.
I get that there are private shipping companies and countries, but having a national publicly owned postal system that is coordinated in a centralized way is much much more efficient than any decentralized system could operate for distribution of physical packages.
This is a good example for a natural monopoly, but that does not mean that there can't be regional suppliers that cooperate with each other in a decentralized way or covering different market segments.
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This is actually a funny question if you think about it a bit more.
There is no such thing as a centralized system globally speaking, at least not in the real world. Having global centralized systems is actually a very new thing that only came to be on the internet.
Otherwise the world is by necessity deeply decentralized. Even at the level of individual nation states it usually is much more decentralized that it appears at first. Humans simply can't do centralized systems, this only came to be once we had a global computerized network.
Electrical grids (not generation)
So distributed generation shouldn't happen? As far as I know distributed generation is happening and it is likely to increase as time goes on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation In general non-renewables should be centralized due to economies and efficiencies of scale but renewables almost have to be distributed due to the amount of space they take and localized weather effects.
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I think they're saying electrical transmission should be centralized, but generation should not be. Problems with double negatives...
But transmission isn't centralized, and can't be centralized. Because its purpose is to transmit power from power generators (both centralized and decentralized) to (located elsewhere) loads.
I assumed the OP meant generation because the other way around doesn't make sense.
I may also be thinking about the physical world with the OP thinking about ownership, but that makes even less sense. Transmission and generation should be paid for by the end users. Preferably in whatever way reduces their costs without making them a burden on other participants.
Maybe the statement is talking about centralized ownership for the purposes of economies of scale. Even that can be broken down to cooperative ownership as much of the less urban areas of the United States already are.
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What makes a grid centralized besides generation?
The maintenance of the transmission lines, smart load balancing, maintenance, etc.
Huh? Electrical grids are decentralized in many ways right now.
I was going to say Databases but I suppose you could have multiple sources to feed and make a local database...
orbit db says hi :)
there's also actorDB which I think is more mature
This looks pretty cool, but is it completely P2P like OrbitDB?
Also, it looks a little bit abandoned: last commit was in 2019
Yeah, doesn't look like it's actively developed unfortunately. It is fully distributed though, from the docs:
ActorDB on the other hand allows you to start out with a database that is fully normalised within an actor unit and scale that database horizontally over as many servers as you need. No single points of failure or global locks. Transactions only affect the actors that participate in them.
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oh THIS is awesome!
Is that production ready?
i'm not sure what concretely do you mean by that...
it's still new, as ipfs iself is, but it's already used by multiple applications to different degrees of success
That is, is it in a stage where it's usable to some degree outside of testing
i haven't used orbitdb yet, so i'm not sure what state it is in exactly
but this depends on what your application for it is and what you're trying to replace with it, just like ipfs itself can be pretty good for certain purposes, but still be lacking in certain things like dynamic websites or streaming
i would recommend asking on their gitter
Thanks :)
Nothing
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