The emergent drive towards centralization scales with the number of peers and the difficulty of forging a bilateral agreement.

· Bits and Bobs 4/27/26
  • The emergent drive towards centralization scales with the number of peers and the difficulty of forging a bilateral agreement.
    • If there aren't many peers, the n-squared hasn't gotten big enough to matter yet
    • If a bilateral "agreement" is trivial (e.g. validating an SSL cert with no other pre-aggreement), then there's no need to centralize.
    • But the multiplication of those two factors can lead to a centralizing force that grows to significant strength.