If the goal is known, high profile & measurable (zero covid cases in Wuhan within 60 days), then a centralized system can in fact get there faster.

If the goals are unknown, diffuse, and difficult to quantify (just about everything else in an evolving consumer economy), then decentralized exploration is required.

I spent nearly two decades building and operating in production the LOCKSS system, a small-ish system that was intended, but never quite managed, to be completely decentralized. I agree with Marlinspike’s conclusion…. It is always comforting to find someone coming to the same conclusion via a completely different route

This is called confirmation bias.

many of the techniques routinely used by centralized systems to improve the user experience, such as A/B testing, are difficult if not impossible to apply to decentralized systems

He’s talking about centralized/decentralized systems, not markets. In a decentralized market you get inherent A/B testing between different competitors.

Privacy. … real data protection requires end-to-end encryption, but metadata protection requires innovation. Both will happen faster in centralized systems because they can change faster
If centralized means bigger, then why would they change faster? And I think innovation would also happen faster in several smaller firms than in one big centralized firm. He seems to be trying to apply attributes of centralized systems to centralized markets….

Censorship resistance
I think he makes a better argument for censorship resistance, but I still see it more as a political problem than a technology problem.

Availability
Here he goes back to systems, without considering markets. Considering the recent outages, I would guess a more decentralized market would give users better availability. Even if average availability of one big centralized company is better than average availability of several smaller companies, one outage doesn’t bring down the services of the whole market for service X.

Control
I agree with him that what happened with XMPP is very exemplifying of the limitations of trying to deploy a common protocol for interoperability. But that is interoperability. What I think most users would understand as control is the ability of saying: “I’m done with Amazon/Googlemaps/Youtube, screw them, I’m switching to their competitor”. ¿How is centralization better at giving users more control?

Two good examples would be Microsoft and Intel, who formed the Wintel duopoly for two decades, but completely missed the mobile transition a decade ago and were replaced by a host of smaller suppliers. Intel’s vertically integrated model of designing and manufacturing their own chips was largely replaced by a panoply of ARM, Samsung, TSMC, Qualcomm, and so on, while Microsoft’s Windows OS is a footnote compared to Android, which is built by google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and a host of random companies and people that contribute to the open source linux kernel at its base. This decentralized end game is much better at mixing and matching components to create a variety of products to match consumers’ widely differing desires.

Similarly, online software was centralized because internet connections were slow and flaky, but decentralized tech like bitcoin or bit torrent has become popular with faster internet connections. To me, this common pattern suggests that the current Big Tech giants are already doomed, as close observers see the same signs of the rot that set in at IBM, SGI, Yahoo, or Microsoft long before.

Let me end by pointing out that while economic forces shape a lot of what happens, giant successes like Apple are sui generis and driven by the unique talents of a founder who can even somewhat upend those forces, such as the joke that the Apple org chart was Jobs as the sun that everybody reported to, which nobody else has been able to replicate with much success.

So that, as we are station above station
Throughout this realm, to all the realm ’tis pleasing,
As to the King, who makes his will our will.
– Dante

1) Discovery. Decentralized systems are optimal for discovering unmet needs.
2) Maturity. Needs are known, and centralized systems are optimal for meeting those needs efficiently.
3) Obsolescence. There is a centralized system that is extremely efficient at meeting the needs of the past, which increasingly diverge from the needs of the present. The system is large and expensive, many things remain dependent on it, and it was not designed to scale down gracefully.