18 highlights
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The US Government developed the early internet as a technology that could survive a nuclear attack.¹
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If any one computer went down, the hope was that information on the network would persist — there would be no central point of failure, everything would be decentralized.² 50 years later, and decentralization is still the lifeblood of the internet.
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Napster’s decentralization killed the middlemen, or at least significantly shrank their power.
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Today, there’s a new rockstar turning heads: blockchain. Like Napster, blockchain has its own set of challenges — speculation, funding, regulation, censorship, etc. But these challenges aren’t necessarily new. Blockchain and Napster are both just chapters in a much longer story: the story of decentralization.
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Wisdom, as defined by Aristotle, is an understanding of the principles and causes of our knowledge. He wanted us to ask why things are a certain way.
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Decentralization continues to disrupt global institutions, and gives life to new ones. If you understand the causes of why it’s happening you will be positioned to make wiser decisions in the future.
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They were neck and neck in the race until 1957 when the Soviets pulled into first place. That’s the year the Soviets launched the first-ever satellite into space: Sputnik.
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Sputnik showed the world that the Soviets had missiles capable of reaching any part of the world. Americans were terrified, as is seen in this ad for practical low-cost nuclear fallout shelters.
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in direct response to Sputnik, requested the funds from Congress to start two new agencies: The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
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Lick proposed a solution called time-sharing. With time-sharing, you could have one central “brain” computer which could communicate with lower-cost computers. Essentially, what we today refer to as networking.
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Baran wrote a report to the U.S. Air Force where he made the argument: the U.S. government must upgrade communications from the centralized model to a newly-designed decentralized model.⁴
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If the Soviets bombed the main computer, the entire network goes down!.⁵
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If Kermit sends Fozzie a cute cat pic, that image is broken up into smaller pieces called packets.
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The packets travel along a variety of different routes: through wires, over land and sea, and eventually reassemble when they reach their destination.
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If node “D” and “G” were to fail, then the packets can just reroute through other available nodes.
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What the RIAA didn’t know is that decentralization flows like a parade of ants. Step in their way, and they naturally find a path around your feet.
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Over that next decade, the RIAA (The Record Industry Association of America) made it its mission to destroy Napster!
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Eventually, in 2009 the RIAA ended their war against decentralization. They couldn’t fight the power of the network. Somewhat ironically, the war against file sharing ended the same way the Cold War ended: Not with a climactic battle, but from exhaustion.