> But history has proven that the centralized model is flawed and inefficient.
History shows the exact opposite. For example, at one point every business above a certain size had its own electric generator, and developed their own electricity on-site. In other words, decentralized power. That was replaced by contracts with central generation providers because that centralized model was so much more efficient.
You can see the same thing happening today with computing power (AWS, Azure, Google), music (Spotify, Pandors), movies (Netlfix), and books (Kindle).
What you want is something in the middle. Email is a good example.
Your comment assumes that efficiency is the most important thing. Addressing power imbalances and improving local resiliency are also important.
In the 1960s and 70s for many people computers meant centralized power and oppression. Computers were huge and expensive and therefore centralized, and only big government and big business (i.e. The Man) could afford them. A lot of the appeal of desktop computers in the 1980s was that they were personal: you could run the computing tasks that you wanted, on a machine that you controlled.
Today what do most people use their computers for? Accessing the services of big service providers like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.
I'm not suggesting we couldn't get by on decentralised systems, but rather that such concepts are largely the domain of the geeky. Centralisation is what provides the convenience and trust that drives utility and adoption.
How can you measure and transact in BTCUSD without going to BitStamp?
By going to BTC-e, OKCoin, Bitfinex, Coinbase, localbitcoins, or Craigslist?
I'm not suggesting we couldn't get by on decentralised systems, but rather that such concepts are largely the domain of the geeky.
Geeks didn't pass anti-trust law.
For that matter, even Twitter adapted torrent technology to distribute binaries to servers at a datacenter.
1. Mesh Networks: FireChat isn't a mesh network. There is a long thread on /r/Futurology about it, with lots of good posts describing what it is and the problems with implementing real mesh networks (https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2hvtoh/over_100...).
The article espouses all the benefits of mesh networks and glosses over the gritty facts of implementation that can't necessarily be solved by simply throwing more software at the problem.
2. The BlockChain: Yes, this is a massively distributed system. But the fact is it relies on the existence of a fast, reliable internet that so happens to be immensely centralised.
A rant I often like to have which makes me unpopular amongst the proponents of so called p2p systems is that the bootstrap of all of these so called decentralised systems is completely centralised. Bittorrent has trackers, Bitcoin uses DNS seeds to find peers, Tor uses directory servers and most others simply hardcode some URL list of peers into their source. If you can attack the bootstrap you can split these so called decentralised networks quite easily. Sybil attack is a common vector here.
The article also glosses over the fact that all the things which have driven bitcoin adoption and popularity (Blockchain.io, Mt Gox, BitStamp, BitPay, etc) are all centralised services which require the user to essentially give up any of the supposed benefits of decentralisation. Even in the case of mining, how many run their own bitcoind? 99% of miners run in a pool, another form of centralisation.
3. Autonomous agents: I can't even...