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Guest Talk with Mike Masnick | The Role of Protocols in Decentralization

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Mike Masnick traces the evolution of his thinking since his 2019 'Protocols, Not Platforms' paper, engaging criticisms from Moxie Marlinspike (that protocols are too slow and prone to corporate capture) and reframing decentralization not as an absolute good but as a question of which system components should be centralized versus pushed to the edges. Using the U.S. interstate highway system as an analogy, he argues the protocol itself should function as a stable, centralized foundation while competition and innovation happen in decentralized nodes built on top of it, and discusses how Twitter's Musk acquisition and Bluesky's emergence illustrate these dynamics in practice.

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centralized-protocol-decentralized-edges-framework decentralization-as-incentive-structure-rather-than-end-goal embrace-extend-extinguish-capture-risk exit-to-communityprotocol governance guest-talks protocols protocols-vs-platforms technology