Decentralization I

Which is better, centralization or decentralization? I've been giving this question a lot of thought lately, in the context of distributed systems, and I've come to realize a few things.

First, the question applies to more things than you'd expect. For once, I'm not going to spend the entire time talking about tech - command and market economies, for instance, can be understood as centralized and decentralized systems, respectively, and analyzed as such.

Second, there are fundamental limitations in both directions. For example, a fully centralized system will always undergo some sort of failure eventually, thanks to Murphy's law, while a completely decentralized system has to deal with malicious individuals, asynchrony, and other such issues that keep people that work on distributed systems awake at night.

Third, it's not an all-or-nothing question; it may not even be a smooth gradient. In addition to the tradeoff between centralization and decentralization, we need to consider hybrid decentralized systems, which have proven to be a good compromise. Popular examples include e-mail, and XMPP (aka Jabber, aka Google Talk).

Over the course of this month, I'm going to be writing a series of posts about decentralization. Many of them won't even be about computers, but about other systems that I'm looking at from this perspective. I think that there are a few core principles that account for the difference between centralized and decentralized systems, and I'm trying to tease out what those are.