His points about blockchain are compelling but I disagree with “blockchain/decentralisation” part. Blockchain is a decentralised ideal, but so is BitTorrent, so is Tor, and so on, to some significant extent. To say that decentralisation failed because blockchain failed ignores all the other technologies which are serving people well.
I think the distinction between “decentralised” (i.e. federated) and “distributed” is important (as decentralised is often used as an umbrella term to cover both).[0] There are tons of federated projects out there from Matrix to Mastodon, and there are initiatives to make federated networks more decentralised (such as the integration of Kademlia DHT in BitTorrent).
No need for pessimism I think. :)
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Hoelscher/publica...
On a semi-related note, I don't know if torrents are successful outside of piracy.
In the last week or two I went back and downloaded all of my years worth of Humble Bundle ebooks/videos. I downloaded the torrent versions as they were easier to track failures with and the HB store does limit simultaneous downloads.
I'm still wondering if I'm going to get an automated scaremail letter about using torrents from my ISP. I already received one for downloading Ubuntu years back, though IIRC that was a different provider.
Regardless of the cause, they've been successful don't they? :)
I think partially it was because you had to download a separate piece of software -a BitTorrent client- to utilise the network. This is also changing thanks to WebTorrent[0] and IPFS.js[1] which works right in our web browsers without even requiring an add-on! They enable initiatives such as PeerTube[2] -a decentralised video-hosting platform- and distributed (NoSQL) databases such as OrbitDB[3].
Convenience is the key and huge advancements have been made in that direction!
[0]: https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent
[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs