Decentralization Central

Moving to decentralized services and apps has recently become critically important if you want to maintain your sovereignty and your free speech, free from big-tech authoritarian censorship.

This is so important that I’ve dedicated my time to creating a hub for decentralized services and apps. I registered a domain name, secured it with an SSL certificated, and wrote an online, searchable database for anyone to access, listing dozens (and growing) of fully decentralized apps, DAPPs, and services, as well as some that aren’t necessarily 100% decentralized, but useful nonetheless, plus a few companions services and apps that may not, themselves be decentralized, but support decentralization.

Without further ado, allow me to officially introduce…

DecentralizationCentral.com <– Click here!

And yes, you can switch to light mode if you wish. Just click the dark/light button at the top of the page, next to “About”.

The services are easily discoverable by browsing the dozen or so categories. Each category houses multiple services. You can also use the search bar to search for both services and categories of services.

Each service has its own informational page, describing the service and listing the decentralization features it has. Each feature is color coded. A fully decentralized service will have all decentralization features listed in green.

Below that is a list of icons representing the platforms the service is support on.

And below the list of platforms supported, is a list of useful links. Note that SOME links are not regular web links. We ARE, afterall, talking about the next, decentralized web, which has new kinds of links that require new kinds of browsers to support them. Almost all links are traditional links that will work with your traditional (legacy) browser.

The new kinds of links you may run into are:

  • IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)
  • dat:// (beaker browser)
  • TOR .onion links (for the TOR network)

Please peruse this database and try out any of the services that peak your interests. And check back often. I’m constantly updating it with more decentralized products and services and adding new features.

Things to expect in the near to mid-term future:

  • Video demonstrations
  • Blogs
  • More informative text for each service… more like a wiki page.
  • User editable pages plus users being able to add more services.
  • How-to articles to get you started into the world of decentralization.
  • Forums
  • The ultimate goal will be having a fully decentralized version of this website.

What are your thoughts on big tech censorship and how to protect yourself from it? What would be useful for YOU in those services and on the DecentralizationCentral.com website? Let us know in the comments.

BitCoin Just had its 2020 Halvening: Here’s what that means

What Happened?

Earlier today (2020-05-11), the amount of new BitCoins awarded to each minor that hits the jackpot of finding the right hash to validate the latest block of transactions now gets rewarded HALF the amount of BitCoin that they would have been awarded for each block mined for the last 4 years. For the last 4 years, up until earlier today, every block that was mined, 12.5 BitCoins were awarded to the miner that mined it. Now, and for the next 4 years, any minor that mines a block will be awarded only 6.25 BitCoins.

Why did that happen?

Creating new BitCoins is like printing money. It shouldn’t be done unless it has to because doing so floods the market with new coins and reduces the value of every coin already in existence. This is called “inflation”. But, the miners have to be incentivised to run their expensive hardware and burn through their expensive electricity, therefore, they are rewarded with a small amount of new coins. But, also built into the algorithm is a maximum limit of 21 million total BitCoins. There aren’t that many BitCoins yet, and this halvening algorithm is part of the reason why. By cutting in half, the reward, every 4 years (more specifically, every 210,000 blocks mined), it will take 144 or so years before the last BitCoin is mined.

What does this mean?

For miners, it means their income is cut in half… but only in the short term. BitCoin is deflationary by design, so the value of BitCoin has been and it is expected to continue to go up over time.

For consumers, it doesn’t mean much, at least not in the immediate future. The price of BitCoin has not been immediately effected by prior halvening events. For the most part, it should be business as usual.

For HODL’rs (people that Hold On for Dear Life… saving for the long term), it should reinforce the future value of their BitCoin.

For day traders, given prior halvenings that turned out to be non eventful, they probably won’t experience much of a difference either.

Conclusion:

For the most part, there’s more hype than action… every halvening, but the algorithm for the halvening is critically important for the long term viability of BitCoin.