Nobody Wants to Run Their Own Servers
I run my own servers. Actual machines, in an actual room, which I maintain worse than I should and enjoy more than I should admit. So of all people I ought to be the one who argues with the clearest sentence anyone has written about modern technology, and I cannot.
Moxie Marlinspike wrote it in an essay about web3: people do not want to run their own servers, and never will.
It reads like a shrug, and it behaves like a law.
We keep designing systems to free people from the middleman, and the systems keep growing a new one, because the only alternative is that everyone runs their own infrastructure, and almost no one will. The reason is not laziness. Running infrastructure is a real job, and people already have jobs, so a company appears that will run the thing for them, and then a second, and soon the decentralized system everyone celebrated is, in practice, two or three companies that everyone actually talks to. The celebration continues as though nothing has moved.
Blockchains are the sharpest case, because trustlessness is the whole pitch: no authority, no one you are asked to believe, verify rather than trust. And yet the phone in your pocket cannot be a peer on the network and cannot verify the chain on its own, so it asks a company, the same handful of companies everyone else asks, and the answers it gets back are not even signed. At the one point where the trustless system touches a human being, it runs on plain trust in a few firms that nobody elected.
I find that honest and a little sad, and it is where the novel begins.
The Chain carries the pattern one step further, from companies to a single person. A currency built so that no one has to be trusted turns out to depend on one engineer. The math is public and the code is open and anyone is free to check it, and even so, if you follow the dependencies down past the whitepaper and the consensus rules and the confident language about removing authority, you arrive at one human being whose knowledge keeps the whole thing running. The system had removed every kind of trust except the one it could not see it still relied on.
The villains work this out before the users do. They never touch the cryptography, which is sound. They find the person the trustless system quietly depends on and they take him, because owning the one irreplaceable human tends to be cheaper and surer than breaking good mathematics.
Decentralization is real and worth wanting. The amount of it people actually want, though, tends to be the least that lets the thing exist, and the pull back toward a few servers, then a few companies, then one indispensable person, is patient and strong. Anything meant to stay honest once it is running on someone else's machines has to be designed against that pull from the first day.
The man in my book understands all of this better than I do. He made himself the indispensable person deliberately, because he worked out that being irreplaceable is the only protection a person can build for themselves inside a system like that. He was right. It works exactly as long as he is the only one who can do the job.