v5: added git and github (thanks @ceejbot), and RSS (thanks @zem42). Taking suggestions for hierarchical/distributed and hierarchical/decentralized.
t Laurie Voss's crowdsourced set of examples of things that have structure & control in the form of the following: - centralized - hierarchical - federated - distributed - decentralized
Picture below:
What would a secure Federated PMK / archive network backed by a minimal blockchain look like?
Possibly like Holochain (which is distinct from the blockchain architecture). Blockchain only seems helpful if you need all of the following: - a database - immutability - distributed data - decentralized & totally trustless - append only - cryptographically secure assurance
Confer Brandon Enright's provocative talk "Blockchain is Bullshit" for an elaboration of these features. The first 10 or so minutes is mostly uninsightful trolling, so the link takes one to his argument about the key features of blockchain.
AFAICT, Holochain eases the feature of "decentralized", although Laurie Voss suggests that it's better to think of Bitcoin & Ethereum as "distributed" (in both the structure & control).
In Voss' taxonomy, I suspect that Holochain's structure would be "distributed" (ie, "No total point of failure, all nodes work on shared goal") and control would be "federated" (ie, "Limited set of shared rules, multiple overlapping/conflicting rules below")
