He’s mainly explaining how do you fight spam in a centralized way, and then explain how all the centralized techiques are unusable when using crypto. That’s normal, crypto and decentralization comes together. You need to think according other paradigms.
And the point I'm making is this: this setup, which works, is what we will have to discard and replace if we move to E2E crypto.
I'm not saying decentralized systems can't work. I'm saying that before we throw out our current system, we need to look long and hard at what it does, why it does it, and how effective it is -- because as soon as we adopt E2E crypto this thing goes completely away and we're going to need to rebuild it in a quite different way.
I don’t consider that an issue. Quite the opposite: the result —and we always end finding it— is *beautiful*.
No, you don't always end up finding it (where 'it' is 'a decentralized algorithm that offers efficiency equivalent to a centralized algorithm'). There are many algorithms that have no known equivalently-performing decentralized alternative, algorithms where global knowledge is strictly necessary.
Decentralized algorithms also have really interesting failure modes. Back in 2008, a one-bit error in Amazon's S3 cloud propagated from one node to the next and ultimately brought the entire thing down for several hours. It was a brilliant example of both error propagation and the limits of Byzantine fault tolerance.[1]
I'm a firm believer that decentralized algorithms are a good thing, but let's keep our sense of perspective, all right? They're not magic and they don't always beat centralized algorithms.
[1] http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html -- a really fascinating read if you love decentralized algorithms.
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