“A man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently than can a standing man.” – Wittgenstein

I first saw this many years ago as a young philosophy student and I have meditated on it ever since.  It is that while the outward appearance of things maybe the same, the motivating principle of a thing may cause it to have different powers.

Today I was walking down the street and thought of this in terms of decentralization, in particular, the company and protocol blockstack.  What is really the difference of using a centralized word processor, (google docs), vs a decentralized one, Graphite.  The way you use it is the same. But they are quite different.  The forces within are quite different.

How can the decentralized text editor act differently from the centralized text editor? Well no one can remove your documents. That is the easiest thing, but what else? What do you get from decentralization that gives you special powers beyond tail risk?  Maybe that is what the man of faith gets as well, protection of tail risk from burning in hell.

However, I think there is something more there, I just cannot put my finger on what that is.