Will the future be decentralised?

On the internet, as a friend recently reminded me, everything looks permanent until it isn’t. As technology evolves, the most profound and destabilising change
is likely to be the
transition from centralised internet services to decentralised ones.
Centralised services typically are run by companies or institutions, such as Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. There is a command structure and a boss, and changes can be made by deliberate decision. In this parlance, even Wikipedia counts as centralised, though the editors and contributors are scattered around the world.
Decentralised services are harder to define, but two simple examples may be helpful. The first is email, which consists of networks of rules and interconnections not owned by any one company or institution, even though your email provider might be. The second is the World Wide Web itself, a series of protocols with a huge amount of stuff built on top of it. Bitcoin also operates in a decentralised way, unless a majority of the blockchain miners decide otherwise, which is very difficult to pull off. When I hear laypersons discuss the future of the internet, the most common question is what kind of company or service is coming next. Clubhouse, the audio discussion forum, is one recent innovation in social media, and no doubt there will be more.
When I hear internet entrepreneurs discuss the future, the biggest question is what kind of decentralised service or platform might be next. The internet has gone through numerous fundamental changes since its origins in the 1960s, and more smart people are working on innovation than ever before. There is no good reason to assume the status quo is sacred; in fact there is ample reason to suppose otherwise.
The technology entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan
predicts a radically decentralised future. In his frequent Twitter postings, crypto and decentralisation will swallow the world,
to paraphrase Marc Andreessen’s decade-old claim about software. If Twitter censors some of its posters, users can seek out new platforms that do not allow such intrusions.
Why not, for example, put social media on blockchains and have efficient cryptocurrency micropayments to reward those who help maintain such mechanisms? Censoring postings on such a service would be as difficult as trying to overwrite a blockchain ledger, which is to say very difficult. (Indeed such postings would be a blockchain ledger, albeit in a more digestible form.) And instead of having to deal with the content rules of Twitter or WhatsApp, perhaps you could customise and build your own rules.
According to Srinivasan, such exchanges — for not only money but also information — will evolve beyond easy governmental or gatekeeper control. It may even be hard to recognise what money is anymore.

—Bloomberg