While I think the word "decentralized" has a lot of nuance that people often forget (as an example: federated systems are also "decentralized", though I'd argue they barely live up to the term), the core problem is an equivocation on the word "it": Orchid, with the prepaid access credits system we had to put in place to satisfy Apple/Google, essentially is "a network of networks", all of which share not only the protocol (that would be trite) but share the entire mechanism for staking and selection: there is no difference at the level of the staking system between what "network" you are on for this purpose... there is but one shared pool of servers.

The issue is that the money comes in different shapes and forms, and individual users have access to different forms of money and individual servers accept different forms of money... and due to restrictions put in place by Apple and Google, we were forced to go to great lengths to support the ability to pay for the service using "in-app purchases", which results in a very large number of users having money that has been constructed--on the blockchain--to only be able to be spent with a set of servers that we are legally required to collect personal information from, making it "permissioned" if you want to accept that money... which you don't have to, but you aren't going to make much money.

It thereby isn't that the software we have released is in any way centralized: it isn't. The directory of providers isn't either. It isn't that any of the "protocols" I designed for this are somehow decentralized vs. centralized (I'm not even sure what that would mean: it would be like claiming OpenVPN is decentralized but NordVPN isn't? at best that would be, as I said, "trite"). The status is more that you are opening up shop in a bazaar, but weirdly most of the customers aren't carrying around cash, but you aren't allowed to accept credit cards. There's nothing preventing you from selling to any of these people, though. There isn't some server I'm running that is holding the entire thing together like the keystone.

Where it just kind of burns me up, though, is that the vast majority of people in the crypto space are just looking for "an easy buck", and so what they are looking for are easy to follow instructions to "stake money and get rewards", and the reality is that I know that the current state of Orchid would make those people sad, and so I don't go out of my way to bother making a "guide" where step 5 is "you are now sad"; to me, this is part of "being honest about what we have". But like, it isn't hard to run the server: you just need to be pretty comfortable calling functions on Ethereum contracts with a wallet and be able to deal with a relative paucity of documentation... I think that maximally prevents deception.

There are other solutions right now that, in contrast, I would argue "aren't honest": they are actively getting people to run servers, for example, but they don't even have payments at all yet, and have said every month for over a year that they will have payments in place "soon"... or they have a system set up to pay for servers using "inflation" on some underlying investment asset, and then report an APY that is largely based on the value being held up by speculation. Orchid has had payments working--in a way that is absolutely decentralized and which works over a legitimate utility token... but at a small scale--ever since we launched in December of 2019. It is just that we were also forced to build a second set of users by companies like Apple and Google to support their App Store monopolies, and those systems massively out-compete our decentralized users :/.