> I would just take a centralized framework and stick it inside an oversized drone/vehicle capable of carrying the added weight

Makes sense. I think there are scenarios where such “base stations” are a priori available and “shielded,” so in this case, it might make more sense to just go with a centralized system. This could also be built on top of our system, though.

> But what’s the benefit of this?

I agree that, in many cases, the return on saving costs might be marginal. However, say you have a cluster of drones equipped with computing hardware capable enough to run all algorithms themselves—why spin up a cloud instance for running a centralized version of that algorithm? It is more of an engineering-ideological point, though ;)

> But I do find it funny that the solution to decentralization seems to be simply having the centralization move around easily / flexibly. It’s not a hive of peers, it’s a hive of temporary kings.

Most of our applications will not need this group leader. For example, the pubsub system does not work by aggregating and dispatching the messages at a central point (like MQTT) but employs a gossip mechanism (https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/pubsub/overview/).

What I meant is that, in some situations, it might be more efficient (and it’s easier to reason about) to elect a leader. For example, say you have an algorithm that needs to do a matching between neighboring nodes —i.e., each node has some data point, and the algorithm wants to compute a pairwise similarity metric and share all computed metrics back to all nodes. You could do some kind of “ring-structure” algorithm, where you have an ordering among the nodes, and each node receives data points from the predecessor, computes its own similarity against the incoming data point, and forwards the received data point to its successor. If one node fails, the neighboring nodes in the ring will switch to the successor. This would be truly decentralized, and there is no single point of failure. However, in most cases, this approach will have a higher computation latency than just electing a temporary leader (by letting the leader compute the matchings and send them back to everyone). So someone caring about efficiency (and not resiliency) will probably want such a leader mechanism.