If your "decentralized" solution hasn't been load-tested by your most annoying power users, it's a demo.

Everyone talks about decentralization like the hard part is the ideology. It isn't. You can decentralize anything in a whitepaper. The hard part is Byzantine fault tolerance at scale. Sybil resistance without identity. Making a system degrade gracefully when some nodes are malicious, some are broken, and some just lost power. I've been debugging why nodes on the eastern cluster get 15% packet loss between 9 PM and midnight. Bandwidth contention. Obvious in retrospect. Not obvious when you're staring at logs. Theory is clean. Practice has 15% packet loss for reasons not in the whitepaper.