There are a couple of things any of us talking decentralized need to keep in mind.

1st - Is your service reliant on DNS servers to display your service? If you are not familiar that is the service that translates a word website like STEEMIT.COM into an IP address. Which is 54.174.133.181 currently in the case of steemit.com. So my profile steemit.com/@dwinblood is actually translated to 54.174.133.181/@dwinblood thanks to DNS. People use friendly names because it is easier to remember, share, and they can change the IP address of their server and just adjust what IP address that name points to and it will still work.

This makes us vulnerable though as if they shut down the DNS servers or alter them such as the popular 8.8.8.8 Google public DNS servers then it can redirect or stop web traffic.

You can do your own DNS server, but that doesn't help the world. DNS servers communicate with each other and update addresses in their lists, but they can override them. So google with a few tweaks of numbers can disable or redirect any website or service using a name instead of an IP address for those using their 8.8.8.8 public DNS.

The "infamous" internet kill switch is thought to be mostly an agreement to make people turn off their DNS servers if they have agreed to do so. Suddenly you would not be able to resolve names to their addresses unless you happen to be using a DNS server that did not turn off. Yet the webservers also have DNS servers as they prepare to display your page. So you might reach part of a site only to have it broken due to the site itself using DNS servers that are down.

So there is the old method some of us internet old timers used of simply using IP addresses. If web pages and services used IP addresses instead of names then we would not require DNS. That has it's own share of problems.

First... most of this stuff is running on IPv4 which is running out of IP addresses and has been for awhile. Technically it already ran out but people that have them are reselling them and using other techniques. IPv6 addresses the IP space problem but despite pressure to migrate the entire internet to IPv6 that hasn't really happened yet.

Even so. IP addresses are allotted by agencies such as ARIN.NET and there was a big concern a couple of years ago as control over IP address assignment was moved outside of the United States.

These places essentially control what is known as the master BGP or Border Gateway Protocol which determines routes to reach and where large IP blocks go. The owners of IP blocks can adjust BGP and if they own large enough amounts can fragment it into chunks and spread it across multiple locations.

All that is necessary to take the IP ADDRESSES themselves out of the picture is a slight adjustment to the main BGP so that the addresses are no longer controlled or routed to you.

That last one is a doozie. You see if DNS were to go down we can and have thought up alternatives though they are not as friendly as people would like.

However, if you are chopped off from your IP ADDRESS blocks then your services and sites will be down completely.

So while we talk about decentralized and I am a fan there are aspects of decentralization that are vulnerable.

Is your decentralized code/platform spread across multiple ranges of IP blocks that are owned by completely different entities? If one or more of these entities it is spread to are taken down can it still operate on the ones that are not.

Is your code using names instead of IP addresses or some other mechanism that is vulnerable if your host, or your clients DNS is compromised? If not then your decentralization still has attack vectors.

Now the big problem with HTTP and HTTPS (web page protocols) is they expect to resolve to a single IP address. A new protocol that did the same thing and could resiliently fail over to other IP addresses could be developed but in reality at the moment they tend to always resolve to a single address which is reached via BGP and then perhaps it hands off from there if certain paths are failing. It is still very vulnerable to DNS and BGP manipulation.

To truly be decentralized a system would need to be in place that could fail over in the event of no DNS and no proper BGP for a specific IP address.

The front facing web pages will always be vulnerable such as steemit.com, busy.org, etc. The hope is that if there are enough alternatives they cannot take them all down.

I see steem as resistant to a lot of common problems. I also suspect it is more vulnerable than we suspect to shutting down a lot of the critical interfaces we use to communicate with the blockchain. Sure witnesses with the critical data may still be there, but if all avenues to communicate with that data are down... what then?

Some big questions I don't have the answers to.

EDIT: There is one thing good about BGP. The smallest block it can route to ISPs and hosts is 256 IP addresses (/24). So if they attack your BGP they have to do it in a minimum of 256 IP addresses. If you happen to share that chunk with other businesses and clients then those businesses and clients would also need to be taken down to take you out of commission. So the more different /24s your decentralized applications reside upon the more collateral damage would need to be acceptable to take you down via the BGP method.

The easiest method is to simply mess with DNS.