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RE: From ad hoc governance to better governance
errrm, blockchain is a decentralised technology i was made to believe, so the blockchain-governance is kinda tweaking my brain please.....Who are the goverment in this secenario?.....i just need a simple term explanation please
Blockchains are decentralized in that anyone can participate in the network. How those voluntary participants interact with one another once they join a project (a specific blockchain protocol) is a problem of governance. You can think of this discussion as "How to develop a decentralized governance structure." What the author is saying is that anywhere you have people interacting with one another, governance structures will emerge. You can either consciously design them, or not.
IMO this article is addressing a larger point of "What the heck does decentralization mean?" It's often easy to fall into the trap of believing that "decentralization is always better" as if decentralization is an easy thing to pin down. The United States, for example, is decentralized in that it has individual States that have some level of autonomy. But it's obviously also highly centralized in that it has a Federal Government with a lot of compulsory power. Point being, centralization and decentralization are often in the eye of the beholder. They are more subjective terms than people often let on. The truth is that the challenge is having the right amount of decentralization/centralization. The reason it is so important that these systems be entirely voluntary is that this serves as a check on centralization (among other things). If the participants feel the system is becoming "too centralized" they can always leave, so it's always in the best interests of those involved to keep their system "only as centralized as necessary."
Now i just got schooled. Thanks for this @andrarchy, this a question that had been in my mind since i got to know a little about Cryptos and Blockchain, it was my lucky moment to get a post where i could ask and not feel embarassed......PS- I'm in Nigeria West Africa, and we are trying to catch up on this amazing things
It was a very good question!
Gracias!
I wrote a little bit more on decentralization here: What's so great about decentralization, anyway?
@andrarchy already gave a pretty good answer.
It depends also on what kind of system it we are discussing about. If we assume that a certain blockchain is perfect and it doesn't need ever again any kind of improvements, then it doesn't necessarily need a governance system. But so far we are very far away from perfect blockchains. There is always something that can and should be improved.
For example, Bitcoin is in trouble with the blocksize debate. They can't decide what kind of actions should be taken to move forward. Somebody might say that this is a problem of non-existent governance, but another perspective is that there is governance structure, it just doesn't work very well. Participants in Bitcoin economy are still doing decisions all the time, about what not to do. They are deciding that all improvements that are suggested so far should not be implemented. So there are people who have power – they have a power to say no.
Bitcoin governance structure is a good example of ad hoc governance which just happened to arise. Nobody designed it.
If you want to know who are the government, you have to ask who have the power to say yes or no to any proposed change to the protocol.
Hmmm.....
That is pretty deep, now i know where to focus my findings on now.