I'm fully aware that to most who are involved in crypto-communities there are some words that are tinged with negative associations, one of them is no doubt is democracy, but I hope that my words carry on the message I'm trying to convey effectively, and that none chooses to lower an anchor on semantics.

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Unavoidable Politics

Many of us dislike thinking about this, and in truth, most crypto users landed in crypto because of anarchistic tendencies. However, politics is truly unavoidable, simply because its part of the system that allows humans to collaborate flexibly and in large scale.

We may default to thinking in black and white terms when we use the word, in red vs blue if you are in america for example. But, the idea of left vs right is not all that exists, and specifically talking about cryptocurrencies those thoughts may not even be part of daily conversations. Nonetheless I've come to grips with the fact that all cryptocurrencies projects without exception require strong leadership, and because they do, these leaders must also be adept in the way of politics.

Evolving Concepts of Governance

We often hear the word consensus, and although those who have dug deep into the white-papers understand it, most don't, they have little to no clue to what it's supposed to mean. However, this does not mean they can't use or participate of the ecosystems, which I find slightly fascinating to be honest.

Here is an interesting parallel we can draw from "normal politics". A consensus government is one where cabinet appointees are chosen without regard for political affiliations. Simply said, non-partisan governance, right? Yes, that seems simple enough, so How does that apply to Blockchain you say? Well, this is the lines I'm trying to trace at the moment, and hopefully it will all make sense in the end, however I need to take one step back for just a minute.

An easier way to look at blockchains is to think of them as public databases, the idea is simply to decentralize the control of said database. It's impossible in other words for one agent to change the information on that database, to change the rules, without achieving consensus. And it's at that very point that we encounter the magical word "consensus".

What is interesting to me about this whole thing is that initially when the white-paper for bitcoin was drafted, the concept of governance, of consensus, eliminated somewhat entirely the complicated layers of human collaboration. The one phrase that comes to mind at the moment "code is law" sums up the intent pretty well. However, we the sapiens cannot help but to overcomplicate things, or to be more correct, to improve them?

The first form of consensus POW (Proof of Work) was all that was needed for the spark that started this revolutionary idea. Later came POS (Proof of Stake) and then DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake). With each shift we seem to have added not only plausible solutions for scalability, but complicated layers of Politics and socio-economic dynamics.

None are perfect

And I think that is not really debatable. The problem however might fall on the fact that as much as we can collaborate at a massive scale, we are still very limited. There is just no plausible way that everyone can agree on everything, at least none that I know of.

As a result, project leaders with different ideas split from their initial communities, forks of coins happen, some crypto projects even die off due to these differences. For the past few months I've dedicated a lot of brainpower to this challenge mostly coming from a DPOS community. It's taken me a while to come to grips with the somewhat ugly challenges that consensus in general faces, and I'm still not sure DPOS, the one I prefer, is the silver bullet to the conundrum.

Proof of Brain or Proof of Wallet?

In theory the idea is that on DPOS system, everything would be balanced out by a system of incentives. For example, the "miners" of a DPOS system are democratically voted, thus in theory a bad actor would be weeded out democratically. However, since the election of these "miners" who also happen to be leaders within the community is determined not by the number of votes, but by the weight of wallets, we encounter a potential weakness with no easy solution.

Some believe that the answer should be simple; One vote, one user. But, if the system of incentives is not in place, if there is no benefit to holding tokens, to becoming a big stake holder, then the valuation of the asset can never really move up, at least not theoretically. Can you think of a system that gives you no advantage for being heavily vested, and in the same breathe say that you are fine with it? Of course not, none of us could sincerely say that, but there is merit to the idea of not favoring the favored, the wallets.

On the other hand, if we have a system that gives clear advantage to heavily vested users, we basically create something sustainable. They are incentivized to stay vested, to participate of the economy and politics of the ecosystem, because they stand the most to lose if they don't and they most to gain if they do. This however, puts anyone who is just getting started at a massive disadvantage and thus creates a system that perpetuates the inequality of opportunity most of us a critical of.

And corruption?

Is never too far away from the conversation because it's also an element of human existence and governance. So, without me having to into details this occurs at all levels in all communities, and I would go as far as saying that I've not found an exception.

Another word we could use instead of corruption is abuse, and sometimes the softening of the labels allows us to be a little more pragmatic with our assertion, but my point stands. The criticisms DPOS receives are not unwarranted and it's been proven over again that things as bribery and the proliferation of something I can only call cartels is actually a thing.

So what now?

I'm not entirely sure, but out of everything I've learnt so far, the closest one I've found to solving most of the challenges is DPOS, with all of its political layers, with it's somewhat broken democracy, it's corruption and the hundreds of critiques it rightfully receives.

Funnily enough, even with all the positive things we could extract from DPOS, we still have not been able to escape one mold of default social behaviors, and that is because of one constant element in the mix, us.