Are we afraid of decentralization ?
It would be understandable as our mere experience of reality is based on what we call I, which is, even typographically, a symbol of centrality. Nevertheless, we have seen recently some applications of decentralization that question our feelings on the subject.
Decentralized is unfortunately related to unstructured. Even mathematically, ordering properties are lost if the graph looses its root. But we're humans (are we) and we're maybe not designed the optimal way. Maybe we are a species that needs help organizing itself, and help was unavailable until now. Maybe we only need soft hierarchy brought by decentralization instead of strong hierarchy principles of centralization. Maybe soft hierarchy for everyone is a form of centralization anyway and we can benefit from what we loose even if we loose it. That's my personal belief.
So, when I see that the word Gridcoin is not used in the paragraph of the whitepaper[+] proposal relative to decentralization (all other paragraphs use it), it rings a bell instinctively++.
It feels like decentralization is only a second class value, something not so important for Gridcoin. I'm really against this way to interpret the whitepaper.
I'm even considering making a poll. I propose to add to this paragraph the "In the wake of Bitcoin, Gridcoin acknowledges decentralization's benefits." sentence , or any improvement.
Would it be wise ?
I'd be glad to read your thought about that ( but you won't change my mind !) or your unstructured opinions about decentralization :-)
[+] https://github.com/gridcoin-community/Whitepaper/blob/master/Gridcoin_White_Paper_DRAFT_1.0.2.pdf p.10
++ thank you @jringo and the #whitepaper team on Slack : this paragraph is the only thing that bothers me on the proposal, the rest is awesome!
Thanks for the feedback!
I can speak only for myself (though I'd guess that most of us here feel similarly), but I am very much a supporter of and advocate for decentralized systems built on top of open-source protocols.
I think you're right that the decentralized paragraph should mention Gridcoin, and I can say that it wasn't brought up before publishing the first draft (at least not by me) because I assumed it was a given = ). After all, we're a network built on a blockchain -- the protocol used to build decentralized systems!
I agree with you though: in the next draft, this should be made clear for people who might be newer to blockchains. I will bring it up with the team and we will have to decide on whether to add it at our own discretion, before the poll is over, or wait until the poll is done and write and poll a new paragraph.
For the sake of all our sanity, I ask that you don't make a new poll about the white paper while the original poll is still running.
That is the wise path I couldn't see. Thank you for your comment and don't worry, I won't interfere until the 20th!
at the end of the day we read the rac stats from boinc servers so it's not exactly the ultimate embodiment of decentralization, but then again there are multiple projects so it is kinda diversified (to say the least). i see the paper's goal as getting the big picture out, the rest is semantics imho...
I agree. The big picture is clear and my point is only a semantic question. IMO though, semantics on the whitepaper should be as clear as possible. At the moment, the special treatment of that paragraph could diffuse an ambiguous signal.
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I have found the whitepapers and roadmaps to be a waste of time to read because things never go as planned and things get left out that get taken care of here and there that were not known...Let alone slack and the private conversations behind closed doors that nobody else in the community has any say in , polls only get us so far. How are we " Gridcoin " decentralized when yet we have hard coded seed nodes? I refer you to look at the source code and check out /src/net.cpp around lines 113-117 iirc and since I pointed out the security issues that arose there and barton26 was nice enough to update and change the seed nodes to something less favoring 1 single persons nodes ( and we wonder why there are forking issues??? ) I have learned after sharing those lines of code and conversing on freenode #gridcoin that unfortunately its necessary to get things working and to assure connectivity for the network to spider out amongst the full nodes you " can " add to your config file and you could have no nodes in the config and still have a working wallet client. Apparently I guess you could call it a failsafe for people whom do not know how to edit a config and put in their own entries but I would not call it decentralized when there are hard coded node DNS entries the block-chain client is told to connect to.I would call it as decentralized as possible , kinda how in America we are not free but we are as free as we can be without total anarchy.
Thanks @jamezz, I think your comparaison between Gridcoin and America very relevant and that establishes a correspondance between whitepaper and Constitution. No matter how is the situation today, the main point is that everyone aggrees to sign it for what it means. It is thus important for Gridcoin to clearly expose its philosophy because it represents a respectable power (legislative through vote, executive through currency, social, ...) and a responsible behaviour is expected from any respectable power.