Centralization Isn't Bad, People Are Bad
Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
If we could simply trust the individuals we put in charge everything would be fine, but we can't so it isn't. The problems with the world don't stem from centralization directly. They are a result of the corrupting nature of power and tribalism. Zero-sum game theory reigns supreme. I win, you lose.
Decentralization
People throw around this word like it means something. Spreading out control will solve all the worlds problems. Is that true? What if everyone you are spreading out power to are just as bad as the original source?
It becomes obvious to me that targeted and focused heuristics to find trustworthy citizens is going to be far more effective than simply giving everyone a little piece of the pie. We can see this same concept play out with advertising.
Who is more likely to buy propane? A random person or a consumer with a history of purchasing propane and propane accessories?
Would you rather have one leader who has ascended the ranks of power without becoming corrupted, or 1000 random people that will never agree on anything? This is the cryptosphere's biggest problem:
Consensus
Getting communities to agree is the hardest thing in the world. This is why they fragment. This is why we centralize; to force people to do things they don't want to do because the boss is in charge. Centralization gets things done, that's why decentralization is so slow and stagnant.
I've talked about this before a few times. I think we are headed into the realm of decentralized crypto city-states ruled by philosopher kings.
This is the value of DPOS. It is the middle ground between what we have now and where we want to go. It is a way to forge a republic out of a decentralized space and put a few trustworthy people in charge. A few decades from now we will look at POW and POS and laugh about how flawed and weak they are (DPOS included).
Fearless leaders
Does Steem have what it takes to get where it needs to be? Is @ned a shining beacon of light that sets an example for everyone on the platform? Obviously, we have a long way to go, but I think we can get there. When we do, that victory will be all the sweeter, and if we fail another platform will pick up the torch.
Oh, I like so much about this. Even though I have thought for a long time that everyone has potential for good and evil within them, I've still wanted to believe people are basically good. Lately I've heard some very good cases against that - maybe we all have a desire to be good, but we are also driven by base needs and desires that have the potential to be terribly evil. It takes a great deal of discipline to behave in a way that is consistent with our ideal of "good" for any length of time.
Exactly, but I disagree that centralization is always about force. Before I took ownership of my dojo, the team and I (all students of the deceased founder) considered making it a co-op. We (a significant number of us) rejected that idea because it would have required working together at a level we were not ready to do. We ended up with one business owner, but it's about freedom and not force. I am not tethered to the opinions of the others if I want to make a decision, like what how to allocate our budget and what we should charge for dues. They are not tethered to mine either. They can influence the decision, and if they really don't like the direction we are taking they can choose to walk away.
I guess what I'm saying is, in a free and decentralized society, a business or organization can be centralized and still leave plenty of room for free choice of individuals.
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Agree. Centralization is just a more streamlined form of consensus. It doesn't mean people will be forced into doing something they don't want to, but they might. "It's a free country," so anyone obviously still has the option to leave. However, more often than not the option to leave is not worth it, and members can get forced into doing things they normally wouldn't.
It's tough because we don't truly have a great example of how these thing should best work. I can't think of a government that is efficient, makes decisions quickly, and looks after everyone.
Maybe a series of committees (or shortlists as you say in the comments) is the way to go. Committees that have their own interests in mind, but have to compromise with the other committees to get junk done. Elon Musk is very good at changing the world, but he's an absolute monster to work for... the crypto world just doesn't have a great example, but that's okay because blockchain might provide opportunities that we've never considered before...
I don't think we have to worry about it much. Most roads are dead-ends, but we are running in every direction at once. Anyone who finds a superior solution shares it because the entire space is open-source and collaborative. Superior solutions will be copied exhaustively and there is no way to enforce patents or stifle creativity in a permessionless setting.
How is DPOS going to put a few trusted people in charge? Stake based voting! The rich get to decide! Wo0ot! I know we can trust them to decide ;) :P LOL
The rich don't decide. The people with coins decide. Coins don't necessarily have value. It's really the initial distribution that is a problem, but again, coins can only be spent once, unlike fiat.
For example, Steem is allowing me to communicate with crypto enthusiasts. I now have a short-list of people here that I would trust with outrageous amounts of power. If I could get these people to create their own short-lists, then I now have a long list; a short-list with two tiers. At three tiers I would have a gigantic list of potentially trustworthy people.
Acquire a big enough community and forking/cloning a chain becomes trivial. Put all the trustworthy people in charge, simple. Might even be able to do it on chain in the form of a 2nd layer token. Once that token has enough support you exit the main chain and make your own. This has already happened on Ethereum with Tron EOS, and soon Binance.
Not sure if you are aware that Hiveminds has been released and it is said to have moved enough out of RAM to run on 64GB. This is making the rocksDB HF look very plausable. With nodes able to run on 16GB the game is about to change drastically. dApp devs will hardly need to know who Steemit, Inc. is.
https://steemit.com/busy/@taskmaster4450/ned-needs-a-tim-cook-cost-of-nodes-plummets#@themarkymark/re-taskmaster4450-ned-needs-a-tim-cook-cost-of-nodes-plummets-20190115t121629212z
When I read things like this I'm not so convinced. Hopefully it works out.
Well the biggest take away, for me, is that scalability seems to be under control. It has been a little over a year since my experimenting with getting a witness node running. That experiment was put on hold when seeing RAM demands skyrocket each month that went by. After the first month my home server was out of the running. Things were on the edge of requiring load balanced servers before this release. Time will tell how things finally land, yet this sounds like good news to me, Mr. Silverlinings. 😎
DPOS is the rich deciding ,
money is the basis for any changes,
That's like saying Communism is not bad...it was just abused..does it makes the idea bad?
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https://steemit.com/politics/@edicted/all-forms-of-government-are-on-the-verge-of-merging
Communism isn't bad. There has been active propaganda in America against communism since before we were both born. Why is that I wonder? Is it because the powers that be care about us and want to protect us?
The problem with communism is that it has to be micromanaged into the ground. When the Berlin Wall fell. People were asking who was in charge of the bread supply (and demand). Capitalism regulates itself in many ways that communism cannot.
However, with the ability to trust smart-contracts instead of people, all governments can now transition to custom systems that are transparent and may even have no one in charge.
I always enjoy following and reading you, I feel bad that I didn't endup upVoteing that post...I'm sure I read it the day u posted...
You see...I have spend my first 18 yrs of my life under communism,in Romania...and my last 25 yrs in US... Everything I was craving than,now I avoid it,by choice and if I can...but it took me a lifetime to make the difference between need and wants...and while I'm still here,I'm very discusted of our way of life...just a waste of energy and resources... Capitalism helped me understand cancer!
No one way of doing things will ever do right by everyone. We can tweak, change and improve things, but someone will always slip through the net. Any governance needs to have a form of appeal for those it's failing, but that's time consuming and rarely implemented in a large scale.
I think you're onto something with tribalism. It is in our nature as a group that someone always seems to rise to the top and that someone isn't always the best one to be there.
When we work in smaller groups people are most likely to be able to come to a consensus. The larger the group the more regulation needs to be in place to keep things civil. With huge, controlled, country sized groups amazing advances can be achieved, but we usually end up sacrificing freedom (and sometimes lives) to acheive these things. It's a catch 22 situation.
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you really dont understand what decentralization is
decentralisation is having multiple systems governing relative areas with policy and finance instead of a central government which historically has always abused control funnelled funds and services to build up central points like megacities which are unsustainable monstrosities that are ticking time bombs as soon as economies wane fall into despair.
a good example of this would be Detroit ,USA millions were incentivized to relocate here to build up steel industries and motor industries and as soon as demand fell and industries stalled millions of people were left stranded outside of the economy with nothing but empty promises for years from a government far removed from their problems and to be petitioned for change was a 600 mile journey
you might think all that is nonsense so ill leave you with a quote from Thomas Jefferson (founding father USA) during that brief moment it was a democracy.
“When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
You are very skilled at taking my words out of context and then writing a page long debate based off a single sentence.
Yeah I've been researching crypto for 1000 hours over the last year, so I know what decentralization is, thanks.
Do you just stop reading and click the reply button as soon as you read something you can isolate and refute?
you said in your title centrilstions isnt bad
this is false and the purpose of my comment was to show this
in saying that you researched cryptos for 1000 hours means little,
99% are not decentralised and misrepresent facts to support their own false claims