As I said in a previous post on my "experimental account", I am studying toward a Master's degree in EU Law (and got my first year French diploma of "Maîtrise")
In the second year, we had two lectures on "EU Digital Transformation: Regulation vs. Technology", one with the Programme's Director, Godefroy de Moncuit, the second with Prof. Bruno Deffains
For additional readings on the topic of blockchain and law, we were recommended The Network Law review which listed in its recommendations an older blog post from Vitalik, "The meaning of decentralization"
On a side note, it's astonishing that Vitalik's Medium blog only has 50K subscribers as of 2022. I would have expected ten times that, and only goes to show how early we are.
Vitalik analyses different meanings of the term "decentralization" and why decentralization might be desirable. However, he also points out the drawbacks of decentralisation.
Indeed, decentralization is not an unmitigated good but rather presents us with important trade-offs.
Vitalik talks about "good cordination" (for getting good things done as a team) and "bad coordination" (ie collusion) for doing bad things:
He opines that this paradox cannot be solved by economics and technology only and is basically a social challenge.
In my previous post, "Hive: waiting for Ryoshi", I've argued that the past years have proven that there is at least one social solution to this challenge: the existence of a strong leader acting as the "focal point" for the community
Atahive
I'm not Turkish but I've learned enough history to know that Mustafa Kemal is considered the creator of modern Turkey and has been called "Atatürk" - the father of the Turks.
The reason Hive lingers at these price levels is the inherent contradiction between having a strong, father-like, charismatic figure for people to follow and being "decentralized".
What I'm saying is that decentralized means
- "censorship resistant", and that makes sense when there is indeed a risk someone will come to censor you.
- but it also means unruly, without direction, chaotic and disorganised. It's hard to impossible to follow something that moves chaotically.
Decentralization is thus not only "censorship resistance" but also chaos. Or, put differently, it is "censorship-resistant through chaos"
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can fake decentralization (like Ethereum) and have a high market capitalization because you take purposeful, directed actions which people can "read" and get attracted to. Or you can have real decentralization (like Hive) but then you are condemned to low market cap because to an outside observer you appear unruly and chaotic and "unreadable".
It's a hard trade-off to swallow. I lean toward being decentralized at technological and economic levels but becoming socially centralized. I hope an "Atahive" will raise and federate the many talented people gravitating around this platform and create "the modern Hive".
Many thanks for this post and some other you have made, blockchain, wb3, cryptos begin to be clear step after step reading surch posts. Very instructive for me, the comments under are very interesting too
Merci, votre blog est également très bien !
This is a fascinating article and raises many interesting ideas that I would love to explore. Given that I am already committed today, I will confine myself to the following:
I'm not sure that Hive is any more difficult to read than the national governments of pretty much any state (this is before we get into extra-national organisations like the European Union and the United Nations).
Decentralisation and centralisation are framed here as either/or; an alternative framing might be that they are points along a continuum that includes collective leadership.
My recollection of the formation of Hive is that it was anything but chaotic and involved collective and dispersed leadership across multiple arenas of activity. I believe there was something like five weeks between the initial threat (the purchase of Steem Inc by Justin Sun and the ill-fated AMA) and the hard fork that created Hive.
In order to achieve that, thirty developers came together to work on and test the code prior to the hard fork; at the same time, other people were maintaining negotiations with Steem Inc and Justin Sun; still other people were enabling and facilitating town hall meetings, and there was the push to maintain the top twenty Steem community witnesses in opposition to the sock puppet witnesses financed by Justin Sun. I'm sure there were other things going on that I've either forgotten or didn't know about.
I may have time to come back to this later in the week, which I would love to do.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Hereunder some follow-ups
Fair comment, and indeed we can see where this line of thinking leads: most national governments rule over stable polities - countries do not grow nor shrink to a significant extent, they are mostly stable entities. I compared in the past Steem (it was before Hive) with a virtual country and took as illustration Iceland. By being "as readable as a national government" what we can say is that this will not prevent Hive to staying stable. But if we want the strength of the national currency of Hiveland to increase in comparison with other national currencies such as the USD and the euro, then we need to increase as a country and an economy, we need to attract more "citizens" to Hiveland. That was my point: if we want to attract more people, we need to be more easily "readable":
Indeed, that is for simplicity's sake. Vitalik's blog makes a multidimensional analysis of decentralization. It can be said that having a strong leader is close to 100% political centralization
Indeed, that was a galvanizing moment, so emotionnally loaded that it achieved coordination among a large number of people. Very few other such moments happened since then. There are so many things to do to increase the number of citizens of Hiveland and the strength of Hive's economy! Yet they require coordination which is hard to come by when not faced with a clear and present danger like the Justin Sun takeover was. Basically, very little of comparable value has been achieved on Hive since then, because there's too much chaos and too little coordination
Yay! 🤗
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