Community Forks due to centralization
You'll hear the term "community fork" more and more as we move to a more authentic version of web 3. We're witnessing the beginning of the great "centralization purge" as regulations, or even large, powerful entities try to squeeze centralized pain points forcing the organic part of the community to "fork away."
"You, what do you own the world? How do you own disorder?" - soad.
Moving from web 2 to web 3.
Web 3 is the concept of owning your account, data, and digital assets without a middleperson—direct ownership. The token side has led many investors, who may not understand the underlining value set that web 3 brings, which leads to them speculating on anything and everything with a token. This leads to the rise of premines, greed, and leaving founders with disproportionate control over their blockchains; billions have been made in a very short time.
A blockchain is similar to a child. You must let your child "leave the nest," or you risk suffocating the child. To try and control every aspect of what you create leads to your creation dying or defying you.
Bitcoin is much more than just a blockchain, technology-wise but also ideologically. Bitcoin was the origin of web 3 from a creation standpoint. The founder(s) created a revolutionary technology that could have made the creator(s) wealthy. To build it, give it away for free, then walk away with seemingly no financial benefits is a once and a lifetime moment. The way Bitcoin was created gave birth to the idea of digital decentralization, censorship-resistance of one's assets, sovereignty from policymakers who can dilute currencies on a whim. It gave birth to something that we truly own, and the network's gamification allows it so that no one can take over the network in a meaningful way.
Since Bitcoins inception, there were a few who have tried to walk in its footsteps. But none came close—premines have thus far flourished, allowing overly centralized network control and figureheads who haven't relinquished power but have doubled down. The spirit turned into an investment, toxicity for a buck. Since Bitcoin has small blocks and low transactions per second, web 3 needs a decentralized account layer to communicate with all of web 3.
We are far past relying on a anonymous superhero to save the day; there will never be another satoshi. However, community forks can fork out centralized control of amazing technology creators who refuse to "set free."
Entities coming to web 3 with a legacy web mindset of "trying to control things" are in for some growing pains. Web 3 isn't like traditional investments. It lives outside the scope of legacy business models; it trendsends barriers, turning every mobile device into a sovereign bank, an immutable social platform, and endless ways to monetize creativity for business models this world has yet seen. It's community-owned, and while every centralized business on earth preaches "community first," none were truly capable until now with web 3 technology.
Centralization will come at web 3 like they did web 2; they will try to buy out premines and build their own "supped up," controlled versions of things. On web 3, this is akin to competing vs. the atmosphere by trying to capture air in a giant bag.
Trying to force something unnatural on something organic, you'll either kill it or enact its survival instincts and will grow around whatever circumstance.
Trying to come in, and what is essentially a money attack, to buy up as much of the underlining governance resources on decentralized networks to control them will fail miserably. "Big tech" has made their money because money attacks work on the web 2. You can buy out a business legally and fire everyone and change the way the business operates with the snap of a finger. The employees can't fork traditional businesses like you can with open source software that is self-sustaining.
Trying to brute force your way in on web 3 will only cause it to react to survive. Trying to centralized a decentralized community is an attack, and the community will react accordingly. No longer can anyone buy out the underlining protocol in a meaningful way, thus owning all apps on that network. They will need to compete, and their money does not go nearly as far in the sharing economy that strives for true account ownership.
Community Forks
The first and last line of defense is layer zero, which can always fork and slash bad actors out trying to take over the blockchain. In theory, it sounds very simple, but how does it work in practice?
There are many more centrally controlled blockchains than there are decentralized community-run blockchains.
Looking back on our history, we could have forked Steem when the founders held over 50% of the total supply on a DPoS blockchain. Factions tried many times, when Ned started a 100% powerdown, they shook the cage more, lots of hooping and hollering, lots of pleads, lots of threats of the all-mighty fork! But it never happened. Ned backed down with the powerdown, realized that there was zero way he could powerdown and rug us in broad daylight without a hell of a backlash and tons of community dumping. By the time he could have dumped his ninjamined stake, slowly and painfully in front of all, he'd had been lucky to get pennies on the dollar for it.
Sneaky Ned stopped his powerdown, "calmed" the waters, then rugged us by night in a secret over-the-counter deal to a not-so-well-trusted entity. Needless to say, why didnt we fork earlier? Why did it take Justin Sun turning into Godzilla and stomping everywhere, destroying everything for the majority to agree to fork? Simple, you can't even get a dozen people in a room and not have someone not like someone else, let alone a community of thousands.
Many stepped up over the years and tried, offered to fork and provide resources, but when the idea went to rally, people just didnt mesh enough. Factions formed pockets, people with "their vision." It's a tough gig. Hell, I got here in 2017, summer, and there were talks of forks before I even arrived. This has been an ongoing battle since the inception of the ninjamine.
You'll hear me say it takes an alien invasion for all to come together and fork out "centralization." Some still lingered even when Justin Sun had full control over the chain as many moved to Hive. It took him censoring anyone saying anything; I remember Hivers got posts removed that mentioned TikTok. It took that level of extremity to get the last people over, the "ring the towel," and squeeze everyone over.
The longer a community waits to fork, the more established the centralized chain becomes, the harder it becomes to fork away an entire community. The gains pacify people, and it's almost impossible to separate them from each other. However, early enough in the project's life, the community is still fresh with the original vision and will fight to preserve the value proposition.
We are early into web 3, and many of us still believe overly centralized blockchains would fall by the wayside, both ideologically and investment-wise. You see, we've been sold on web 3, account ownership first and skins second. We understand the value proposition, and when we are still really small, it's a "risk" to try and sacrifice the core value proposition for short-term gains—Especially on a chain like Hive, where the largest stakeholders are locked in for 90 days.
However, as a centralized chain gains mass adoption, you'll find people defending premines and centralization due to them becoming married financially with the network. Many people built businesses and had ICOs on top of these networks, thus a community to appease. If everything price-wise is going up, why would any of them band together and fork for the sake of a more censorship-resistant chain? And if they did, they would be in the minority.
It's only when investors think censorship-resistance is the main value proposition and hurting that will hurt their investment long term is when the community is most likely to band together and fork. We saw this in real-time with Steem vs. Tron, resulting in the community fork Hive; we also saw it with BTC, small blockers vs. big blockers resulting in a smaller subsection of the community forking to make BCH.
Being centralized is not enough in practice to provoke a community fork. It takes both being early enough for perceived centralization to hurt the value proposition and the largest stake-centralizing-holder to destroy their own investment, thus forcing investors to flee out of fear for their assets. When I had Steem in my wallet, I often feared they would break the chain and GG to my funds.
One of the biggest hurdles to a community fork is, well, having a community strong enough to fork. It requires people who know the technology and who are willing to be nodes. It takes the risk of not know what the token price will be, as the token will not be listed on any centralized exchanges from the get-go, less of an issue today as it was when Hive forked, especially since Hive had no access to the larger "decentralized" exchanges out there. It takes a lot of resources and humans to have a noncentralized fork. Under an attack, people band together and "divvy" up later. Under peaceful times, the politics of who contributes what and gets what in return, can go on forever. Hive is a well-oiled machine, the entire community forked, in terms of all the top witnesses and 99% of the real (no sockpuppets) backups. It has a ride or die community ready to go, and when we moved, we made a big splash, quickly surpassing STEEM in both market cap and daily active users and blockchain transactions. You can only fake it until you make it for so long. Hey Justin Sun, we want to be the ones to choose, you always want to play, but you never want to lose.
What makes Hive so special is the same thing that makes Bitcoin so special, its creation. These blockchains are open source; it's not the technology that will make any one stand out. It's the community, the story, the censorship resistance, the birth. You cant buy what Hive did, not for all the money in the world. It's an immaculate conception, just as Bitcoins was. It was done, not out of greed, but out of survival. It was to protect what was ours. And shortly after we jumped the Steem ship to join the Hive lifeboat, the titanic was sunk, and millions of dollars in funds were stolen directly from the "dissenters" wallets. Maybe Justin Sun can terrorize your favorite premine blockchain and force a community fork, better sooner than later.
Waiting too long to fork as a community, letting centralized chains gain mass adoption and set roots, makes community efforts less feasible on that chain. Unlike the internet of old, the new internet will have a token. Regulation will come down with an ironclad. Whatever isn't bolted down will fly straight out of the picture.
Web 3 will be so abundant, having any centralized control over any meaningful amount of it will result in an insurmountable attack vector. No one should have all that power, and they won't.
Communities will rise, defi, and bring about technology that bends laws and reinvents them. The internet changed everything; old laws could not capture it nor control it. Still, until this day, regulators with their mops keep trying to stop the ocean of innovation that grows larger and larger every day.
It is not up to technology and innovation to bow down, submit, pander to political whims and regulatory red tape. It is up to lawmakers to keep up and not get in the way of innovation. This need to try and control and suffocate every little detail will not be put up with by free communities.
"Headless" DAOs & DACs using stake-based voting are the future. Token distribution that cannot be centralized. Pysudeomous worldwide nodes. Countries either adapt or get left in the dust; it isn't crypto that will be hurt by over-regulation; the entities/countries that try to slow it down will become irrelevant.
Hi Dan.
The web3 must be accompanied by great innovation, bitcoin is undoubtedly the beginning of everything, but it slows down before everything that must be developed so that the web3 has scalability and adoption.
Regarding the forking of a blockchain, it takes many brilliant minds within a community, Hive was able to do it and we are not stopping, we are learning every day and taking great skills to take Hive to another level.
Regarding business models and commercial models, the investment concepts of web2 cannot be adapted to web3, which is why traditional institutions are not yet pioneers in angel investment in web3.
But traditional investment systems can be replaced by a large organized community (DAO) that can manage tokens for development and marketing.
On Hive we need a program to help us create and manage DAOs with the governance tokens that communities can generate.
Ah, the SOAD references! Most iconic freedom prophets, them.
Something about this reminded me of the Sci-Fi concept of Singularity. The point of no return where truly things get irreversibly out of control. Often considered a threat to Humankind, this point of no return might also be something to hope for, if Humankind means...The Man Who Sold The World.
Rand's Libertarian idea was, and it's also a school of thought in Psychology in general, Society is a fake concept, and Good for Society usually means Goof for those in charge only...
And decentralization brings hope that Good for the interested individuals shall be possible in our lifetime...wait...separate individual lifetimes and legacies.
Singularity...is a matter of critical mass. Is the genie out of the bottle yet?
As with many things, one cannot be certain until it's already been long ongoing. Three years later, I am still pretty enthusiastic about this new thing with great potential. It's still the thing I've been looking for during the past decade and more.
Blockchain tech is only as good as the people managing it and setting it up..
If it's malicious folks or government entities, they will always stack the the deck in their favour somehow, or have systems in place to exert otherwise unwanted actions onto data the blockchain contains.
Agreed. The good thing is decks can only be stacked so much, and not every entity, government or not, is out to stifle innovation via the need to control everything. Blockchain is worldwide, and innovation will always be welcome and able to seek refuge somewhere. The places that allow it will flourish, the places that don't won't. Pretty soon, everyone will have no choice but to embrace it, and those that try to stifle it will be unpopular.
It will really come down to good and bad actors as well as governments chasing them through policy crafting and regulation that will see this stuff become common place or effectively outlawwed and sent to the unregulated black market.
Those drunk on power tend to want more, totally agree with it being a huge factor in potential stifling.
Damn overbearing governments and such... I think as crypto gains more and more traction we'll only see their attempts to regulate ramp up in more restrictive means, towards those still engaging in the old system.
btw, hope you feel better soon!
Much appreciated captain <3
Even history is evident every society faced it's dark age not due to lack of resources but because those resources were only utilised by and for a selected few. Democracy was supposed to be a solution but eventually paid media came. In the age of IT open source was supposed to solve it but their to people develop their own software based over those dependency which eventually lead to empowerment of few.
But this can't happen in blockchain cause by default they are supposed to be open source, so it means anyone can have the contribute to a project help in development or if they like even give it a particular direction. Still there are coins like Stellar(XLM) and Ripple(XMR) which somehow had proprietary software in them. So would it still might be a possibility that we might see centralisation of decentralisation in future?
On paper, the odds greatly favor centralized blockchains. However, there will always be a few that are decentralized. The few that survive and withstand will slowly but surely scoop up the mass network effects over time making centralized chains either irrelevant or turned into covenant gateways for people to use in between web 3. So web 2 bridges taking you to web 3 lands.
@theycallmedan Sr. I just love to know how hive blockchain is more secure, what if anyone else tries again to do with current hive blockchain what Justin sun and Ned Scott did with steem and steemit how we can make sure it will not happend again, because it's very painful and time consuming to rebrand everything again due to hard fork
There is no premine on Hive. They would need to buy up 51%+ of all voting tokens. If they did that, we would react as we did with Steem and powerup/vote more. We are close to the "checkmate" scenario of having enough voting that no one entity could get enough to take over the chain. Today they would need help of the exchanges, but with the 1 monthly delay on voting in governance, we would see that attack from a mile away and prevent it. Anything is possible, but the game theory is very tight here, and in practice, we showed what is possible vs. a premine; imagine what we could do without that attack vector.
So Hive is pretty much safe? How long until it's 100% safe?
Funds are safu. But no one can say anything is 100% safe, doesn't exist anywhere, but you can strive to make things as secure as possible.
Yeah... I think it would cost an attacker a MASSIVE amount of money to make a dent though? I hope Hive will stay around long enough to be a permanent home!
You are right, 100% nothing is safe, if it is fine in a moment, then no one has any idea what will happen in the next moment, like a person leaves the world in front of us in a moment. Never have 100% confidence in anything in life.
@theycallmedan Sr. I really thank full to you, your words really helped me to understand what can be happend and how hive blockchain community can react on it
You have a lot of information and experience about hive blockchain as compared to me, because I am just a normal hive blockchain user, I just love to use and promote hive blockchain, I am not a blockchain developer and a technical person
One thing I want to know more from your reply, how exchanges get hive tokens? I mean what are the resources these exchanges use to get liquid hive coins, as you mentioned there is no premine hive available, is it possible for exchanges to have more then 51 total supply of Hive tokens , I mean how and from where they can able to get or purchase that much supply of Hive coin?
I wish it become almost impossible or very difficult to to control and take over hive blockchain because it's need a alot of time and effort to develop a brand but when we need to rebrand everything due to hard fork it's very frustrating to see
Thanks again for your support and encouragement
@zaibkang
Hi, exchanges can only get Hive tokens when people decide to sell them. So the best thing is to trt to lock up as much as possible in good hands.
It means there is only one way for exchanges to buy hive coin and that is from individual users who hold and earn hive already I think that's great because if hive blockchain users not sell to these centralized exchanges or use dex decentralized exchange they are not able to get 51% supply of Hive coins
Exactly, people can't buy what isn't for sale :)
Coincidentally I was on a research to try and understand what web 3 means and reading your article has given me a well detailed explanation of what it is. Nice post. I learnt a lot from this being a cryptocurrency infant still learning.
The U.S. government and Federal Reserve Bank will just have to learn this the hard way.
I love decentralization, but if anyone wants to create his private centralized space (inside our decentralized ecosystem) didnt see why is something negative. I mean, its a matter of choice. Centralization also have some strong sides that descentralization lacks, and the other way around (descentralization of course is indisputably better) but vertical organizations and corporative policies also have his own advantages.
As everything i believe the common ground is always the best choice, whatever tribe wants inside, but in a descentralized enviroment.
Freedom is the best choice, but it has to remain as a choice!
Agreed, layer 1 must be decentralized enough to be censorship-resistant. Layer 2 and tokenized assets can be centralized or decentralized; it doesn't matter because tokenized assets are not protecting the integrity of the blockchain they are built on. Building a token on a decentralized blockchain saves you all the headache of protecting the integration of the data. It allows you to tokenize securely, any way you see fit.
Totally agree, and the transparency is also key! The posibility of audit and track activity, and know where the money comes, and more important, where it goes!
Altough sometimes i see something that makes me noise, when different interfaces are created, the branding on Hive is lost.
The network provides the structure and it is not even mentioned, which weakens Hive and consequently the stability of its own projects. Today you can google "Hive blockchain" and first links are of weird suspicious projects.
We are free in the blockchain. Yet we don't own anything but a set of cryptopasswords.
We just have freedom because some technology owner give us the possibility.
In this athorization we can live "free". We are. And this is great.
But it's limite to the existence of this space.
If you think of what ownership actually means, my definition of it is something that can't be taken from you. Do you really own your house if someone can take it from you? Your gold, that was taken by force many times. Just because we hold something does not really give us immutable ownership of it. However, with crypto, all you need to do is memorize a string of words; that's something no one can take from you. So for me, true web 3 account ownership is the highest form of ownership one can have.
And I totally agree with this concept. That's why I'm here once discovered all of this.
What I mean is "even in web 3.0 a user has limits" (I can memorize my string of words, but the owner of the switch is not me)(I can't control any server, any code, any source of energy).
I'm free inside Hive. so as you say "is the highest form of ownership one can have"...I agree.
The user is free in his own digital identity, and this is the great value in Hive, in my opinion, that generates a cascade of benefits.
A token for every digital identity, marketable, with a value that represents the user itself.
And we're not even strictly talking about currency anymore.
:)
Yo Dan, I just watched your interview on youtube. You are a fantastic spokesperson for Hive. @aggroed, Khal, and yourself really need to get on some more crypto channels for interviews. You guys are propping this thing up and making it easy for others to follow in your footsteps. Love what you do for this community. Really excited for 3speaks new developments!
cheers , appreciate the kind words. I'm always on the look out for more interviews, if you know any send them to @lordbutterfly or @eddiespino - thanks!
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@theycallmedan Is the web3 speaknetwork happening this year or next???
This year.
What of the citizens in the over regulated countries? Will they become irrelevant, or just use a vpn or something like Substratum?
I read about what Ned and Justin Sun did, and a friend survived it. But I wasn't there thankfully! It hurts to see your platform die, and I did witness that happen to my first blogging home, which was centralized. The owner just lost interest in us...
web 3 offers anyone from any country a chance. If the country is over regulated to the point people can access web 3, VPNs and the like can be used.
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STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
I love decentralization
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Un saludo amigo @theycallmedan, quería formularle una pregunta a través de este post, no es una pregunta relacionada con el contenido del mismo pero tengo una inquietud muy grande, actualmente tengo una reputación de 64.47 en mi perfil, pero en mis post dice que tengo 48.26 por que paso esto ? podrá responderme amigo gracias pos su atención.
In time to come, countries will make foundations on cryptospaces. They'll really learn it the hard way.
I enjoy reading this
To content creators on hive, it feels like the platform is growing and is fully funtional, but to be honest, is not like that, is barely on infant stage, and it's just learning how to walk and move, an example of that is the constant born of new tokens, games, and communitys on it.
They are booming with grow because is just starting, we can only grow up front now on. But there will be challenges, sooner than later community forks will add slight problems we could do nothing about, not willout establishing autoritys that would centralize power and we would go back to steemit.
So we have to find ways to democratically push fowar governance systems, the recent problem on proof of brain show us that the current governance of some of the communitys are not enought for keeping in check the problems that born in it.
The proof of stake seens to be unbalance and in proof of brain was not enought to keep the ship going willout problems, the whole voting problem between proofofbrainio and some downvoter, and the current decent of proof of brain token value, show us that proof of stake is still a bit centraliced, and we need to create a better way to shield users than this.
The whole idea of eliminating downvotes at all is also wrong, communitys should be able to self censor content that is to be outlawed, noone would like to see CP, human traffict or drug markets on hive, but just adding rules makes people feel trapped because we supose to be descentraliced and free of censorship in firts place, so we need entitys like hivewatchers to keep in check agains that kind of content.
We need a more democratic system to rule where, and who, gets to run the token generation system, and how they are to be keep working in every community, if someone can just burn tokens to push the value up, they can tamper with the token value and modify the power balance on the hive blockchain.
We need to find a balance on the communitys, there are still problems but im sure and i have FAITH that the communitys are the way to go fowar, centralization is wrong, we already try that on the internet 2.0 and it went WRONG.
G'day Dan, hate to comment on something unrelated, but I tried all the other ways I could find...
Pretty sure you're involved with 3Speak. If not, my bad.
The 3speak search function isn't working
Tried opening a ticket (https://helpdesk.3speak.co/);
Tried opening a different ticket (https://support.3speak.tv/support/tickets);
sigh
I respect you sir. Thank you for this master piece.
Good one, bro.
Everyone is trying to take hive up in their own way but for this we need an active community which it will grow more.
I believe, if there is a hard-fork in this, then hive can go down a lot, which will disappoint the entire hive members.
Gracias por votarme
Really very interesting post .. about WEB 3.0 I think it will be an even bigger revolution than the other two previous phases. However, it is true that this initial phase with the blockchain has created a lot of wealth still aimed at a few individuals ... but the system that is being born is still better than the previous ones, in my opinion