This is a question that is worthy of consideration.
Crypto promised to be the decentralizing force that allowed the world to break away from the banks and create an entirely new monetary system. This was something espoused from the Bitcoin White Paper which discussed the idea of peer-to-peer money.
The challenge here was the fact that Bitcoin had some flaws. To start, it does not operate as a valid medium of exchange. As a trading asset, Bitcoin excels. Price stability is nowhere to be found.
Then we have the network. Proof-of-work was a breakthrough in that it provided decentralized consensus. We really had not seen that before.
Unfortunately, this is failing since we see mining operations growing in size. No longer can people use a PC for this purpose. Expensive hardware drawing large sums of energy are required.
In other words, with 40% of mining in the US, the largest chunk of this is done by publicly traded mining companies. These stocks are held by the likes of Blackrock.
Hence we seem to be back where we started.
Will We Ever Truly See Decentralization?
There are two components to this discussion.
One the one hand, we have the technological capabilities. The issue with decentralization is that it is slower than centralization. Meta can spin something up much quicker than a panel of developers operating independently around the world. Zuckerberg, if he decides, can through resources at a situation and direct people to focus in that direction.
A case could be made that decentralized infrastructure lagged behind its centralized counterparts. We can see how quickly Wall Street institutions get their applications online. Once the decision is made to enter something, they move rapidly.
For this reason, the basis of decentralization was lagging. Infrastructure is slow to develop. However, the advantage is that, which so much open source, at some point, the compounding starts to take hold.
More developers get involved, using existing code to build their platforms or services. Ultimately, this closes the gap to the centralized world.
The second component is not as simple.
Human Resistance
People tend to fight change. I think this is a statement that few would contest. Humans tend to resist anything new that comes along. The majority of the population simply resides in the same "rut" they were in. Basically we are creatures of habit.
With the discussion about decentralization, we have to take this into account.
Web 3.0 is another transition long promised by the crypto world. The challenge here is that few even think about using these platforms. Instead, the majority who are involved in the topic simply talk about it on Web 2.0 social media platforms.
As we enter deeper into the AI world, this is becoming even more prevalent. Big Tech are the beneficiaries of more data along with the continual feed into the vector databases. A platform like X has up-to-the minute info since people are always posting about what is going on.
Will this change in the future?
This is the crux of the discussion. We will never see decentralization as long as people resist it. In other words, it will only materialize if people opt for it.
So far, this is not the case.
Solving some of the technical challenges certainly could help. Many are not going to "wrestle" with an application, trying to work around all the bugs.
My guess is that we are facing a hard road here. People tend to do what is familiar. Even with something new as crypto, the centralized entities are getting people in the habit of heading to their platforms.
Will this change?
If it does, we might have an affirmative on the question posed in this article.
Posted Using INLEO
Sadly no. Governments and large corporations have a vested interest in maintaining control of the monetary systems. Even if a system tried to cut them out somehow I am sure there would quickly be laws made to remedy the situation and they would regain their grasp of any financial system.
Anything internet based relies on those same governments and corporations to maintain the network anyway. Just look at the recent events with Cloudflare and AWS outages.
You hit the nail on the head with the whole human resistance to change part. That's exactly what it is. Proof of work is a beautiful technology, but the problem lies in greed. People want more and bigger and more and bigger, lol, and that's why we have this institutional centralization in bitcoin mining (as well as other chains). There are still those like Monero that stay ASIC resistant so that the every day person can mine with a CPU. Those are the chains I like to support. Hell, I have a Monero mining machine sitting on the work bench in pieces I need to build. But the issue with these are with the concentration of hashrate in mining pools. The power that people have here is decentralizing their hashrate, but then again, there is the greed factor. They want to keep getting the most for their hashrate, which ends up being with the biggest pools. But the decision can be made to solo mine, whereas with proof of stake, there is none of that.
So really there your problem is right there: GREED and LAZINESS... People want the easy way out of everything, that's why the ETFs, treasury stocks, and mining stocks are blowing up right now. It's an easy way to be exposed to crypto and not have to do the work. With that, the problem is that blackholes like Blackrock are taking control more and more.
Interesting, but the way to this is by merging it with traditional systems and also by addressing issues within giving rise to new industries 😊
I think that descentralization is here because we see a ton of Blockchains, coins and token all doing their own thing. We also see markets that slice across these markets and can be exchange all the same. Wherever you want to trade a meme token with a gold pegged coin with a metaverse digital backed coin like Dark Energy Tokens on Splinter lands is all coordinated through different and independent systems. Making it amazingly descentralized. And contrary to the narrative that all altcoins are going to 0, I'll say the marketcap from these coins keeps growing.
I'm often disappointed with this scenario where coins exclude all the crypto universe and only compare themselves to Bitcoin. Which in most cases is silly. Not all coins were made to compete with Bitcoin, or achieve the same goals. The functionality and ecosystem around each chain is completely different.
So descentralization is already working, the read should never be focused around one specific coin or chain but withing the whole ecosystem.
On the human resistance topic, a huge miscalculation most people make comparing Web2 vs Web3 is the huge amount of marketing that has been poured in order for a SN to get recognized by the masses.
Tech people will want to believe that the best tech will win. But that's extremely off. The better marketed product will mostly win regardless of how crappy the technology is.
Web3 has almost 0 marketing budget making it completely inefficient for mass adoption. Hence most people are not even aware of its existence, let alone comparing the option. The average teen doesn't even know what Web3 is. The average YouTube or Netflix commercial doesn't even connect Web3 to crypto. So for the majority of society, crypto is only a replacement for forex and stocks. The idea of being everyday money hasn't even been considered truthfully.
A big question friend, we are talking of habit here; something very difficult to break out from. How do you run even your online business on web3 when all your customer base are on web2. Try drawing them in and it seems the entire process is complicating.
And in the end, data keeps increasing in the old systems.
There is really much needed to be done for web3 to stand out.