Monday, December 27, 2021

True Decentralization means the total give up of control. Let's think about it...

Deep questions here....

What evidence would convince you that Cardano walks towards decentralization and won't walk back when the d-day arrives?

As much as I love Cardano, sometimes we need to zoom out and get dispassionate for a little and try to poke holes in that which we love, just to check if it deserves our love...

No, I didn't find any problems in the Cardano ecosystem recently. These questions arose long ago and, for no logical reason I decided to post it today. But there is an area where I keep finding serious problems everyday: human psychology. There is one thing humans are consistently the worst in the Universe and it's giving up power.

I said I love Cardano... Well, that's not quite true. I don't really love Cardano. I love decentralization, transparency and scientific rigor and I love those things, not because they are beautiful, but because these are the most powerful mechanisms for keeping away human greed and corruption, the two main forces keeping humanity in the "modern dark ages".

If Cardano, flips Bitcoin threefold, if it turns out to be the world financial system, if ADA becomes the world currency, but with all those things it still fails to achieve true decentralization.... Sorry, I pull my love of it. Without true decentralization, humans in control will find some way of slowly perverting the system, especially when things at stake grow bigger and bigger, and Cardano would be nothing but an unconventional tech company, but a tech company nevertheless.

If you think I may be exaggerating the difficulties of true decentralization, let's just meditate about the current state of the world:

True decentralization has not been achieved by any project whatsoever, be it in the crypto universe or out of it. What has been achieved so far is pseudo-decentralization, or partial-decentralization, or even, in many cases, true marketing. There may be one exception, though: Bitcoin.

I don't think Bitcoin is truly decentralized, but seems to be the most decentralized system so far. But it's important to remember the context in which Bitcoin decentralization came to being, with focus in the humans, not in the tech:

Satoshi "gave up" power during the launching of bitcoin when it was worthless at the time. That was easy. So even though Bitcoin is arguably the most decentralized system to date, this decentralization didn't come at the cost of giving up power while having big things at stake. There was no sacrifice of power and I wonder if that is the reason why Bitcoin succeeded at decentralization.

If Cardano, or any other project achieves true decentralization, this would be probably the first event in human history when people in governance positions consciously give up their power, irrecoverably.

Just think about it...

Cesar Scapella


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