drnick: Because decentralization (Twitter.com)

Despite my grumps about the crypto industry recently. I still think this is all profoundly important. Why? Because decentralisation. History has showed us that civilisations ebb and flow between states of decentralised and centralised. On many levels: cultural, societal, political, organisational and now technological. Decentralisation emerges as the desire for distributed power does. Normally because things have started going wrong with the old centralised way of doing things. It’s often a fairly organic process, driven by debate, political action, attitudinal shifts, natural shifts in the power structure. And other times it happens because of total collapse. You see centralisation is weakness. It necessarily involves giving up your power for the sake of efficiency and efficacy. It involves trust. And when things are held together by trust. They fail. Corruption takes hold. The power that transitions to the trusted do’ers of the world gets abused. Cracks get papered over. Skeletons get hidden in closets. Backs get stabbed. Depending on how long this goes on for and how many layers of centralisation get stacked on top of one another. The bigger the mess and more extravagant the blow ups. Historically, despite the propensity for centralised fuckery, decentralisation eventually loses out as the dominant paradigm. People tire of the lack of predictability, things don’t happen quick enough, accountability is obscure, “the people are [redacted]”. So we time and time again, trust opaque institutions, corporations and demagogues to sort it all out for us. And largely, that’s where we’re at. For the last few hundred years all we’ve done is centralise and we’ve reaped the bounty of corporatisation and globalisation. But now, there’s some pretty nasty cracks in the countless layers of centralised systems, that have accrued entirely too much global power and are rattling through finite resources exponentially. And this is what I think could change. The technological tools for decentralisation enable decentralisation itself. At every level of the system. So far we’ve mostly got to payments, finance and basic tokenisation, but really that’s just the beginning. Blockchains are a coordination layer that allow us to not just exchange value, but now arbitrary logic and data. We can build new architectures of trust. What we’re building here is a toolkit for a more decentralised future. Where genuine credible alternative systems exist. A more anti-fragile and pluralistic world. More bottom up, more power to the people. It is possible. Up to now we’ve succumbed to centralised systems because there was simply no credible other way to do it and I think that is about to change. The failings of our industry arise when we let the weakness take hold. We let centralisation in, for convenience, efficiency and shiny new things. We trust the wrong people. Nevertheless, the trajectory is greater decentralisation and it will wash through society writ large and genuinely change things for the better. Or I’m wrong, and it is all a scam. Guess, we’ll find out.