This is again a great video!
People mistake technological decentralization for financial decentralization. You can have a platform running on open source code and even have a ton of nodes, but people who are "staked" in the dollars economy can buy crytpo and be "staked" in the crypto economy. These 10% of people that own 90% of the worlds wealth can also come in and own 90% of the crypto wealth and just financially recentralize these "decentralized" currencies.
One doesn't have to look any further than to look at the voting mechanism inside these decentralized social media platforms. I have not run the calculations personally, but I wouldn't be surprised if the top 10% of the vote make up 90% of the voting power as measured in rewards handed out for curating post.
I challenge people to just hover over the like button of any of the top post in these platforms and do a quick calculation to see the financial concentration or centralization of voting power on most post. Take this mental exercise and apply it to the rest of the crypto economy and the dollar economy and just ask the question out loud. How do you measure centralization in this particular economy, blockchain, platform, government institution, etc?
I also wouldn't be surprised if one day the top 10% of authors were to earn 90% of the reward pool. I am not saying that this is in fact what is happening, but if these platforms were to head in this direction it would not be the first time that humans did this.
There is technological determinism due to inherent bias in the code of a lot of these platforms as well as inherent bias in the code of some humans. There is this march toward hoarding resources in the biological code of some people.
Cathie Wood said in one of her podcast that the blockchain ecosystem is one where a handful of blockchains will win out and the rest will probably die off. I agree with her. This again is a form of consolidation or centralization through competitive destruction. We start with an Ecosystem of 1000s of coins and we will probably end up in an ecosystem where the top 10% of coins will be worth 90% of the market cap. The 80 / 20 rule is becoming the 90 / 10 rule and crypto is not immune to this. We should be weary of the Crypto "exceptionalism" that pervades the community.
People just assume that the rise in Bitcoin prices is good for the whole Crypto ecosystem and that it's good for them personally. Just like some Americans think the rise of wall street is good for "main" street. I ask people people to pause for a second. The bottom 48% of Americans own zero stock. I am curious as to what the wealth share looks like in crypto? How decentralized is this wealth? I don't have that answer.
The blockchain is the opportunity to truly decentralize currency and grow wealth in a decentralized way. We just need to be smart and "build back better".
Too much forking dilutes and erodes trust. People should try to build good trustworthy blockchains by design because forking is a double edge sword. I won't go into too much detail cause the topic of forking as a defense can be its own article. My early intuition tells me that there is a limit to how much we can keep forking without destroying value.
I completely agree with you in that we need to decentralize the technology and physical infrastructure. More nodes, decentralized cloud, file sharing, and decentralize the geography to evade government crackdowns.
I think we also need to think about decentralization of the internal economic incentive structure, the governance, and social norms, so that we don't end up with decentralized technology and code, but centralized wealth, economics, and power within and between the different blockchains.
I suspect that Cathie Wood is trying to figure out who the "FAANG" will be in the crypto world. She has an open position at ARK right now for a crypto analyst. She'll eventually release an ARK Crypto ETF that is publicly traded just like she plans to release an ARKX for Space Exploration.
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I think it we take things in totality, we see an enormous amount of decentralization taking place. If we look at Hive distribution versus say Leo, there is a radically difference in the "whales". I dont think many of the top Hive holders outside of perhaps Khal have much stake in Leo. People like rollandthomas are not Hive whales but are that with Leo.
This is why distribution is vital. Over time, with more users, things spread out. This is happening with Leo as the months pass. Smaller accounts get bigger. It is also happening on Hive although at a very slow pace.
Every level needs to be looked at with decentralization in blockchain/crypto. That is how our minds need to default. Each action has to be viewed as to whether it makes things more or less centralized.
That is where things will go if we each take that mindset.
If one is not an influencer, than he or she needs to be one in that particular realm. Simply put, we need a lot more influencers in all their forms.
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I agree with everything that you are saying. We need to ask at every step of the way does this make things more centralized or does this make things less decentralized? Money grows exponentially in the dollar economy, so its not an accident that we live in a 90 / 10 world. Even within the top companies such as in the S&P you see are starting to see consolidation and the FAANG stocks are a perfect example.
If there is even a slight bias in the reward mechanism, which articles get selected for top billing on front ends, or in the governance of the platform then you will see consolidation. Every blockchain should disclose their centrality metrics or wealth distribution metrics. That way people don't have to speculate and it sends the message that decentralization is a core value of the chain. You are what you measure.
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