<story><title>Decentralized Woo Hoo</title><url>https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>21eleven</author><text>I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don&amp;#x27;t have value beyond serving as gambling games.&lt;p&gt;However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and &amp;quot;strongly typed&amp;quot;&amp;#x2F;formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as &amp;quot;decentralization&amp;quot; but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized.&lt;p&gt;This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace.&lt;p&gt;To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn&amp;#x27;t have tons of other problems will take time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&amp;gt; However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation&lt;p&gt;I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” are out there, somewhere, while ignoring the fact that the blockchain&amp;#x2F;crypto space is absolutely drowning in meme tokens and obvious cash grabs.&lt;p&gt;The superiority of blockchain solutions seems to be assumed for many believers, so it’s natural to assume that superior solutions will eventually arise from this superior blockchain technology.&lt;p&gt;But the superiority of blockchain isn’t obvious for most problems. Moreover, if someone does build a superior solution on top of a blockchain, what’s stopping a centralized player from duplicating the benefits of that superior solution at a lower cost in a centralized platform?&lt;p&gt;This is the conundrum of blockchain and token projects: For them to be superior &lt;i&gt;to the consumer&lt;/i&gt; they must eventually have lower fees and costs. Yet blockchain is inherently more expensive than equivalent centralized solutions and, even worse, the token investors expect astronomical (to the moon) returns on their investments, which necessitates extracting a lot of money from the users after the speculative frenzy has died off. At least currently, most blockchain&amp;#x2F;crypto&amp;#x2F;token schemes are built with the assumption that &lt;i&gt;the consumer&lt;/i&gt; is the person they will sell the tokens to as a speculative investment, not the person who will actually use the service itself.&lt;p&gt;Decentralized solutions actually have a lot of problems that proponents avoid talking about. For example, DAOs are promoted as ways of decentralizing ownership, but we&amp;#x27;re supposed to ignore the fact that a well-capitalized player could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO by purchasing up enough tokens. And unlike with real-world companies, the ownership can be purchased anonymously in a way that makes it appear to come from a lot of organic traction. A well-funded company could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO and neither regulators, users, nor consumers would even know. We&amp;#x27;re supposed to believe this model is a boon for decentralization, but it&amp;#x27;s a dream come true for surreptitious takeovers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Decentralized Woo Hoo</title><url>https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/decentralized-woo.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>21eleven</author><text>I think this is a fair criticism to a limited extent, the crypto world is full of useless memecoins that don&amp;#x27;t have value beyond serving as gambling games.&lt;p&gt;However some people interested in and working on blockchain and related technologies are pursuing ambitious goals that could reshape the economy and politics in ways that makes them more open to participation and &amp;quot;strongly typed&amp;quot;&amp;#x2F;formalized. Achieving these goals is not the same as &amp;quot;decentralization&amp;quot; but more about a concept where you start from a decentralized and open base (blockchain) and build structures atop that base that are appropriately balanced between centralized and decentralized.&lt;p&gt;This is all very ambitious and may fail utterly and completely. But if it does succeed there will be a period where people have wild ambitious visions about what could be while the technology progresses to actualize those visions at what appears to be a slow pace.&lt;p&gt;To provide a specific ambitious vision: you could have a world where appropriate taxation of a transaction is built into a smart contract and everything from deciding on how to spend that tax money to the project management for the efforts those tax dollars fund is conducted in the open by people who have achieved various types of stakeholder status. Actually creating a system that allows for this and doesn&amp;#x27;t have tons of other problems will take time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CJefferson</author><text>Your last point  (everything in smart contracts) I just can&amp;#x27;t understand. I personally wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to live in a world where the &amp;quot;computer says no&amp;quot;, and even if a court and Jury disagrees, it&amp;#x27;s impossible to change.&lt;p&gt;Similarly (and it&amp;#x27;s already happened several times), what happens when someone finds a loophole and drains the entire GDP of a country into their account? Do we say &amp;quot;Oh, well that&amp;#x27;s what the smart contract said, so bye bye country?&amp;quot;</text></comment>