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While I agree that there should be more discussion about what should/shouldn't be decentralized and to what extent, the huge issue right now that's responsible

by dkh 5y ago

While I agree that there should be more discussion about what should/shouldn't be decentralized and to what extent, the huge issue right now that's responsible for how heated of a debate this is right now, is in the implementation. It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. Now add to it the rat race everyone is in to transition to a DAO as soon possible, despite the existing insane complexity modification difficulty of blockchain platforms, or that the DAO concept has a short history but one filled with failures, and we're left with something that, frankly, frightens me. I'm not anti-crypto, and in fact I work in the space and am primarily focused on some areas I feel are in need of being "decentralized" in the CDN and streaming video spaces. And while a ton of technical progress has been made, I can't shake the feeling that we are in many cases implementing this stuff wrong, or haven't even bothered to address the "how" or "why" in as much length as one should before going out and building it.

k__ 5y ago
What are good alternatives that also have useful incentivization mechanisms built in? Every system that is lacking this is doomed.
- loceng 5y ago
  Democratically elected government which implements policy mandating data mobility (etc) at penalty of exponentially increasing fines for non-compliance? You don't need to use a carrot for corporations, a "stick" will work just fine for making sure they follow what's determined to be ideal.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I had the impression, the money of companies is used for lobbying, effectively controlling the "stick".
    - loceng 5y ago
      Indeed that is another problem and why policy needs to shift to counter that - but don't forget that Bitcoin et al will be, are involved in the same regulatory capture game - holders are financially incentivized to try to be the ones to gain control. I like Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including Ranked Choice Voting, and most notable I believe is his Democracy Dollars policy - wherein every eligible voter gets $100/year voucher they can allocate to the political candidate of their choice, which would wash out the corporate lobbyist money of roughly $4 billion with 8 times that by citizens (including giving those who can't afford $100/year for an additional layer of "voting with money" to fuel/funding the political system), meaning $4 billion to up to $32 billing from eligible voters; https://andrewyang.com https://andrewyang.com - Andrew Yang, ran in last Presidential race as a Democrat - polled higher than Kamala Harris and raised half that of Bernie Sanders, starting as an unknown - then ran for Mayor of NYC, and author of The War on Normal People, and most recently Forward: Notes On The Future Of Our Democracy - which in part was to announce the new relatively centrist political party he started called the Forward Party. I feel another noteworthy policy proposal of his is Journalism Dollars, similarly where you give every individual say $50/year voucher to fund/support the journalist of your choice - so then journalism and news media isn't adversely incentivized by the advertising dollars coming in from industrual complexes (including from the political establishment/duopoly of the arguably captured Democratic-Republican parties).
      - rglullis 5y ago
        Believing that governments can be effective on a global scale is the leftist version of Intelligent Design Theory of Evolution. History has shown time and again that the best we can do is some local maxima that works only for a part of the population at the cost of everyone of the periphery of power, and even these on the top can get wiped out by a Black Swan. There will not be one single standard of policies that will work for all people, no matter how "democratic" the process to establish the rules are and no matter how good the ideas you think they are. What we need is to reduce the scope and reach of governments, get their leaders to act on a localized level and to be directly accountable for the results of their policies. Anything else will take us to more centralization, more forced conformity, less diversity and more fragility facing global-scale events. We need more Switzerlands and less USAs and even less European Unions.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    > what's determined to be ideal. "Determined" to be ideal? Found the totalitarian.
    - loceng 5y ago
      "Found the totalitarian." Really? Nowhere did I state who's determining what's ideal, but you seem to have a need to demonize or put down - so you assumed it must be what I believe is ideal. I suggest you stop making assumptions, and in part based on your comments in this thread, that means broadening your perspective. Ideally who's determining what's ideal is a democratically elected nation of people who have elected politicians to create policy that will reflect the wants, desires, beliefs of their population - from the local level and all the way up. I didn't downvote your comment by the way, that was others - I don't downvote anything as I think downvotes in this context are overall harmful and a useless and lazy signal at that.
- grey_earthling 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by “useful incentivization mechanisms” and why they're necessary? I use scuttlebutt because it's fun and nice. I'm not sure what more incentive is needed.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Scuttlebutt works on a small scale because all of its participants are willing to pay for the cost of hosting the data and they can afford the inefficiencies and redundancies of decentralization. And I know that it works for you, but if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for it to be viable.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive The problem is that when you start measuring on "reaching more than a few thousand people" instead of "is creating a lot of economic incentive", cryptocurrency experiments around building communities also start to look pretty bad in practice. I have yet to see any general-user social platform built on top of cryptocurrency amass the same amount of mainstream success as Mastodon. And Mastodon is comparatively tiny when stacked up against Twitter/Facebook, it should be the low-hanging fruit. But at least Mastodon is a platform that seems to have somewhat evolved past the initial "the only people using this are the people who built it or who are invested in it" phase. On the protocol level, look at stuff like Matrix; it's got very little incentive built in to get you to run your own platform, and yet... it still kinda looks like it's beating blockchain networks at being actually useful. A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. So sure, crypto has an interesting approach to incentivizing economic investment, but at a certain point I start to question whether those incentives actually result in generalized, successful platforms that tons of everyday people are using. It unfortunately is starting to seem like the incentive structures attract a lot of capital and a lot of eyes that are either hostile to the overall goals of decentralization, or at least that the attention doesn't seem to be providing the kind of value/structure required to get non-invested, non-capital-focused general users to join in.
austincheney 5y ago
Implementation is whatever two parties agree upon, otherwise it isn't decentralized.
grey_earthling 5y ago
> It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. This isn't my experience. These types of solutions may be generating a lot of interest in some places (perhaps because the people talking about them hope to profit?), but they're not all that exist.
danShumway 5y ago
> by players in the decentralization space Keep in mind that this is a somewhat large space, and depending on what parts of the decentralization space you're looking at you might see players who are all-in on blockchain tech, or you might see people who view it as a giant waste of time or even actively campaign against it. In particular when I look at projects that are using federation (Mastodon, Matrix, etc), I see a lot of people who are fairly skeptical about cryptocurrency and outright hostile to NFTs. I have my own biases there, I don't think that NFTs are in practice particularly decentralized, and I've slowly come to believe that cryptocurrencies have both systemic problems that make them less valuable as a decentralization tool than they're often advertised as being, and community problems that make them difficult to use as a basis for any kind of political movement (and decentralization is inherently a political idea/movement). But my biases aside (I'm not trying to make a pro/anti blockchain post here), just remember it's a big space without a single uniformity of views; from the circle of advocates I'm paying attention to and interacting with the most, I would have almost guessed the opposite, absent better stats I'd have guessed from my experiences that at least a plurality if not the majority of the decentralized "community" is against this stuff. Interesting to run into people who seem to be more in touch with parts of the community that are outside of my bubble.

by dkh 5y ago

k__ 5y ago

What are good alternatives that also have useful incentivization mechanisms built in? Every system that is lacking this is doomed.

loceng 5y ago
Democratically elected government which implements policy mandating data mobility (etc) at penalty of exponentially increasing fines for non-compliance? You don't need to use a carrot for corporations, a "stick" will work just fine for making sure they follow what's determined to be ideal.
- k__ 5y ago
  I had the impression, the money of companies is used for lobbying, effectively controlling the "stick".
  - loceng 5y ago
    Indeed that is another problem and why policy needs to shift to counter that - but don't forget that Bitcoin et al will be, are involved in the same regulatory capture game - holders are financially incentivized to try to be the ones to gain control. I like Andrew Yang's core policy proposals including Ranked Choice Voting, and most notable I believe is his Democracy Dollars policy - wherein every eligible voter gets $100/year voucher they can allocate to the political candidate of their choice, which would wash out the corporate lobbyist money of roughly $4 billion with 8 times that by citizens (including giving those who can't afford $100/year for an additional layer of "voting with money" to fuel/funding the political system), meaning $4 billion to up to $32 billing from eligible voters; https://andrewyang.com https://andrewyang.com - Andrew Yang, ran in last Presidential race as a Democrat - polled higher than Kamala Harris and raised half that of Bernie Sanders, starting as an unknown - then ran for Mayor of NYC, and author of The War on Normal People, and most recently Forward: Notes On The Future Of Our Democracy - which in part was to announce the new relatively centrist political party he started called the Forward Party. I feel another noteworthy policy proposal of his is Journalism Dollars, similarly where you give every individual say $50/year voucher to fund/support the journalist of your choice - so then journalism and news media isn't adversely incentivized by the advertising dollars coming in from industrual complexes (including from the political establishment/duopoly of the arguably captured Democratic-Republican parties).
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Believing that governments can be effective on a global scale is the leftist version of Intelligent Design Theory of Evolution. History has shown time and again that the best we can do is some local maxima that works only for a part of the population at the cost of everyone of the periphery of power, and even these on the top can get wiped out by a Black Swan. There will not be one single standard of policies that will work for all people, no matter how "democratic" the process to establish the rules are and no matter how good the ideas you think they are. What we need is to reduce the scope and reach of governments, get their leaders to act on a localized level and to be directly accountable for the results of their policies. Anything else will take us to more centralization, more forced conformity, less diversity and more fragility facing global-scale events. We need more Switzerlands and less USAs and even less European Unions.
- rglullis 5y ago
  > what's determined to be ideal. "Determined" to be ideal? Found the totalitarian.
  - loceng 5y ago
    "Found the totalitarian." Really? Nowhere did I state who's determining what's ideal, but you seem to have a need to demonize or put down - so you assumed it must be what I believe is ideal. I suggest you stop making assumptions, and in part based on your comments in this thread, that means broadening your perspective. Ideally who's determining what's ideal is a democratically elected nation of people who have elected politicians to create policy that will reflect the wants, desires, beliefs of their population - from the local level and all the way up. I didn't downvote your comment by the way, that was others - I don't downvote anything as I think downvotes in this context are overall harmful and a useless and lazy signal at that.
grey_earthling 5y ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “useful incentivization mechanisms” and why they're necessary? I use scuttlebutt because it's fun and nice. I'm not sure what more incentive is needed.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Scuttlebutt works on a small scale because all of its participants are willing to pay for the cost of hosting the data and they can afford the inefficiencies and redundancies of decentralization. And I know that it works for you, but if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for it to be viable.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > if we want something that can reach more than a few thousand people, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive The problem is that when you start measuring on "reaching more than a few thousand people" instead of "is creating a lot of economic incentive", cryptocurrency experiments around building communities also start to look pretty bad in practice. I have yet to see any general-user social platform built on top of cryptocurrency amass the same amount of mainstream success as Mastodon. And Mastodon is comparatively tiny when stacked up against Twitter/Facebook, it should be the low-hanging fruit. But at least Mastodon is a platform that seems to have somewhat evolved past the initial "the only people using this are the people who built it or who are invested in it" phase. On the protocol level, look at stuff like Matrix; it's got very little incentive built in to get you to run your own platform, and yet... it still kinda looks like it's beating blockchain networks at being actually useful. A lot of crypto spaces/experiments have a lot of money moving through them. But the ratio of money to users/disruption seems to be really low. So sure, crypto has an interesting approach to incentivizing economic investment, but at a certain point I start to question whether those incentives actually result in generalized, successful platforms that tons of everyday people are using. It unfortunately is starting to seem like the incentive structures attract a lot of capital and a lot of eyes that are either hostile to the overall goals of decentralization, or at least that the attention doesn't seem to be providing the kind of value/structure required to get non-invested, non-capital-focused general users to join in.

austincheney 5y ago

Implementation is whatever two parties agree upon, otherwise it isn't decentralized.

grey_earthling 5y ago

> It seems almost like it's already been decided by players in the decentralization space that the only solution is a blockchain with a token economy model that sits nicely alongside -- or in fact integrates with -- crypto trading, NFTs, etc. This isn't my experience. These types of solutions may be generating a lot of interest in some places (perhaps because the people talking about them hope to profit?), but they're not all that exist.

danShumway 5y ago

> by players in the decentralization space Keep in mind that this is a somewhat large space, and depending on what parts of the decentralization space you're looking at you might see players who are all-in on blockchain tech, or you might see people who view it as a giant waste of time or even actively campaign against it. In particular when I look at projects that are using federation (Mastodon, Matrix, etc), I see a lot of people who are fairly skeptical about cryptocurrency and outright hostile to NFTs. I have my own biases there, I don't think that NFTs are in practice particularly decentralized, and I've slowly come to believe that cryptocurrencies have both systemic problems that make them less valuable as a decentralization tool than they're often advertised as being, and community problems that make them difficult to use as a basis for any kind of political movement (and decentralization is inherently a political idea/movement). But my biases aside (I'm not trying to make a pro/anti blockchain post here), just remember it's a big space without a single uniformity of views; from the circle of advocates I'm paying attention to and interacting with the most, I would have almost guessed the opposite, absent better stats I'd have guessed from my experiences that at least a plurality if not the majority of the decentralized "community" is against this stuff. Interesting to run into people who seem to be more in touch with parts of the community that are outside of my bubble.