Decentralization - Has this word become a “trend”?

Decentralization is the process of spreading functions and power away from a? central location or authority.?

The challenge of coordinating groups of humans and getting them to behave in productive, peaceable ways has been the central story of civilization. Everyone alive on earth today has lived under the paradigm of hierarchy and top-down command and control, so we tend to default to them as organizational modes.??

The Internet and World Wide Web were conceived as decentralized technologies.??

Web 1.0 was the first version of the dial-up web, essentially a virtual library consisting of static web pages.??

Web 2.0 is the web of applications. It has become the Internet of data. It allows people to communicate and exchange information on a global scale, it does not allow us to coordinate at scale.?

Technologies do not have built-in meaning, people inject them with meaning and purpose by using them.?

No technology can fuel broad societal change unless people gather around them,? use them to collaborate, make decisions, and create new systems.?

Ant colonies, flocks of birds, and schools of fish show self-organizing behavior in which interactions between individuals give rise to spontaneous order.??

If power or information is concentrated in one area, order is less likely to emerge freely from interactions across a system.?

Individuals in a decentralized system are freer to pursue whatever they deem productive or promising.?

Decentralized systems are more fault-tolerant, attack-resistant, and collusion resistant than centralized systems.?

Here’s where Web3 comes in, it decentralizes that architecture on open platforms.??

Decentralization at scale, across institutions and societies, has never been possible the way it is now.??

Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) Political decentralization is the number of individuals or organizations that control the computers that make up a system.??

Architectural decentralization is how many computers a system is made up of, and how many it can tolerate breaking down at one time.??

Logical decentralization describes how the interface and data structure behaves.?

Blockchains are effectively just databases or distributed ledgers of recorded blocks of data, representing a consensus of participants.? All of the information on chain is visible to anyone, anywhere in the world, all the time.??

The word trustless is common in describing the nature of blockchain networks, but the word is misleading.??

Outside social communities and contexts, many people have outsourced trust to institutions: credit scores, background checks, and state-issued identifications tell us about someone with whom we might do business, and we might trust contracts and the legal system to uphold our rights if someone violates an agreement we’ve made.

The most ideal outcome is a move away from data monopolies and toward a? digital culture of inclusion, active participation, and more productive coordination.?

The redistribution of money and power could just as likely give rise to a new but still unjust society, especially if the majority of influence in the ecosystem remains with a small few.??

We now have the opportunity to coordinate in entirely new ways, to open up new pathways and connections, and to build a potentially more diverse and resilient kind of system.?

A lot has to happen before the full potential of blockchain-facilitated decentralization can be realized fully.?

Our civilization is not a pyramid but a part of a fractal pattern.??

"We can’t observe a paradigm shift until it has already taken place.” - Thomas Kuhn.?

By distributing power and value across global systems, the exchange of information and value can become more efficient, equitable, and open: more collaborative.??

Blockchain technology arguably could make the digital universe look more like a? complex adaptive system of the kinds found in nature if it becomes the best version of itself.??

Digital tools such as blockchain technology offer an opportunity for an opening, a? diffusion of power and information, and profound possibilities for collaboration.?

Narrow technical decentralization faces contradictions between resisting censorship and embedding values that often result in either worse functionality or some centralized decision-making in the end, as by content moderation on decentralized social networks.?

There are “soft” limits to the degree of centralization and to the decentralization feasible in a functional system. Rather than pursuing a false debate over whether next-generation technology should be centralized or decentralized, we should ask how to best arrange the pattern of desirable decentralization.??

Such a debate requires precisely articulating what we want from decentralization.?

Artificial intelligence might also increase the human capacity for reason,? establishing a symbiosis that enriches the entire ecosystem.

Decentralization is also a social challenge.??

The core of a decentralized ecosystem is that?the structure and style of a group building a software tool will have a far greater influence on the final product than the assumptions they make about how their intended users will use it.??

A network of people trying to build software tools to facilitate decentralization ought to be decentralized themselves: diverse, interacting randomly, conducting experiments etc.??

We must take steps to make Web3 a network of networks.??

And try to understand trending words with knowledge & wisdom.?

By My

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