Grand Decentral: Using Blockchain Technologies to Diffuse Power and Democratize Ownership

The following is adapted from Bitcoin Pizza: The No-Bullshit Guide to Blockchain.

What’s the single most revolutionary aspect of blockchain technologies? Arguably, it’s their potential to catalyze a shift from centralization to decentralization.

What do I mean by this? Consider the most powerful institutions in our current reality: governments, major corporations, and the like. They all rely on centralized power, with identifiable headquarters and clear leadership structures. Even supposedly decentralized organizations often rely on centralization if we scratch the surface.

Take Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia is supposed to be a community-generated encyclopedia, right?

Wrong.

It’s the centralized, crazy stepchild of Web 2.0’s attempt to create a free and open information source. I might get harassed, blacklisted, or worse for writing this, but f*ck it.

What’s my problem with Wikipedia? The platform appears to be open. Any public contributor can add content, but there are gatekeepers with reputations who have editorial and approval privileges and who run sketchy services that charge for posting content on the site. It’s a mess and the perfect example of why the system is broken.

It wasn’t always that way. Wikipedia was founded on many of the same ideals as bitcoin and blockchain: decentralization, libertarianism, and free-market capitalism. The idea was a platform providing community-curated information.

What happened, however, was that Wikipedia moved toward its centralized gatekeepers. Perhaps it was just too early for decentralization, or perhaps the system lacked proper governance. Whatever the case may be, Wikipedia was and continues to be a historical benchmark of supposed decentralization.

This poses an additional problem. When people try to describe a truly decentralized technology, such as blockchain, they reach for metaphors or analogies that relate to things we already understand. You may have heard that blockchain is “kind of like Wikipedia or a Google Doc,” but there are several reasons that response is inadequate and even confusing.

First, the analogy gives a circular definition, explaining one type of software in terms of another. Yes, there is some similarity, because Wikipedia and Google Docs allow more than one person to access and add to a document. However, Wikipedia and Google Docs, all appearances to the contrary, are also essentially centralized systems.

Meanwhile, probably the most important feature of blockchain is its decentralization and disintermediation of third-party middlemen, whether they be for-profit corporations like Google and banks, nonprofit institutions like the Wikipedia Foundation, or governments.

What’s the difference?

Can Decentralization Replace Trust?

Although we rely heavily on centralized institutions, do we trust them? The frightening reality is that we trust them less and less. People don’t like to think about it, but that’s the current reality. Facebook hacks, food recalls, election fraud: all this is creating a come-to-Jesus moment. Some things just aren’t working, and we might as well admit it.

What’s the alternative, however? Blockchain technologies offer a radical vision of a world in which we no longer find ourselves beholden to the institutions that currently feel fundamental to our lives. That’s exciting. It’s also scary.

It feels libertarian in some ways and socialistic in others, and that scares people on many different sides of the political spectrum. Decentralization is a bit Robin Hood–esque, and all we can do is hope that Robin Hood really is the good guy and not the Sheriff of Nottingham in disguise.

Confusion and contradiction are inevitable during times of major transformation. On the one hand, some folks raise a rallying cry of “let’s take down the powers that be and the intermediaries who are making all the money.” But when you look at those eager to get on board, they include large corporations that basically want to optimize their current, quite profitable systems.

The original vision of blockchain pioneers, however, was to create a system that doesn’t rely on centralization, and which no single person or company can control. At its core, blockchain is an accounting tool, which hardly makes it sound sexy and cool. To try to make it seem sexy and cool would be bullsh*t. However, blockchain is also a really powerful accounting tool: a ledger that’s also a distributed network on which data, once recorded, can’t be changed.

Ledgers originated as a way to keep accounts of crops and were essential tools in launching the agricultural revolution. Blockchain technology has the potential to be just as revolutionary and transformative. Blockchain is a response to the distrust — the “trust gaps” — that globalization and centralization have brought about, and the technology is poised to shift how we transact, communicate, and organize.

We’re at such an early stage of this technology’s development that almost anything that can be said about it is bound to be speculative and controversial. Nonetheless, we can say that it has the potential to make decentralization a reality in almost every sphere of human activity. By doing so, it has the power to alter the way we shop, communicate, elect governments, and address social problems, among many other things.

Centralized systems are vulnerable to human error and interference. Decentralized systems, not so much. The shift is eye-opening and sometimes confusing, as we struggle to come to terms with the implications. But it’s one we’re already making, and which will only accelerate.

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Hungry for more? For more insights on how emerging technologies like blockchain will impact your business and daily life, be sure to check out Samantha Radocchia’s #1 Best Selling book — Bitcoin Pizza: The No-Bullshit Guide to Blockchain

This article first appeared in Minutes.

Samantha Radocchia is an early blockchain pioneer and advocate who combines the mindsets of an anthropologist and a technologist. She’s led corporate trainings at Fortune 100 companies, governments, and the United Nations, educating leaders on the technologies and cultural shifts that will shape their organizations — and daily lives — in the decades to come. Sam is a contributor to Forbes and was named to their 30 Under 30 List in 2017. A three-time entrepreneur, Sam holds several patents and is a cofounder of Chronicled, an enterprise blockchain company focused on supply chain. She now consults executives on emerging technologies and delivers keynotes at events worldwide as she works to build her next company.