Why Decentralization Is Everything and Nothing: Lessons for OpenBazaar, SteemIt, and Future Projects
Decentralization is like the iron throne: everybody wants it, scores of individuals will fight and sacrifice to attain it, but it just may be a huge distraction from the real battle.
What is the real battle? In my view, the real battle is the war to build applications that are highly valued by mainstream users.
While everyone fights for the iron throne, a greater threat bears down on us all
This is why I respect what SteemIt is attempting to achieve, and succeeding by all accounts: they are building a network effect around original content creation and curation that positively influences the future predicted value of the tokens used to reward content creators. Under the hood, SteemIt is pretty damn complicated with a mix of centralized and decentralized elements... nevertheless, much of the complexity has been skilfully hidden and abstracted away.
What I suspect is that the SteemIt team understand that decentralization isn't the end goal. Some people/projects relentlessly pursue decentralized 'solutions' to every problem, no matter how inefficient or poorly functioning it may be. This is largely driven by ideological passion, which creates a high tolerance to inefficient and complex decentralized projects and systems. It is also accompanied by contempt to any popular centralized platform if a more open and decentralized alternative exists... and also disbelief that centralized services are still dominant in the marketplace.
The fact is that many decentralized applications and systems are terrible. They're too hard to install (let alone use) or too complex for mainstream users to use.
I say this partially from our experience with OpenBazaar. Although I'm proud of our accomplishments and what we have released, I'm also anxious for upcoming 2.0 release that will significantly enhance the user experience and mainstream-friendliness of the application.
Even though the bulk of our work for 2.0 is building decentralized store hosting into the network, we're mindful of a hard truth: users don't care if your system is decentralized or not, they only care if it works better, faster, and cheaper than what they use now.
I love something that my co-founder and CEO Brian Hoffman said recently about the project:
If 6 months from now, OpenBazaar is flooded with drug listings and illegal services, the most likely it wasn't a good enough solution for the world's trade... I would consider that a failure because this is more about building a free market...
Brian's point in this interview is to emphasize that OpenBazaar's vision is to become the dominant protocol for online global trade. This trade would be censorship-resistant, cryptographically-secured for pseudonymous users, and uses Bitcoin as the 'backend currency'. Most importantly, this is a platform that has zero overhead fees or charges.
In order to achieve this, we must create a decentralized system. Decentralization is a means to an end, the end being a set of requirements designed to help mainstream users take more control of their financial destinies and become more disintermediated from public and private gatekeepers.
An ongoing challenge that we and many others will face is balancing the technical limitations of decentralized systems and the expectations of mainstream users for how applications should work.
Ok, it's late and I'm falling asleep at my computer. I'll check for spelling and grammar mistakes tomorrow!
Hey drwasho,
thanks for sharing your thoughts. I also think that there are way too much projects, which uses decentralisation as main 'selling argument' , even if there is no need for it ;)
For me its more like an ideological thing, that i want society managed by the people itself and not by some rent-seeking who say: 'i know better whats good for all' .
For apps on the internet, this means that no single person should be responsible for a big network , that is important for people. We live in a time, where we have great techniques to archive at least distributed networks, that have no single-point-of-failure and i really appreciate every developer with the ideals to make everything more decentral/distributed but not, if the only goal is to still make money out of others work like its happening around the world right now.
greetings and sleep well ;)
Thanks for sharing the view about the decentralization ideal - hopefully not utopia - from a perspective of one of the active insiders and pragmatist. Tell Brian we out in the field really appreciate the hard work you guys are putting into this future we hopefully can all together share rather sooner than later...