besides being a software engineer I'm
also a co-organizer of a conference
called our networks on all aspects of
the distributed web this presentation is
going to be a little more philosophical
than some of the other more maybe
hands-on talks it's also a shortened
version of a longer presentation so I've
tried to keep in all of the most
interesting content but I will link to
the longer one on the last slide so this
is a totally not comprehensive overview
of the decentralized space and though
this presentation will be hopefully very
relevant to blockchains and this is an
aetherium conference I think it's good
to remember that this movement spans
other tech stacks too so we have you
know the network layer things like
community mesh networks protocol there
we have block chains but also things
like IP FS application layer this is
what we might fit most daps and then we
also have this social or governance
layer where we might put things like
loomio or most dowse
this is the agenda for our talk and like
I said this presentation is cut down so
instead we're going to focus primarily
on the first question on the list and we
can leave the final two maybe for
discussion during the breakout or on
conference section so what is
decentralization are we sure that we
know you might also call this new
version decentralization without so many
discontents so yeah it turns out to be a
more complicated question than you might
think
one that has many unsatisfying
explanations when we look at the word we
don't get a lot of help all this word
means is not centralization and I'm not
the first person to point this out
there's a name for this type of
definition and it's an ant anemic
definition but the problem with an ant
anemic definition is you know we have
this thing that we can call
centralization but what are all these
other things that aren't the same thing
and also aren't centralization
what are the names for all these
different not centralized ations
the origin of the terms in the mid-1800s
Alex de Tocqueville would write that the
French Revolution began with a push
towards decentralization that became in
the end an extension of centralization
which I think is possibly still
interesting to keep in mind as we
confront for example blockchain
maximalism it also reminded me of this
Hannah Arendt passage which is the most
radical revolutionary will become a
conservative the day after the
Revolution and indeed the word
decentralization is still used more
often in a political or organizational
context than a technical one after I
came up with the title for this talk I
found out it's also a book one with the
subtitle an essay on class political
agency and national perspective in
Indonesian politics the Google
definitions of the word are the transfer
of authority from central to local
government and the movement of
departments of a large organization away
from a single administrative centre to
other locations so these are both
political and organizational definitions
and it's possibly ironic to be part of a
community that focuses so much on
decentralization but struggles so much
with governance and also worth noting
off the bat that in a political and
organizational context the concept of
decentralization has been a component of
many different political movements some
very at odds with one another so for
example there's a strong free-market
rationale for decentralization this is
from an essay on information markets the
sentence before it cites Adam Smith and
the one after it cites Friedrich von
Hayek and the argument here is you know
we have all these rational actors
independently moving throughout society
without any kind of central coordinating
but there's also an entire movement
called decentralized socialism and this
is a passage from an essay talking about
how you know Mao Mao Zedong and the
Cultural Revolution was a reaction to
the centralization of Soviet Russia so
really a dizzying range of thinkers have
called for some kind of decentralization
and of course that's what makes the
concept so interesting kind of like
universal
cick income it has this fascinating
cross partisan support which gives it
this kind of gravitational pull it's
like a dense messy knot that's
fascinating to untangle so we may not
all want decentralization for the same
reason and I can't take credit for this
caption but I also don't want to Doc's
its creator I'll let you all interpret
this phenomenon which is certainly the
case that we have competing motivations
you might say it's a success or weakness
of the decentralization movement you
might say we've decentralized our
motivations alright so it may be
difficult to define decentralization but
can you measure it this is one way
people often like to it's called the
Lorenz curve or Gini coefficient and
it's often used to measure the
decentralization of wealth so there are
a few components of this graph and one
of them is this straight line that we
call the line of equality and this is
the curve that we would get if the
distribution of wealth in a system were
totally uniform so if 10% of the
population had ten percent of the wealth
fifty percent had 50 percent etc etc the
Lorenz curve is what we get when we plot
the actuals and the Gini coefficient is
the difference between these two lines
this is from an excellent recent article
called quantifying decentralization by
Balaji Srinivasan and he took the top
100 cryptocurrencies and he plotted them
on the Lorenz curve and you will see
that they are very far away from the
line of perfect equality and again from
quantified decentralization Srinivasan
describes how a decentralized system is
composed of a set of decentralized sub
systems so we have you know miners we
have the developer community we have the
concept of geographical decentralization
or governmental decentralization and I
think maybe it's helpful here to borrow
the term intersectional and to think
about intersectional decentralization if
we imagine decentralization as like this
Cartesian plane of intersecting
decentralization x'
will find that we can't get the complete
picture without considering all of them
that none of them really make sense to
discuss in the absence of others in the
blockchain world we talk about the
scalability trilemma so this is from the
etherion wiki and you may be familiar
with it when designing a blockchain
these are areas you have to make
trade-offs within it's sort of like a
cap theorem for block chains and notably
one of them is decentralization with its
own very specific definition and here it
is that each node on the network should
not have to have you know too much
compute resources available to it maybe
a laptop scalability is one and here
it's defined as the network being able
to process more transactions than any
individual node and security which is
the amount of compute resources an
attacker needs to have to successfully
attack the network so of course
decentralization is on this list and ok
way to think of that is as a stat that
we could lower in order to improve these
other qualities so when we talk about
scalability in the blockchain world it's
almost a catechism to compare it to the
transactions per second if something
like Visa visa process is 24,000
transactions per second another way to
understand that statement is that visa
has dropped its decentralization stat to
zero and max out its scalability um so
in conclusion here are some questions in
rapid-fire do we want decentralization I
think this deserves to be an open
question or at least one we don't forget
that it's possible to ask and if we
accept that there's no canonical
decentralization or no perfect
decentralization then which one do we
want are there limits to
decentralization and if so what are they
right now we talk a lot about
decentralizing the network and
application layer but how often do we
consider the centralization of the
manufacturing pipeline or of supply
chains how far down the proverbial stack
do we care about decentralization and
finally a recursive question can we
decentralize the building of
decentralized networks
I see specialization and centralization
is tightly connected concepts and a
technical expert is often a central
point of failure for a decentralized
network
and if pursuit of power tends to
centralize the system how can we prevent
this from happening to our networks over
time what underlines all of this that
there are many possible decentralization
and perhaps no perfect one but all of
them may prove meaningless or become
just ideological background noise if not
carefully and thoughtfully examined so
thank you my name is Sara again that's
my handle and this will YouTube link to
the longer version of this presentation
thank you all so much
you