Decentralization
One word to rule them all
Just recently also Twitter decided to move some resources in this direction and this is only the last event of a trend that is far from stopping soon. In this article I would like to discuss why this movement is unlikely to be stopped, what enabled it and what are the big challenges ahead so let’s start from a short simple video:
A bit of History
Everything started thanks to this new data structure. In 2009 a still unknown person (or group) called Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous Bitcoin whitepaper that got incredible traction in very few years. With Bitcoin, the concept of blockchain was born, and by looking at the video linked above I hope everyone is on the same page.
The introduction of the blockchain in the data structures’ ecosystem, enabled the possibility to think about digital systems completely decentralized. Must be said that decentralized systems were already deployed in the world, just think to BitTorrent and many other file sharing application that doesn’t rely on a central server. In such applications, the data is transferred between peers of the network that come and goes without any prior advice and without breaking the system. Around the first years of the new century, the research in peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture was very fancy but the hype decreased in favor of very high-performance, centralized alternatives. The arrival of the blockchain has given new lifeblood to the field not only by bringing something cool and new but creating the concept of digital scarcity.
Digital scarcity is defined as the ability of the blockchain to make digital information scarce, so, not duplicable and not tamperable. This is the power of blockchain and the reason why its impact is huge. Stop.
First, it was Bitcoin to leverage this property of the blockchain by introducing the economic incentive and finally solving the problem of the double-spending.
Then, it was Ethereum to leverage the same property by introducing a Turing-complete programming language and finally implementing a giant worldwide virtual machine.
After? What’s next?
Moving away from central systems
Recently, as we said at the beginning of the article, even Twitter decided to put effort into the development of decentralized solutions and I believe this is another milestone in the slow trend that is bringing people to the center of the network as, a few years ago, the sharing economy was bringing people to exchange closer deleting a huge amount of difficulties. What we are experiencing is the complete establishment of Bitcoin as a (small) part of our financial system and Ethereum as an (almost) bullet-proof public virtual machine. Both of them must be restarted over and over, are platforms controlled by nobody and publicly accessible by anyone.
This pandemic has shown a lot of fallacies in our society and a lot of limitations of the technologies we use. From Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk, many people are, in my opinion, recognize that centralized solutions could not be the perfect choice for any application where people interact with each other. Decentralization is a keyword that I believe we will hear them more and more with many startup and business that would like to decentralize everything in the following years. If you think about it already during the first industrial revolution we experienced some kind of decentralization. During the industrial revolution, the power and the money that was well locked inside lavish palaces were forced to flow away to the poor exploited workers that had the opportunity to be relevant, conquered a lot of rights, and cumulate some wealth. With the come of the internet and automatization, we saw again an increase of centralization where the money flew inside big tech companies run by few but able to touch each person on the planet. If the story will repeat then we could witness again a decentralization phase where people will start to recognize is it possible to have an alternative to the actual centralized systems.
Two, Three, Many sided platforms were the core driver of the period after the financial crisis of 2008 (Airbnb, Uber, Food Deliveries, etc..) while decentralized platform could be the driver of the period after the health crisis we are experiencing.
The Icebergs on the road
Many people still struggle to understand why decentralization can be the answer to rule them all and they usually bring some intuition without much of a fundament. Many people describe the field as a wild west without rules that are completely user-unfriendly without realizing that every technology has to pass those steps before becoming mainstream. Future experts of international rights will have a hard time regulating such a movement but in the end, they will even with years of delay as we are still experiencing digital platforms. The same is true for the user-friendly interfaces that for sure will appear as the technology improves and more people will join the working field.
The icebergs on the road are therefore quite tiny besides one main technological disadvantage of the blockchain. As the video explains, every node that wants to participate should keep and store everything that happened in the network…. quite a huge amount of information, almost impossible to scale efficiently. This remains one of the main challenges to solve to be able to complete the shift from centralized application to decentralized ones.
To Conclude
Reflecting on the cycle of decentralization of our history is a good indicator to foresee the incoming change. The recent event of Congress and WallStreetBeats is a good indicator of how social networks and finance respectively are broken and a decentralized solution that empowers people first will for sure arise and get a great amount of success. For sure those changes won’t fix our society which is still fundamentally broken but I hope those blog posts, one after the other could enhance your awareness when approaching a fully connected and complex world as the one we live in. As discussed, must be kept in mind that decentralization is not the answer to everything, and every system comes with goods and bads.
I’m pretty sure many of you won’t agree with me, reason why, I hope to fire up the discussion on any platform, for example on Instagram tagging @bit.evolution. If you would stick with me for the next 17 weeks hopefully a clear picture of humans and technology will raise. It is very easy to be driven by data giving up all of we are. Till the next one, if you understand Italian:
