Think Decentralized? Brilliant. Just Don’t Forget to Execute.

Think Globally, Act Locally. The expression has been around for a long time. The concepts behind it for much longer. You know the phrase is catchy when it gets it own wikipedia page :)

We’ve adapted it slightly for our purposes in the cryptosphere: Think Decentrally, Execute Effectively.

Yes, it’s buzzword-ish. But the good thing about buzzwords is that if you distill them enough you can find a grain of truth or two that can be helpful.

According to us, that grain of truth is that while the cryptosphere has (and will continue to need) plenty of excellent thinking about decentralization, there should be more effective execution around that thinking.

ICO scams are the obvious bogeymen here. Lots of talk about how decentralization will save us all and nothing to back it up. But there are also plenty of interesting, well-intentioned crypto projects that simply run out of steam.

In this article we’re going to unpack some ideas around this current state of play in the cryptosphere. Hopefully by the end you will:

• Be cautiously optimistic about the crypto decentralization story, i.e. understand why decentralization is important — but also why the story doesn’t end there.
• Know our take on what “effective execution” looks like — and will look like more — in crypto as opposed to traditional commercial or open source software development.

First, let’s cover decentralization:

Decentralization is an important concept, but it is one side of a dichotomy that people have been thinking about for years.

Since long before the first computer, let alone the first blockchain, thinkers from a variety fields have been contending with the centralization-decentralization dichotomy.

That is to say, they have wondered about how best to work together to get things done. Should someone have more autonomy? Should someone simply do as he is told and nothing more? What will motivate him? Who decides what is worth doing?

You can find people asking questions like these in practically any area of like in a society if you look hard enough.

Military history and military strategy in particular are full of popular examples — probably because there are easier to understand. There are usually two clear sides and a more-or-less clear outcome at the end of the day. But the questions are just as relevant in everything from business management to raising kids.

So what’s the big deal about blockchains and decentralization?

Blockchains — like other innovative technologies before it — are expanding the scope of the centralization-decentralization dichotomy.

When a new technology makes it possible to do something new, the scope of the centralization-decentralization dichotomy inevitably expands around this new possibility. In other words, there are all kinds of new questions about who should be allowed to do the new thing, under which circumstances, and so forth.

Take nuclear weapons as an extreme example. Should every soldier be able to launch nukes? Most people would say no, obviously. But someone needs to be able to. So who can and can’t?

You might be interested to know that in the 1980’s the Soviets took what probably seems like an overly decentralized approach to the issue. See this excerpt from a 1984 United States Department of the Army field report on the Soviet Army:

Makes you think twice about access to technology being decentralized, huh? What are the odds of all those people exercising good judgment?

On the other hand, how confident can you be that one person with centralized authority will exercise good judgment? Incidentally, Soviet Russia also gives us a good example that we might be able to. Check out Stanislav Petrov, “the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war.”

Clearly, blockchains aren’t nuclear weapons. But they are innovative technologies that have expanded — or perhaps re-expanded, if you see some parallel concepts history — the scope of this decentralization-centralization dichotomy.

Can you really be allowed to communicate online any ideas without any fear of censorship, no matter what? Should you be able to buy something with a currency that wasn’t printed by a government? Why should some software code inspire more trust than some stamps and ribbons from a government?

You know where we stand on these questions. Any crypto enthusiast “thinks decentralized,” i.e. is optimistic about how decentralized technology can improve people’s lives.

It’s important, though, not focus too much on the “decentralization porn” that you’ll find in fraudulent ICO documentation. Or the “decentralization daydreams” that you’ll find in better-intentioned projects that never really get off the ground.

Instead, get excited that the project has the potential to expand a familiar dichotomy in a novel way. And understand that actually doing so takes effective execution, just like any other technology project.

Which brings us to our take on effective crypto software project execution.

Successful crypto project execution channels the efforts of “citizen developers.”

Before crypto became a thing, there were essentially two types of reasons to develop software. Both reasons are alive and well today.

One type of reason is to make money. That obviously involves creating software that makes money. There are a lot of ways to do that. But judging from how the biggest tech companies make most of their money, it means developing financially free-to-use software that is adopted quickly and sells user data.

The other type of reason involves not making money. All kinds of reasons here, with the classic example here would be open source software supporting some kind of value system. Adoption is not a make-or-break factor, and use cases don’t necessarily have to be defined early. These projects can be “slow burns” that go on for years with contributions every once in a while.

Then came blockchains. With coins and tokens, projects have incentive structures that are a sort-of mashup of both commercial and open source software.

Like commercial software, money is involved, but it is primarily the project’s internal money, i.e. cryptocurrency. Speculation aside, this cryptocurrency’s value is tied directly to the actual adoption of the blockchain.

At the same time, crypto projects are usually very transparent and open source-ish. Even if they aren’t completely open source, the necessarily involve openness in one way or another. Crypto projects therefore tend to be driven more by value systems and ideals than purely commercial software projects.

In our opinion, this mashup incentive structure is giving rise to a new breed of “citizen developers.” These developers want to build things that drive rapid adoption of open source technology around real-life use cases that the developers and users all believe in.

That’s why we think the most successful crypto projects will increasingly be built around these types of motivations. And the crypto projects that stall will take either

• an overly slow, “take our time about defining the use case” open-source software style approach, or
• an overly fast “cowboy” commercial approach usually involving raising money without clear plans, capabilities, or safeguards.

Those are in fact, some of the key ideas behind what we’re doing at BlockStamp Foundation. BlockStamp Games, for example, is the only online casino that doesn’t make money off its players. We built it to disrupt the notoriously unfair online gambling industry, not to profit from it!

Watch this space, we’ll be launching an online interface for the casino shortly. Plus other BlockStamp applications will follow in Q1 2019.

About BlockStamp:

BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed by the BlockStamp Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. Designed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk, BlockStamp is built in to a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, and a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System.