Understanding Zargham: Nature is decentralized and a lot of the systems we already created are too
Reality itself is decentralized
Nature is matter and energy spread out in space and evolving in time. There is no global state of the world, only an interpretation of the global state of the world. The traditional way of building systems was a top-down approach in which you formulated the rules and then created a system that only worked according to those rules. Nature does not have any such top-down approach. Therefor, imitating nature is a better way of constructing decentralized systems, as we are mimicking the decentralized aspects of nature.
All of this is not new. We have already built decentralized systems. Think about travel:
Air traffic is loosely, locally orchestrated to make sure airplanes do not crash into each other when they are physically in the same place, but there is no one centralized party orchestrating each and every move of all airplanes across the globe. It does adhere to some globally similar rules, but in itself is a decentralized system.
Think even bigger: when we travel the world, we make use of local systems. We take a bus, we fly on a plane, we hail a cab. These systems do not really care about the other systems. But they do allow us to travel physically through space. We are already using decentralized systems, that we made ourselves.
Every behavior that you exhibit is a byproduct of local observation, local action and local changes in state.
Most of our models are incomplete
One of the ways in which a lot of the systems that we have are built, is that they do not properly reflect the underlying natural structure. These systems are modelled more simplistically, leaving out crucial interactions. While we as humans instinctively can sense when a certain action might impact nature, a lot of our systems have no representation of those impacts in their model. They are not accounted for, and therefor are missing from the economic equation.
This means that optimization of the economic aspects can drive the system to an undesirable state. By modelling these systems more like nature, the models become more inclusive, and start pricing ecological impact into the interactions which could drive them towards a desirable state again.
Taking the human (economics) out of our models
If you read the previous paragraphs closely, you might have realized that a very interesting (but challenging) way to create systems that more closely resemble nature’s decentralization, is BY LEAVING THE HUMAN ECONOMICS OUT OF THEM. The flow of monetary value that we introduced in most of our systems, is not present in natural systems. All sorts of valuable flows and interactions exist in natural systems, though. None of them exhibit the same kind of extraction that we humans have built into economics.
Blockchain not required, trustworthiness is key
Designing collaboration systems does not require thinking about blockchain, it requires filling in the various layers of the model. Only when we come across something that we do not want to be controlled by a centralized party, then do we think about peer to peer, decentralized networks.
But still, we are more interested in adding ‘truth’ into the system, than a blockchain per se. We need trustworthy data, like nature needs the laws of conservation for instance. If we know the data’s history and provenance, and we know that the data is the same when we read it as when it was added, and we know the chronological order, we know enough. A blockchain can provide that, but other (peer to peer) systems can do that as well.
