What Does ‘Distributed’ Really Mean?
Recently ‘distributed’ ledger processing/storage systems of blockchain technology are beginning to enter more mainstream adoption, with a bow-wave from technologically savvy, financially savvy and otherwise ‘aware’ people acting as adopters and evangilists.
But what does the word ‘distributed’ actually mean? For a while now I have been concerned with the rhetoric of social empowerment often in ICOs not matching up to realities of distribution of wealth — or at least concerned that we did not have clear ways of studying this.
Recently I have found some research beginning to give us a handle on just how ‘distributed’ these new financial systems are.
https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e
http://hackingdistributed.com/2018/01/15/decentralization-bitcoin-ethereum/
These are worth a read because they begin to strip away the claims and leave us with a real picture of how to ensure that the ethos of ‘distributed’ actually comes to pass. We will not achieve equity through willful ignorance or wishful thinking, but only through action and design informed by genuine curiosity and meaningful comparisons of intentions to actual outcomes.
I have written about Moving Beyond Network Feudalism as we have it today, and mentioned blockchains. Yet ‘blockchain’ alone is not enough to actually guarantee equitable distribution of assets. Governance and morality is not leaving us alone in our techno-future, but instead is becoming even more important, even as it atomizes and re-factors itself.
I have always been and will continue to be a watchdog of where power actually exists and how it is truly expressed; not just power as we want it to be, but power as it really is.
With blockchains I’m becoming more interested in how to enforce any of these claims than even the systems themselves: {Watch Talk (5 Min)} Defense Against the Bullshit Arts: ICO Whitepaper Edition
As I wrote about with the emergence of Participation as Commodity, old power-law dynamics can resurface without deliberate counter design in the system.
#decentralized doesn’t mean equality of control and value distribution, and every decentralized standard requires still sharing that standard, making it centralized at the interface level, if not at the runtime level. Look deeper.
Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future” is required reading for all who are involved with blockchain systems.
Hope for a better future is based somewhat in fear and can sometimes obscure truths, I prefer a designer’s perspective: know the system as it is and work with that reality to nudge it toward the affordances you desire. More than Hope, we need exploration and genuine inquiry.
