Decentralise all the things!

As we progress, decentralisation is the new hot topic. Blockchain interest is rapidly growing and more and more people are speculating on cryptocurrencies. Great!

Does everything benefit from decentralisation?

In some cases yes but also in quite a few, not really. A very clear example would be the decentralisation of the production of goods. It doesn't make sense for each country to make everything that their population needs and wants, even if their population gains more of a say in the production process.

But what about services? Surey online services are perfectly suited for decentralisation? Well... imagine decentralising Wikipedia with IPFS or storing data with filecoin. What's happening is we're taking tremendous amounts of data, duplicating it and giving parts or all of it to each user in the network. You have a brand new phone with 128gb of data? Oops, Wikipedia's files just took it all up. And all of that cellular data you have? Hmm, other people on the network need you to consistently be online to upload the files you have. Kind of an over-simplification but you get the idea.

In a sense, centralisation has brought us a lot of benefits and personally I believe it will always exist in some way (bitcoin's somewhat centralised mining groups are an example) but people are working on different consensus algorithms in order to attempt to mitigate this issue.

So what suits decentralisation? The main value that I see in decentralisation is for each individual to be able to really own what they own; things like our money and our digital identity. As in no one great, all powerful third party looms over and censors what they don't like. But don't we own our money in the bank? Julian Assange's funds in his bank account got frozen, something which couldn't have happened if his funds were on a cryptocurrency. Hopefully, this won't happen to us, but what if we start donating to activist organisations frowned upon by the government? Who knows really, but we know for sure someone is watching...

Our digital identity is extremely important to us all. After all, most of us check Facebook religiously each day. I know for certain I do. However, Facebook also has the ability to freeze our accounts, much like how banks are able to freeze our money. Wouldn't it be great if our voice and identity online wasn't overseen by companies salivating over our data? Or if radical thinkers, entrepreneurs, philosophers, activists, all able to express their views without being censored?

The final one which blockchain is so well known for is the ability to trust the network rather than corruptible individuals, even though (i hope) the majority of individuals are trustworthy. A non-financial example of this would be to use a blockchain to verify products along a supply chain. Imagine you're buying free-range eggs, but just because there's a sticker on the carton does it actually mean it's free range? Well if the supply chain is on a blockchain, you are able to trace the journey of the eggs back to the free-range farm! A startup that is currently working on this problem is Devery if you wish to have a look at their work.

These are currently my thoughts on the state of decentralisation which I hope are helpful to you. In one way. Or another... But I believe the success of dapps comes from whether decentralisation fundamentally suits it. If any thoughts jump out at you (or you want to angrily yell at me for being wrong) please let me know!