What decentralization means to me

I'll get straight to the point here.

Decentralization is nothing without decentralization of power. You can talk about decentralized currency and decentralized technology all you want, but if the power is centralized, then it's just empty words. When one person or a small group of people can dominate an ecosystem, it is not decentralized.

True decentralization goes beyond tech and currency. In order to have true decentralization we need to create a culture that believes in it enough to sacrifice some of their own gains. That doesn't mean that we won't be rewarded for our work. It just means that we need to make the health of the ecoysytem priority nearly as important as our own personal wealth. Our own well-being and the well-being of others are two pillars. Nothing works without both of them. When there is only one, we will fail to create something better than what we already have.

Although the crypto-sphere talks a lot about decentralization, super whales have enough power to manipulate the market and since money attracts money, they can continue to increase their stake. There is always the potential that someone big comes along and uses their massive wealth to manipulate the price or have a disproportionate influence on the protocol. This is true of a CEO or organization connected to a blockchain, or a massively rich investor. We are all learning this lesson in real time now.

I don't know if true decentralization is even possible, but we might as well. At the very least we can always do better. The way we get closer to true decentralization is through creating a community that really believes in the decentralization of power, not just decentralized ledgers. We build trust between people and learn to build consensus and create our own culture around shared values. We learn from each other and grow together. We stand up together when someone is acting abusively or seizing too much power for themselves.

I am excited for Hive.

I feel that this community is doing exactly what I described up above. But if we want to pursue something better, we need to be both positive and skeptical, open-minded and vigilant. When we get rid of a centralized company or a massive majority stakeholder, we become vulnerable. That person or organization is not ideal, but they can serve to protect us from people who want to come in and throw their weight around in an abusive fashion. But now the largest stakeholder is acting abusively so we have no choice, and we are forced to step into uncharted territory. It's exciting, but also dangerous.

The community needs to come together and learn to listen to each other better. We need to learn to call out abusive behavior without turning into angry kids about it, so that we can come up with solutions that don't need to come to a head like this ninja-mine stake did. We need to come create enough consensus and trust so that when some other ultra-rich investor, or angry ex-CEO comes and tries to manipulate our ecosystem by any means they have available, we can come up with solutions that don't split the community. We need more transparency among those who hold power including large stake-holders and witnesses and developers so that we are confident there are no back-room deals going on.

I am automatically skeptical of people with lots of power. It's not that they are bad people. It's just that if they are, they can do so much more damage to others. If their egos get the best of them, they end up reaping a disproportionate amount of rewards and eventually, the whole ecoystem will suffer.

But as I was speaking about trust, we need to build trust between all sizes of stakeholders in this community. The witnesses began to earn my trust when they fixed the bid-bod issue. I really disagreed with some of the changes they were making the steem but in the end, they solved a problem that I couldn't imagine them solving. It doesn't mean that I am 100% believing in everything that every witness or large stakeholder says. But trust is something that is BUILT, not something that is given. And so we are slowly building trust between each other in this community. As far as I can see, there are many decent people doing great things among the witnesses and large stake-holders. I can think of @acidyo @theycallmedan, @lukestokes, @themarkymark and @tarazkp to name a few. These are just a few that I've interacted with, there are many I have not.

We still need to continue to build trust. I want to be more confident that no one is engaging in any foul play behind the scenes, but at least we have people who care about this chain and seem to act in the interest of others. Some have made mistakes and that's ok. I am excited to move forward together and make this big leap into a new level of freedom.

This new level of decentralization that we are entering will require a new level of responsibility. We need to be ready for it. We can prioritize our self interests, but not to a level where it hurts the ecoystem. We can disagree but we can't shit on people who we disagree with. We need to build as many bridges as we can between different parts of the community because there will be people who try to divide us and we cannot let them.

Fuck

I love this community.

Thank you for the amazing journey you've given me since mid 2017. I can't wait for this new stage that we are about to enter, and I will do my best to make sure we all stay united and working to bring up the whole community together.

See you in the Hive!

Love,
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