Should we really expect that Bitcoin continues to be "social scalable"? Should we really expect that technology alone will run autonomously and scale seamlessly?
What reason is there to believe that we can simply spend cheap computing resources to avoid the expensive human redundancy and systematic vulnerability to human error?
At what point do computational limits and theory such as Godel's incompleteness theorem hinder the technology scalability?
Sure we can throw more resources into maintaining the Bitcoin network and cast by the wayside saying that the costs to maintain the network is far cheaper than having an army of accountants, lawyers, and regulators.
Except for one fact. Bitcoin is a very specific system for transactions (and is not longer peer to peer). By what extension should we believe that an entire system can continue to scale when in fact it's going from peer to peer to a centralised system.
In fact, let's take a look at two pieces. First the ecosystem required to interact with Bitcoin and second newer blockchains such as Ethereum.
It's very hard to ignore the fact that the ecosystem around actually using Bitcoin is full of security vulnerabilities. In fact, simply casting this aside saying that these are known issues is concerning. What evidence is there that this the supporting ecosystem be easily replaced by a socially scalable system?
There's a growing centralization of mining power. Why is this a good thing? Should we somehow feel better that someone with more resources is controlling and making decisions?
Someone says, ok well fork the chain if you have a problem. Well, I fork Bitcoin and can't an existing mining pool just attempt to attack me?
Fact is not easy to take all my Bitcon assets and fork in case of a dispute.
The centralization of Bitcoin mining power, why is this socially scalable?
Second observation. Attempts to build an "ecosystem" around blockchain is not really functioning so well. There is an army of accountants and lawyers and regulators that are required. Exchanges are an area that comes to mind.
What about Ethereum? Is this socially scalable? Why is creating a large running world computer deemed to be safe? As if bugs will not happen or creep in? As if serious impacting bugs have not crept in to smart contracts already?
The biggest and well known computer is the Internet today. It's nowhere close to being socially scalable. There are dozens of bugs everyday, just look at how routing is managed by humans. Internet service providers and the entire industry is regulated.
Would it be nice if we could have social scalability?
Sure.
Is it realistic to assume that we can have a large ecosystem?
If we do, it will clearly be a large technology break through.
Great thought!!
I think DAO (Decentralized Autonomous organizations) are socially scalable. We need decentralized organizations which can be more effective in charities, technological campanies, educational institutions and so on. I think there is more room for the decentralization of governance in many field in this open new world. Don't you think?
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I'm not clear why decentralized governance is an improvement. I can see the advantage of permissionless participation though.
The quickest way to kill an initiative is to create a committee to "investigate". So I'm not sure why decentralized governance would actually achieve anything and be able to handle serious issues or disruptions. Social checks and balances can be manipulated, look at politics today.
Multiple parties doesn't really move along important issues and can actually be used to halt initiatives due to lack of majority vote. In fact, many security protocols are built on the collusion assumption in that it only takes one honest non colluding party to halt a multi party computation.
So why would decentralization help improve governance, when in fact it's used for the opposite?
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Centralization helps new initiatives grow faster, for sure. But in the case where majority vote is vital to decide whether those proposed initiatives are worth perceiving, initiatives that has no majority vote are not worth perceiving. Decentralized governance makes all the people ( stakeholders, users) the owners of the company, but only decentralized, thus having the validation, by involvement of a large mass, but not their stupidity as one or one small group.
Stopping good initiatives because they came from other group is not anyone's interest.
Nonetheless, centralized governance is sane until we have the technological improvements to engineer stupidity-proof, more efficient governance models.
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