Promise of Web3 Supporters decentralization on an unprecedented scale. Excessive centralization can impede coordination and erode freedom, democracy, and economic dynamism — decentralization is arguably the remedy. But the term itself is too vague to be a consistent end goal. Completing the right work Kind decentralization and we worry that Web3 therefore going in the wrong direction.
In particular, we worry about the focus on the degree, rather than the type, of the hierarchy. Degree of centralization — whether we want to be more or less decentralized — can mislead Web3 proponents about both the reality of existing centralization, as well as the possibility of pure decentralization. On the other hand, existing “centralized” systems are not nearly as centralized as Web3 advocates often describe. “Legacy” banks delegate many operations to local branches, and even central banks are often corporations. Architecturally, “centralized” clouds are rarely so centralized in practice; they are often scattered around a wide range of geographies and train large machine learning models in a distributed fashion.
On the other hand, many Web3 critics have pointed to the inefficiencies along with the proposed decentralized architectures, as well as the inevitable re-emergence of “hubs” in Web3 (the NFTs, currency exchanges, wallet providers). In addition, there are important limitations and trade-offs involved in moving toward a broader goal of decentralization. For example, a narrow technical hierarchy confronts the conflict between resistance to censorship and embedding values that often lead to poorer functionality or ultimately some centralized decision-making, manifesting in content moderation. content on decentralized social networks.
Therefore, there are (soft) limits to the degree of concentration and for possible hierarchies in a functional system. Instead of pursuing a false argument about whether next-generation technology should be centralized or decentralized, we should ask how for the best arrangement pattern of the desired decentralization. Such an argument requires defining exactly what we want from decentralization.
We believe the value of decentralization lies in actually empowering people to act decisively in their social context, while providing the necessary coordination mechanisms across contexts. This is in contrast to the current technical landscape, where decision-making authority over information, computation, censorship, etc. is increasingly in the hands of authorities “distant” from relevant groups. — for example, cross-platform content moderation processes attempt to be cross-community and cross-cultural, and largely fail at both. In this situation, decisions are removed from the applicable context and made by those with little direct interest in the problem, who are then unable to take advantage of the richly distributed information.
Our point of decentralization is about coordination. It emphasizes solving problems through the association of “local” units, grouped around the social contexts most relevant to the current decision. This is not a new idea: American federalism, with its local, state, and national governments, is essentially derived from this principle. subsidize, so is the establishment of an open source repository and a wiki-like structure for aggregating information. It is important that these local units can be combined– modular and interoperable, essentially “stackable” on a more global scale – to enable decentralized systems to efficiently solve problems that may at first seem to require Ask for focus to coordinate. We call this model aggregate local control.
A single-use, local control that distributes decision-making, leveraging a core principle of both markets and democracy: Those closest to an issue often have the most knowledge, and the greatest contribution in solving that problem and by aggregating, linking and filtering this knowledge are best collective decisions are made.
Subsidiarity is the architecture and type of decentralization that makes local control composable. But Web3’s trajectory of dominance is hard to come by, and may even go against subsidies. Permissionless blockchains are built as a distributed backup ledger, where storage and authority are distributed by anonymous economic mechanisms and accessed through replaceable, fungible resources. transactions like computers and tokens. This architecture is optimized for a very narrow set of problems, and therefore by its very nature is not able to communicate with the rich social and economic networks where real coordination is required. problem. Such pure financial systems have a well-documented history of centralization of wealth, information, and power, attributes with which the current Web3 ecosystem has taken and is taking to an extreme. As a result, redundant distributed ledgers are under strain with subsidiary networks and the benefits of the form of decentralization we advocate.
