Decentralization, like many other religions…

Decentralization, like many other religions, relies upon its followers’ faith in an entity whose existence cannot be proved. That entity is decentralization itself, or more particularly decentralization that truly walks among us in our world.

I used to tell people that I viewed Bitcoin as the only truly decentralized currency. Then I stumbled across Bitcoin Core, a group of (currently) five individuals in charge of Bitcoin’s algorithms, which produce a truly, and amazingly, fungible and double-spend-protected digital currency – an incredible accomplishment. I sure hope its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a… you know… human being.

And I’m glad that I, and everyone I care about, am not one of those five members of Bitcoin Core. If they screw up, about $1.7 trillion worth of assets held by millions of people may… well, let’s just not think about the effect that would have on the lives of the Bitcoin Core folks. They have some big decisions about their block hashing procedures coming up, so please join me in wishing them godspeed on that perilous journey.

Again like other religions, decentralization shares the same emotional origins as a variety of anti-authoritarian causes including, very ironically, MAGA. We should not be the least bit surprised that the anti-authoritarian MAGA movement engenders authoritarianism, as that’s what anti-authoritarian passion almost always delivers. (For a very entertaining presentation of that theme, watch the 1971 Woody Allen film Bananas.)

Every coherent network, which by definition includes every cryptocurrency, requires governance. As the decentralization advocate Lawrence Lundy-Bryan notes, “There is no such thing as decentralized governance” – and governance can’t exist without authority. Governance is decisions, and the source of those decisions must be clearly identifiable. That’s the definition of authority.

“Authority” being an inflammatory word among purported anti-authoritarians, we should quickly note that the word itself does not convey anything about its source. Authority may be democratic, representative (e.g. republican), plutocratic, authoritarian, dictatorial, oligarchic, hereditary, or mafiaistic; but authority must exist for there to be governance, i.e. decisions.

Authority may also be engineered. (In my view the Federalist Papers are engineering documents.)

An engineered authority structure is the result of, what else: an engineering process.

Engineers tend to work on physical engineering problems rather than societal problems. Perhaps that’s because they get turned off by the shrillness of debate about solutions to societal problems, and so they leave them to those who can put up with the shrillness. In any event, the problems that decentralization attempts to solve are as much societal as technical.

Stoanova hopes to start the process of bringing the engineering mindset to problems that have not been considered to be the province of the engineering profession. Stoanova will do that by moving the debate to optimocratic places, where people with an engineering mindset tend to self-select in and people with a political mindset will tend to self-select out.

There are many different descriptions of engineering problem-solving processes and the steps involved. In Stoanova the problem-solving process consists of:

1. Background (if necessary)

2. The Problem Statement

3. Analysis of Modes of Failure that cause the Problem

4. Proposed Solution(s)

5. Iterative Prototyping

6. Deployment

7. Iterative Revision

When asked to write the preface to my book Quiet Enjoyment, Dan Geer started it with this sentence:

“The most important step in engineering is to get the problem statement right.”

In this case as in so many others, coming up with the problem statement gets complicated in a hurry. But we need to start.

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About the Author

In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.

Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.

Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.