Decentralization Is The Only Effective Antidote Against Corruption

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This picture is an edited and cropped version of a pic published a month ago. It was taken in Pälkäne, Finland, on Jan 3 2019.

I noticed that @taskmaster4450 wrote a piece a today about the weakness of centralization and how it won't stand a chance despite most people not being aware of that. It is true that ordinary people do not care about how things are organized as long as they get their immediate needs met. Most people would be happy to live in a dictatorship if their stomachs were full and entertainment was available. The forward thinking of us realize that under dictatorship things will start to fall apart sooner or later. That's because there is no such thing as a benevolent dictator or if there is such people who are capable of resisting the corrupting influence of power are rare. @taskmaster4450 was talking about Wells Fargo fucking up which resulted in many customers being cut off from their funds. Centralization fails in one form or another for the same reason: a single point of failure.

Until cryptographically secure distributed ledgers came along, of which blockchains are one proven example, the only way decentralization could be achieved was pitting groups of people with opposing interests against each other and have them watch each other. That method produces varying results. It seems to keep the worst excesses of abuse of power at bay but does not prevent the whole system from being largely corrupted from outside such as by the money elite. Or simply realizing they can collude to a degree at the expense of the public.

I've heard many Russians lament the widespread corruption in their country and saying that their country is not "normal". While the degree of corruption differs from country to country and region to region, one should keep in mind that corruption in a society made up of millions of people is what you'd expect game theoretically. Distrust is normal and trust is what requires an explanation. Building trust takes time but one betrayal can destroy it instantly.

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Flesh is weak and few of us are strong enough to resist a bowl full of goodies offered to us.

From what I've heard from many African or Latin American Steemian friends of mine, I'd say that without the use of decentralized platforms taking off at grassroots level, those regions are hopeless. If national power companies cannot be trusted to deliver power without frequent outages because they are mismanaged or stripped of assets by corrupt powers that be and if the banks are too untrustworthy, then people can be expected to install solar panels and use cryptocurrency in trading their excess capacity. Or if national currency is debased by an incompetent government, cryptocurrencies will substitute it.

The crypto space is still very immature. With the introduction of tools like KeyChain, Steem has only begun to take baby steps toward mass adoption. When I visit forums and social media outlets that the masses frequent, I can only shake my head at the thought of these people handling four pairs of cryptographic keys responsibly without being supported by the right kind of tools.

But as the space matures, I do think it has potential to change the world for the better. One such potential application is electronic voting. It is possible to implement a voting system that is provably correct but yet allows for privacy. There is no way to do that without employing zero-knowledge proofs. Here's an example of how to do that.

One major impediment to a more direct form of democracy is the difficulty of scaling discussions up from a few dozen participants. That is why we haven't had anything better than representative democracy and division of powers so far, a very weak and imperfect form of decentralization. Tau Chain is a decentralized logic and ontology engine that aims at changing that. This is what the project page has to say (I do not own any tokens and are not endorsing this project in any way, but I'm open to the idea that it could be helpful):

Tau is a decentralized blockchain network intended to solve the bottlenecks inherent in large scale human communication and accelerate productivity in human collaboration using logic based Artificial Intelligence.

Currently, large scale discussions and collaborative efforts carried out directly between people are highly inefficient. To address this problem, we developed a paradigm which we call Human-Machine-Human communication: the core principle is that the users can not only interact with each other but also make their statements clear to their Tau client. Our paradigm enables Tau to deduce areas of consensus among its users in real time, allowing the network to boost communication by acting as an intermediary between humans. It does so by collecting the opinions and preferences its users wish to share and logically constructing opinions into a semantic knowledge base.

Able to deduce consensus and understand discussions, Tau can automatically generate and execute code on consensus basis, through a process known as code synthesis. This will greatly accelerate knowledge production and expedite most large scale collaborative efforts we can imagine in today's world.

I guess we'll see how well that works.

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Mature distributed ledger technology has great potential to tame our inner gangster, in my opinion.

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Very nice set of photos!! I cannot catch up with your progress!!

More than decentralization!

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