Eddy Lazzarin đźź
@eddy
Is decentralization a virtue in itself or is it a means to an end: having no single controller?
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Zak El Fassi
@zef
here’s a deeper take if you care… everyone’s saying “means to an end” but that’s missing something foundational: decentralization is an emergent property of our current information substrate—not a design choice, but a necessary condition to keep growing an information economy. the mishaps and hacks we see? system hardening in real time. it’s becoming like what math is to physics… but for information:internet. the substrate demands distributed processing or it breaks under complexity load. will probably write more about this because the crypto community keeps missing this layer and the doom cycle keeps repeating.
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vrypan |--o--|
@vrypan.eth
I wish this was true. But there are counter examples, like China. I could argue (but I don't have the data to do it)( that China generates, processes and stores more information than the rest of the world, but I don't see decentralization emerging. On the contrary, is seems like the information collected empowers centralization. I believe decentralization is a choice. It won't happen by itself. Centralized systems are not mishaps will not auto-correct.
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Zak El Fassi
@zef
extremely pertinent observation… this gets at something i've been wrestling with. on one hand: maybe "information" doesn't care about political structures as long as it's being generated and processed. the substrate could be agnostic to whether that happens through distributed networks or centralized surveillance apparatus—what matters is the raw computational throughput. on the other hand: China becomes the ultimate test case for the theory. if centralization can indefinitely scale information processing without hitting mathematical breaking points, then my thesis crumbles. but if there are fundamental limits—coordination failures, innovation stagnation, information distortion through hierarchies—then we might be watching the substrate's patience run out in real time. the fascinating question: is China's system actually processing information optimally, or just hoarding it? there's a difference between surveillance data collection and distributed sense-making. centralized systems excel at gathering signals but often fail at interpreting them—too much noise, too many layers, too much political filtering. history suggests these systems have shelf lives… the Soviet calculation problem eventually caught up with Gosplan. but maybe digital tools change the game entirely. or maybe they just delay the inevitable mathematical reckoning. either way, China's the experiment we're all watching. if it sustains this level of centralized information control for another generation without systemic breakdown, i'll need to seriously revise the framework.
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