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I predict this will be abandoned (or the blockchain figleaf dropped in favor of an explicitly centralized and far simpler/cheaper store) in 2, maybe 3 years.

Or about as long as it takes for the fundamentally unsolvable problems of decentralized governance to become pathological to group integrity. If you are a junior stakeholder in this nominally decentralized system you eventually have to accept that you have no influence over the direction of the protocol's development, or get together with a group of similarly disadvantaged peers and fork your own implementation where your relative influence is more comparable.

Until that consortium, too, falls apart due to leverage-seeking behavior by individuals within it, or ossifies into a de facto centralized network, but one saddled with a bunch of expensive and now superfluous blockchain game-theory casino infrastructure.




Those are strong words, "fundamentally unsolvable problems of decentralized governance".

I'm not dis/agreeing with your scenario: I also think it's quite likely that this JPMorgan crypto would ossify into a de facto centralized network.

But the phrase "fundamentally unsolvable" feels like it needs some harder proof or logical explanation. There are many instances of (and variations on) "decentralized governance", like open-source projects, technical or social organizations, etc. Would you say all those attempts are doomed to failure? (Or maybe that they could continue to operate despite being potentially unstable/flawed based on fundamentally unsolvable problems. Or perhaps that they all tend to become centralized.)

Thinking of attempts at decentralized governance in a larger sense (including but beyond specific applications in the crypto sphere), it does seem that most of them are failing due to some inherent structural issues. I wonder whether it can be demonstrated that all such decentralized governance systems are fundamentally flawed (similar to Gödel's incompleteness theorem..?).




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