Re:“In 2018 the blockchain/decentralization story fell apart”
by majewsky on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @07:50PM
(#18803408)
> Economic systems are rather like cellular automata. They either splutter around for a while and die out, or they take over the board and assimilate everything.
This metaphor is amazing. I wanted to reply that cellular automata can in fact produce highly-localized, stable systems (like glider cannons in Conway's GoL). Then I realized that while those systems are stable, they are also so brittle that a single flipped bit will destroy them incredibly fast. That sounds a lot like economics.
Re:“In 2018 the blockchain/decentralization story fell apart”
by tim333 on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @05:07PM
(#18802699)
>scratching my head trying to think of any significant distributed and decentralised economic entities
The banking system? Sure it ends up a bit centralised but still most countries have their own ones.
In fact I think this is the Big Lie of Disruption. The reality is that instead of breaking up existing monopolies, "disruption" simply creates new, bigger, even more centralised and powerful monopolies.
Economic systems are rather like cellular automata. They either splutter around for a while and die out, or they take over the board and assimilate everything.
Although it claims to solve this problem, blockchain doesn't - not even close. You can only solve it by consciously moving entropy around the system to keep it in a permanently metastable state - supporting smaller structures that generate new information, and splitting up large structures that threaten to engulf everything around them.