Ethereum and Representative Democracy

Interestingly, the core “strength” of them crypto currencies (eg. ETH, Bitcoin etc) at the moment, is what makes them so susceptible to mining inflation(Deep State) - the Proof of Work algorithm. Early adopters can acquire cheap high performance hardware to outpace majority due to the structural “voting” priority of a guy who can crunch numbers faster(block calculation) - his vote will be taken first. (Byzantine Generals Problem).

This is similar to the issues search engines had prior to Page Rank introduction (named after Larry Page himself, not because it rank pages). People used to simply stuff their pages with keywords, since search engines simply counted mentions.

Any distributed system that requires a consensus of nodes will have this issue. One must balance the need for quick and reliable consensus vs performance degradation if more and more nodes are consulted (Representative Democracy and Gerrymandering anyone?)

Thankfully guys at Ethereum foundation are solving this problem by replacing the PoW algo with Proof of Stake approach, which somewhat solves the aforementioned issue. Alas, the recent move of a minority of Bitcoin holders to diversify into ETH and bumping up the price. Similarity, Page Rank introduced “reputation stake” into deciding whose page/block has priority. And yet, how many revisions and improvement did that go through?

But who knows which new problems it PoS will bring. The good news is that Ethereum architecture is smart enough to separate the Virtual Machine that actually executes smart contracts from blockchain mining, thus making it a very flexible platform for solving these kind of problems in the future.