What does decentralisation mean to me?

Meaningful decentralisation for me means allowing each individual human actor as much freedom as possible, while at the same time having some minimal controls in place to prevent malicious actors from harming the 'collective good', with both the concept of the 'collective good' and the 'minimal controls' having been agreed upon by as many individual human actors as practically possible.

Note that I think 'having minimal controls' to protect an agreed upon 'collective good' are a crucial part of a decentralised system, otherwise we just have fragmentation as people who don't like the already existing system break away from it to form a new one.

What decentralisation isn't - a quick aside

To talk of decentralisation means to talk of each unit which recognises itself as an independent identity in relation to the whole system - that may sound obvious, but what I'm saying is that to talk of decentralisation isn't 'fragmentation' - it isn't distinct units breaking apart, breaking off, and having nothing to do with the original system they may have once been a part of.

Why doing decentralisation is so challenging

The definition above is alone sufficient to demonstrated why decentralisation is such a difficult thing to think about, let alone discuss, let alone agree on.

In order to define what decentralisation is, you need people to have a minimal level of agreement on the following:

1. The individual
2. Freedom
3. appropriate control mechanisms
4. malicious action
5. the collective good
6. How to agree on all of the above.

What you've basically got above are the concepts which have divided political opinion since the beginning of modern philosophy. I'm sure you've all seen the diagram below, with the polar extremes demarcated by some of the key concepts above.

Negative and positive decentralisation

I think it's useful to distinguish between the following....

Negative (minimal) version - involves preventing one individual human or corporate actor from determining the governance of a system.

Positive (maximal) version - involves allowing as many individual human actors as possible to determine the governance of a chain.

Further difficulties of realising decentralisation on Steem

Here I'm going to go through the 6 aspects of the definition above to demonstrate that realiising decentralisation on Steem is maybe MORE difficult than IRL...

1. What is the individual on Steem?

In terms of each individual actor, anonymity means we don't know which accounts are actually individuals: one individual could control multiple accounts, or accounts could be bot accounts, and there seems to be a consensus that this is fine. Thus we cannot pin the individual down in order to hold them to account

2. Freedom on Steem

Steem has been attempting to allow individuals multiple types of freedom. At least the following (mixing up freedom to and freedom from here soz):

• Freedom to speak/ publish, so freedom from censorship
• Freedom to write/ develop and earn from your work.
• Freedom to reward others for their work.
• Freedom to invest and move money.
• The above freedoms to be achieved by the freedom from one centralised company controlling the servers on which your content is stored.

I think when we're talking about decentralisation, we need to be clear about what aspect of the above we're talking about.

Appropriate control mechanisms

At the very least @felixxx will probably appreciate a mention of the crab bucket. This was the original decentralised control mechanism - multiple flags be minnows bringing the self-voting or circle-jerking whales down.

It never worked originally because people didn't use their flags.

It worked slightly better with free DVs, but I think what made this most effective was changing the curation returns to 50-50/

4. malicious action

I think there was some agreement that spam and plagiarism were against the collective good.

5. the collective good

I THINK, or at least I thought there was some minimal level of consensus around this concept, at least in terms of how rewards should be distributed - people should get rewarded on the basis of the quality of their content, and this was in the interest of everyone because this would lead to a nice trending page, and that would attract more users, and that would lead to the price of Steem going up.

Except that's probably a fantasy in my head because clearly there are a lot of people that just want the old system back where we can all post 10 times a day and circle jerk our shit up to the top.

Then there's the fact that not everyone agrees that this is primarily a social media platform - it's a Dapp platform.

Maybe Steem has just been trying to do too much?

How to agree on all of the above...?

In short it breaks down to the following -

• If 4 witnesses don't agree something, then nothing can be changed (25% of stake)
• If 17 witness agree something, then something can be changed (80% of stake )

NB - correct me if I'm wrong on the weightings there!

Why Justin has been terrible for Steem

Given the complexities above, it is astounding that we had a system which worked at all. Yet we did - even through the bear market of recent times (the previous bear market) - we had 80% agreement to push through various HFs and the system after the recent HF at least seemed to have less abuse going on.

On top of that, we had communities, SMTs potentially coming, man I can see why the witnesses reacted with that Soft Fork.

Look at all of the above aspects of decentralisation - on every single aspect Justin has taken us away from decentralisation, he's potentially ruined years of one of the most successful experiments in decentralisation, which was, given the complexities, extremely successful until he weighed in.

Or why he might be the best thing that ever happened...?

Or maybe this IS decentalization working... Justin may have the stake, but we've got this ' stand off situation' which is holding things and commanding dialogue - and it seems that reputation is a factor in Justin's support dropping off.

Maybe this is what Steem needed - we're reaching out, beyond Steem, for support, and this is making Steem even more decentralised?

Let's face it, Steem is only twice as centralised as it was before Justin got here - before hand it was decentralised as far as blocktrades and pumpkin, in practice if you're being generous and ignore steemit's stake that wasn't being used.

Final thoughts... the ecosystems solution

I got to thinking that ecosystems are probably perfect examples of decentralised systems - as in there is no centre in an ecosystem. There may me 'top feeders' like Sharks or Humans, but no centre.

Maybe we need to figure out how to become more like and ecosystem, and less like a network of autonomous individuals?

No idea what that would look like!