First principles of decentralization
This article comes from: NEST fans (nestfans.com) Author: Jiuzhang Tianwen
Blockchain technology builds a decentralized world. Imagine: a complete value network that does not depend on any individual, day and night, contracts, AI and sentient beings can interact frequently, and value flows between them, not only There is no middleman, and even no operation is required. They automatically go where they should go, and you only need to type a line of code. "On the Internet, I didn't even know I was facing a dog" turned into, "On the blockchain, the richest man is an AI" "What we agreed will happen in five hundred years", what kind of situation is this? Magical world? If that doesn't represent progress, what does?
But the decentralized world is not easy to build, nor is it easy to understand? Because the idea of centralization, like a shadow, always interferes with your understanding of decentralization. Some criteria need to be found, just like judging the fineness of gold to judge whether a thing is decentralized or not. According to the expression of economics, the difference between centralization and decentralization lies in whether it contains some kind of individual or organization agency risk. The risk means that once these individuals or organizations do not act according to the intention of the principal, the principal may suffer losses. . In the decentralized process, there is only trust in mechanisms and codes (the risks of mechanisms and codes are clear from the beginning, and bugs or "backdoors" written intentionally or unintentionally are not included), there is no trust in a specific individual or Organizational dependence, this feature inspired us and proposed the first principle of decentralization:
In the entire process of completing value exchange, as long as one link is centralized, the entire process is centralized.
This seemingly simple conclusion is actually very powerful. It can directly test the quality of all self-proclaimed decentralized projects on the market: whether they are as decentralized as they claim. You can give it a try and find out the "centralization" of any link in each project - even if you only have the power to upload and download without modification (such as some zero-knowledge proofs of off-chain matching), It is also centralized because you can refuse to perform.
It seems a bit too "cruel" to use the first principle to demand the current decentralized world (except for the public chain itself, other projects are not satisfied), can you lower the standard a little bit, and classify the decentralization according to the degree? ? Here, we draw on efficient markets and propose several decentralization criteria:
Strong decentralization:That is to say, there is no centralized agency risk in each link, which is completely in line with the first principle, such as a public chain based on POW or POS mechanism, assets written on the chain that do not depend on off-chain facts, such as a NETH ERC20 , its generation method is: put 1 ETH in the contract to generate 1 NETH, put 1 NETH into the contract to get 1 ETH again, the contract is open source and does not have any management authority, such assets are of the same origin as ETH , its value does not depend on any offline team, and it is also decentralized. In contrast, assets such as OMG and HT must rely on the project team to "capture" value. Although they are written in blockchain, they are also decentralized. Not decentralized.
Semi-strong decentralization:Considering that the value confirmation step of most assets may contain centralization risks (such as OMG, HT, etc. mentioned above), we lower the standard of strong decentralization and do not consider the value confirmation step, only considering assets Interactions on the chain. Various DAPPs or applications emphasize the decentralized provision of value or services on the chain, so semi-strong decentralization means that the entire process of these on-chain services no longer includes the risk of centralization. For example, if ERC20 is regarded as a service itself, it is semi-strongly decentralized; for example, the completely open source NEST loan contract is semi-strongly decentralized. In short, the only difference between semi-strong decentralization and strong decentralization is that in the entire process of value exchange, only the source of value has a centralization risk, while other links are completely decentralized. There is a popular saying that only the step of going to the chain has a centralization risk. Once it is on the chain, it will be completely decentralized. Therefore, semi-strong decentralization preserves the centralization risk of the step of going to the chain, but does not add additional centers. risk.
Weak decentralization:It means that regardless of whether the source of value is decentralized or not, in the whole process of value exchange, there is a certain link that is realized through voting, multi-signature, and decentralized nodes, which is called weak decentralization. Weak decentralization is not a further weakening on the basis of semi-strong decentralization. It means that even if the original asset you use is ETH, in the link of value exchange, there are solutions such as voting, multi-signature, and decentralized nodes. , is also weakly decentralized, so weak decentralization emphasizes some kind of semi-centralization risk in the chain interaction process. Of course, if there are such operations in the chaining process, it is also weakly decentralized. For example, Chainlink uses various decentralized nodes to provide prices, which itself is weakly decentralized, because that kind of decentralized has the possibility of cheating (many People emphasize collateral, which is a guarantee that the cost of cheating is not the possibility of cheating).
Centralized blockchain applications:No matter how sophisticated smart contract development you seem to be, or use so-called blocks and chains, as long as there is centralized control of a certain link on the chain, it is centralized, and don’t just promote it as decentralized, such as Makerdao (Directly control the important parameters of the contract: price variables), and bZx, which claims to be able to freeze user assets, and various private chains, and even the distributed DPOS public chain that most nodes are in their own hands. These can only be said to be blockchain or smart contract applications, not decentralized systems, because their creators can artificially control the assets or important variables on the chain. Of course, in order to make this control less naked, it is generally declared I have used multi-signature or decentralized node arrangements. If these cannot be open, open source, and join without audit, they cannot be self-certified, so they are classified as centralized rather than weakly decentralized.
The first principle of decentralization is so important and simple, but no one in the industry seriously refines and calls on everyone to use it as a judgment standard, mainly because more and more project parties are carrying out various centralized operations, and some The so-called realists have adopted a compromise attitude, turning a blind eye to the decentralization of the project, and not classifying and standardizing it. This is a huge loss and consumption for the industry.
In fact, among all blockchain innovations, the truly subversive idea is decentralization. This is not only Satoshi Nakamoto's whimsical idea to solve the double-spend problem, but also the survival of a new technology network. The setting makes the pure technological creation have a self-evolving "life". The exploration in this direction has just begun, but we have easily moved towards eclecticism. This is lazy thinking when encountering difficulties and industry chaos. The speculative thinking below requires vigilance.
