Delayering Decentralization One Center at a Time

Transcript

hey william we're live great hello everybody i'm william mugaya happy to be here for the next 15 minutes so the premise of my talk is that if we want to change the world with blockchain technology we need to think of it in multi-dimensional terms beyond just thinking that blockchain technology is an enabler of decentralized applications with a lot of users so there is a lot more to blockchain technology than just

being that most of us here are involved in dapps and applications and i want us to think a bit more than that so what i'm going to do in the next few minutes is talk about a new paradigm that is moralistic uh and presented to g of sectors it's not just technology we know that technology affects business but how about to say about the global setting specifically and there are many areas each one of them that blockchain technology has a big impact in in knocking in changing in more fundamental ways

so let's think about that i've been researching the topic of this centralization for a number of years obviously uh bitcoin ethereum uh many peer-to-peer protocols have accelerated what can do uh with decentralization and getting us closer to decentralization the question is what what centers look like if they were decentralized most of the world today is still run by centers and this decentralization can happen completely

or can be partially it could have been gradually it could happen slowly and how do we get there that is a big question that we are all asking ourselves everybody that's involved as builder as a career as entrepreneur do we attack centers or do we distract them and the playbook is known uh many of you that are entrepreneurs decentralization you don't install decentralization installment center that you call this centralization you need a platform a protocol

system and then you let that network flourish and the central attention is now the activity between users and you build your business model your organization model around that and i wrote this uh four instagram four years ago in my in my book the business blockchain so that ebook has not changed and this is what most of you are today and the question is how how do we how do we disrupt those centers um how do we attack centers well attack centers

because centers are very resilient and they don't want to change and if you think that you have something that is better because speaking technology it is not good enough because better is not a user acquisition strategy which means that if you tell them that something is is better and now and you need to go and try i am likely not going to try something because it's bad the psychology of change is that users are risk averse in the domain of gains but users are more people think of people not just

users people are more risk seeking in the domain of processes which means that if you had data lost or somebody stole your information from a particular system for sure you would be inside to make a change because you were hit you were you had a pain so i'm going to change if i have pain but if you uh come tell me well this is better i'm not going to because i'm happy more people are happy with what they have and unfortunately only disasters and accidents or pain

will make users change and try something new because the value proposition has to be a lot more than just better so how do you bring these sterilization and apps to the mainstream um some of you are thinking of d5 which is the biggest uh trend today that's gaining a lot of traction and one of the questions is how do we bring these fights to the mainstream and some of you may think well how about either user experience how many of you say well yeah we need better better user experience but do you really think that

a better user experience is all that's necessary to bring decentralized applications into the mainstream the better user experience is is necessary but it is not sufficient to guess the decentralization with more users uh look at define there are a lot of beautiful d5 apps uh smart at on and others that have nailed the user experience but it is still not comprehensible for the mainstream market so in my mind what we for is education we need to educate the market the

greater market so that they can move to the small niches let's take the taos which are the ultimate in this actualization if you look at what can you do today if you hover down or you've folded it down and any one of these d5 protocols have a form of of doubt so what can you do you can pay for memberships you can say i own so many tokens therefore i am a member you can vote on proposals on decisions you can submit proposals you can debate them on this cohort diagram whatever chat

rooms and forums exist and you can predict prediction markets part of that now and you can unfunded projects of course if the votes go through something is approved automatically but be happy that that's all we can do i think this is barely scratching the surface the potential is let's say voting for example everybody is all focused on voting because that's the best enabling thing in dallas and sometimes votes are done and they result in good decisions it's most businesses if if most

decisions were made devoted businesses would make a lot of bad decisions hopefully they're not always the best way to make decisions although in many cases they do lead to something if it was delayed enough and if democracy runs well in the con of government and now we talk about briefly the fact that how can we apply what we have learned in terms of the governance of blockchains how can we apply that to the burns by blockchain what have we learned in terms of governance of blockchain we know all about the properties

of uh governance in blockchains of blockchains illegal consensus is about transparency communities always first there's frequent voting there is real time change if something doesn't work it can change in many hours days it doesn't take forever and the question here how can we apply now these constructs to businesses and how can we apply them that is the key question here going forward how do we networking technology go beyond just the technology sector itself of course democratic voting is great but only if you have the right democracy

if the right system is in place to start with and bad governance as we all know came to the disasters in the case of the blockchain world we have our own base of a disaster that happened a few years ago in the case of ethereum and it was lessened for the whole blockchain industry that was a disaster and you could say well is it because of that governance or is it because of the bad contract that's smart contract am i asked to be at the chicken egg question maybe that governance led to having a bad smart contract and that's what you will think about

uh more profoundly here's another example of bad governance that can be disastrous government this picture some of you may recall last week it's just not from world war ii this is the last week in lebanon big disaster calls from governance negligence governance and competency that led to the explosion of 2 700 tons of ammonium nitrate probably the large explosion since world war ii that is bad guys that little disasters were people get killed can lead to financial and lives

in room we don't want to go there but there's a lot we can learn from blockchain inspired comments and the question to you is can and could blockchain inspire governance lead to a better to better governments for the world this is the list of these countries or locations where the majority of people are not satisfied with their governments yet they cannot implement change so easily in some cases they select democracy but it's not the right kind of democracy democracy cannot if democracy cannot make change it's not hypocrisy

why and that's the question we need to uh whatever is trying to improve with the blockchain and this is where the lessons are we want to improve decision making we're going to improve control accountability innovation inclusion wealth distribution broader benefits to everybody transaction costs freedom all of these not just apply for the blockchain they should apply for a number of other sectors of technology in business in society in the world a lot of these centers are ready to be knocked off and ready to be challenged

and now the errors in red are the ones that we really have made progress in of course technology we talk about distributed and decentral technology we are on the way to having more day ownership we are on the way to adding more central life to the storage of having uncensorable content of having decentralized computing flat counter evolution the financial sector is being challenged is being reconstructed because of the centralized finance these are the light houses this is a guide post that we

should keep in mind but there should be more today cryptocurrency blockchain technology they are the best examples you have and these are not they are not looking for sympathy or validation from existing centers players that i are not going to the banks and asking them can we do that they're just doing it blockchain technology is not going to the database administrator saying can we use your case i want to put it in this new ledger instead of a database no we're doing it cryptocurrency is not begging the central bankers to

change the policies it's happening it's already out there and the question is what sectors are next the thing with defy is that it has something atomic it's cryptocurrency and in my opinion each one of these other sectors have to have something atomics that is native to their own sector for them to be disrupted and that is really the promise of blockchain one of them one by one what will be the native thing that will disrupt this technology this sector and maybe the next thing is work the promise of decentralized ownership where you can earn tokens you can earn

currency based on work you've done and you're not just promised a reward maybe you promised some ownership that could change things the blockchain technology industry most of you are in it you have to keep doing what you're doing to inspire the other sectors to adopt to adapt and get inspired by what the blockchain can enable and really again you cannot go and knock on these centers because it's difficult to go head-on and change the centers we have to create new systems outside of the centers to quote buckminster fuller

you have to change things by fighting the existing reality to change something you build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete that is what tifa is doing it is still small but it is growing it is going to make the current system obsolete cryptocurrency is going to make the current monetary systems obsolete gradually and that is really the promise of the blockchain so if we want to change the world our work world is barely getting started in in the blockchain thank you you