What is "decentralization" worth?

As I said in a previous post on my "experimental account", I am studying toward a Master's degree in EU Law (and got my first year French diploma of "Maîtrise")

In the second year, we had two lectures on "EU Digital Transformation: Regulation vs. Technology", one with the Programme's Director, Godefroy de Moncuit, the second with Prof. Bruno Deffains

For additional readings on the topic of blockchain and law, we were recommended The Network Law review which listed in its recommendations an older blog post from Vitalik, "The meaning of decentralization"

_{On a side note, it's astonishing that Vitalik's Medium blog only has 50K subscribers as of 2022. I would have expected ten times that, and only goes to show how early we are.}

Vitalik analyses different meanings of the term "decentralization" and why decentralization might be desirable. However, he also points out the drawbacks of decentralisation.

Indeed, decentralization is not an unmitigated good but rather presents us with important trade-offs.

Vitalik talks about "good cordination" (for getting good things done as a team) and "bad coordination" (ie collusion) for doing bad things:

However, this presents a fundamental paradox. Many communities, including Ethereum’s, are often praised for having a strong community spirit and being able to coordinate quickly on implementing, releasing and activating a hard fork to fix denial-of-service issues in the protocol within six days. But how can we foster and improve this good kind of coordination, but at the same time prevent “bad coordination” that consists of miners trying to screw everyone else over by repeatedly coordinating 51% attacks?

He opines that this paradox cannot be solved by economics and technology only and is basically a social challenge.

In my previous post, "Hive: waiting for Ryoshi", I've argued that the past years have proven that there is at least one social solution to this challenge: the existence of a strong leader acting as the "focal point" for the community

Atahive

I'm not Turkish but I've learned enough history to know that Mustafa Kemal is considered the creator of modern Turkey and has been called "Atatürk" - the father of the Turks.

The reason Hive lingers at these price levels is the inherent contradiction between having a strong, father-like, charismatic figure for people to follow and being "decentralized".

What I'm saying is that decentralized means

1. "censorship resistant", and that makes sense when there is indeed a risk someone will come to censor you.
2. but it also means unruly, without direction, chaotic and disorganised. It's hard to impossible to follow something that moves chaotically.

Decentralization is thus not only "censorship resistance" but also chaos. Or, put differently, it is "censorship-resistant through chaos"

You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can fake decentralization (like Ethereum) and have a high market capitalization because you take purposeful, directed actions which people can "read" and get attracted to. Or you can have real decentralization (like Hive) but then you are condemned to low market cap because to an outside observer you appear unruly and chaotic and "unreadable".

It's a hard trade-off to swallow. I lean toward being decentralized at technological and economic levels but becoming socially centralized. I hope an "Atahive" will raise and federate the many talented people gravitating around this platform and create "the modern Hive".