1/ Tell me why I’m wrong: “Platform-grade” censorship resistance isn’t a real thing.
The “platform-grade” narrative is new and in vogue—and should be heavily scrutinized.
Blog post here (& summarized below): medium.com/@Bitcom21/the-…
The “platform-grade” narrative is new and in vogue—and should be heavily scrutinized.
Blog post here (& summarized below): medium.com/@Bitcom21/the-…
2/ First, some background: this narrative starts from a reasonable premise that not all use cases require the same level of security and therefore some chains (e.g. EOS) can compromise on decentralization to offer greater throughput and/or functionality. That’s reasonable.
3/ According to the narrative, Bitcoin’s level of decentralization and “sovereign-grade” censorship resistance is overkill for some use-cases—and these use-cases only need a lesser degree of censorship resistance that has been dubbed “platform-grade”.
4/ The problem that said “platform-grade” chains attempt to solve is to provide stronger assurances to developers than centralized tech platforms (e.g. FB or Apple)—which have power & ability to change rules and consequently destroy businesses built on top of them.
5/ The narrative continues that if 3.0 smart contract platforms can provide *stronger assurances*, developers will be more inclined to build on them and investors more inclined to invest in them.
6/ At highest level, my concern with this narrative is that these platforms simply *can’t* offer meaningfully stronger assurances without being highly decentralized —that, absent a central authority, high degrees of decentralization are necessary to offer strong assurances
7/ More specifically, my issues with the “platform-grade” narrative and how these “strong assurances” will be tested (and violated) are two-fold:
8/ First, permissionless platforms inevitably demand sovereign-grade censorship resistance because someone *will* build a dApp that draws the ire of nation-states (e.g. money laundering dApp, confidential documents dApp, etc) and therefore “platform grade” will be insufficient.
9/ Or, second, if not truly permissionless (not allowing those types of dApps) then these platforms will trend toward the same outcome as today’s centralized platform but with less efficient infrastructure.
10/ If it’s the latter (not truly permissionless) and some things will be allowed while others aren’t, then the *exact same* social and economic pressures that drive centralized platforms to censor certain activities & users also apply to these “3.0” platforms…
11/ If so, then we should expect the result to be substantially the same as what we see on centralized platforms except that these new “3.0” platforms use a fundamentally less efficient infrastructure than their centralized counterparts. If so, what have we gained?
12/ Instead, I’m most optimistic that highly decentralized networks will provide the robust foundation on top of which we can realize the efficiencies of centralization in higher layers — should it be desired.
13/ For more about the value of hard-promises in a highly-decentralized network and how we can build “soft-promises” & centralization in higher layers, I highly recommend this talk by Andreas Antonopoulos from the SF Bitcoin meetup:
