Decentralization

Cryptocurrency provides economic incentives to the decentralized computer we call blockchain and is inseparable from the technology that blockchain is empowered with. Everyone who says otherwise is just protecting outdated values for their own benefit. The reason for this inseparability is the “decentralization” property of the system. The whole raison d'être of distributed computer technology is its ability to be run by parties which do not need to trust each other. Please note that the emphasis is not on “do not trust” but on “do not need to trust.” This is an important and powerful concept. There is already technology which can run distributed systems. These systems can scale, they have sharding, consensus, advanced databases, programming languages, they are proven by many years in production to deliver robust performance. There is just one little thing, one detail, one tiny principle you need to obey in order to use them: you must trust someone who runs them.

That trust assumption is how we, as a human race, surrendered our freedom to a few tech corporations and a handful of government organisations around the world. This trust assumption is now almost unilaterally accepted by people as something mandatory to protect them, to provide security guarantees, economy of scale, easy to use interfaces, usability, utility and so on. Let’s call them the conveniences of surrender. The evil gifts.

The inability as a group to protect ourselves which leads to a delegation of power is a compromise we make with our liberal values. As human beings following the laws of history, any time and every time we have a technical ability to end such compromise — we must.

Mr. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first chess world champion and the founding father of chess theory, has formulated one of the important strategic principles — if a player gains a positional advantage over another, it must attack to win. Our life is no chess game, so the price we pay for losing could be catastrophic.

One of the founding fathers of the United States of America and its second president John Adams, stated: “Our Consolation must be this, my dear, that Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.”

Or if one prefers George Orwell's shorter version: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” Over 70 years later, we couldn't be any closer to 1984.

Fortunately, Satoshi Nakamoto invented the economic incentives and technology for running a decentralized computer network. Such a supposedly simple idea gave human individuals an advantage in the game against a human collective. Ethereum has invented turing complete-programming for it and Everscale has invented its operating system. The Operating System of Freedom, that is. The tool to fight a Borg within us, the conveniences of surrender, the evil gifts.