A recent and brief exchange on twitter triggered my need to share thoughts.
Goldmatters posted this statement which i strongly agree with
A peculiar criticism took my attention
It's not the first time i heard this specific denigratory argument about DAOs in general and Splinterlands in particular. I have strong feelings about this kind of ostracism, so i had to fact check him, and answered in a quite rude manner.
It was shameful behavior by me. And CaptainLoken doubled down on his position
What is so much wrong with Capt. Argument?
Well, the first and least important one is NUMBERS MATTERS, 40 is very different by 20 and very different by 100. It defines if there is a problem with centralization and quantifies it. Both things are then crucial to determine paths and tasks to reach the goal, in this case, a certain amount of decentralization.
The second point i have to share is the title of this post DECENTRALIZATION IS A PROCESS
Even if BTC maxi may disagree on that, the world is not black and white, things are not centralized or decentralized. There is a continuous spectrum from a very decentralized thing to a very centralized one. Moreover, phenomenons, communities, states, cryptos, and so on are not standing still at one point of this spectrum, they move.
Splinterlands, as an example, moved from being a very centralized environment when it was just matt and aggy, to be a little less centralized when they decided to hear the community. Then it continued to move and right now is one of the most (if not the most) decentralized videogame company in the world. And it still moves.
Is Splinterlands one of the most decentralized thing in the world?
Hell no!!! and probably it never will be. But we should compare spades to spades. Splinterlands is a videogame company, it's not BTC or ETH.
Having a couple of hundred people involved in the decision-making mechanism is huge for a company, even more, the DAO started few weeks ago, what numbers will we talk about in 3-5 years from now?
Going back to the numbers matters argument, in 2019 if i had the evil plan of stealing from the Splinterlands community i would have had accomplished 3 small tasks:
- make up a plan with some kind of fakenomycs to steal from players
- convince aggroed
- convince matt
today the same evil plan would have a lot more tasks. How many?
well current proposal count 150 M votes (more or less one third of the total voting power)
to reach that kind of voting power i need to gather up the top 76 stakeholders of SPS and get their loyal commitment to the cause. If one of them leaves i need to substitute him with more stakeholders of lower rank. Have u ever tried to get an agreement between 5 or more people about anything?
Final question:
Why this kind of criticism triggers me?
It is not logical, but it appears to be. It is counterfactual but it masks behind some mispresented numbers. When u respond to that kind of argument it easily seems that you are calling the advocate a moron (sometimes u do, but not always), and that creates polarization. After that, when someone come up with a new and good argument against the thing that was attacked the minute before the new and legit attacker needs to cope with the polarization wall that has just been raised. This stuff weakens mankind.