Why can’t it shift to a donation model (a la Monero) when the corporation exits. The key developers who were employees of the corporation, then continue to work for donations (or because they have so many tokens).

One of the key aspects is that the decentralized ledger could possibly be designed such that it can be upgraded by independent (even contending) groups without requiring a hard fork and without needing a significant consensus. IOW, the ledger would be designed so that it can run multiple “forks” simultaneously. The technological discussion of that is out-of-scope for this thread.


It may be the revenue and onboarding model that is the fundamental hindrance. If there is so much revenue to be made on building “apps”, then competition should take care of the problem, presuming the ledger itself is capable. DPoS is permissioned, centralized control, which is another problem because it has to be paid for without a free market pricing. So there is a prisoner’s dilemma amongst the whales in terms of where the profit in the system is.

Daniel Larimer was apparently incentized to exit Steem in a rush and go take raid the ETH cookie jar. Very lucrative opportunity costs compete (but IMO I doubt they’re correctly valuing the long-tail legal risk of launching ICOs).

I do not think centralized systems can scale politically-economically, without being taken over by a dictator.

Solving the decentralization problem of ledgers I believe remains the fundamental challenge. DPoS sort of solves scaling in the way Facebook or Visa solves scaling. But that is not very interesting in terms of a paradigm shit of the Internet. I claim (as probably all of us here do) that the Internet need a decentralized, permissionless protocol for decentralized ledgers, analogous to TCP/IP for decentralized networks. Proof-of-work fits except it has been modeled in research that incentives don’t achieve consensus any more when transaction fees exceed protocol block reward, and once that is fully distilled it (even for Monero it) comes out that oligarchy is the only way proof-of-work continues to function as it scales up economically (even if block size remains 1MB, increased, or adaptive). Oligarchies aren’t very interesting as that is the problem we’re trying to fix on the Internet with centralized ledgers that currently dominate.


So I am outlining some paradigm shifts above that I posit are required. And you noted your doubt is contingent on the current state of the platform. So I guess what must come next is experimentation.