Quote from: blablahblah on March 04, 2014, 06:11:35 PM

Quote from: AnonyMint on March 04, 2014, 04:59:39 PM

Now the (Dark) enlightenment pushes us from the order into the decentralized disorder (where in Shannon entropy disorder means maximizing the number of least probable possibilities i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom and diversity).

This is the pendulum of Contentionism that CoinCube and I have been theorizing about.

Except that your analogy is flawed, showing a flawed understanding of decentralisation on your part.

The canonical spelling according to Merriam-Webster and other prominent dictionaries is 'decentralization'.

Quote from: blablahblah on March 04, 2014, 06:11:35 PM

A far better analogy for "nodes of small independent currency producers and maintainers" would be atomised water droplets which tend to form clouds when there's enough of them.

...

Each droplet has some H2O molecules that are confined at a boundary between a 'soup' of high-entropy free floating H20 and the surrounding atmosphere. The tendency for each droplet to maximise its entropy is what is behind "surface tension". The droplets naturally pull themselves towards a spherical shape to minimise the number of molecules stuck on the surface, which maximises the droplet's overall degrees of freedom.

Indeed and it is analogous to what I wrote, wherein I said the degrees-of-freedom would increase by peeling away independent bottom-up actors from the top-down order, yet these actors would in of themselves show increasing top-down order e.g. a Benevolent Dictator For Life for an altcoin that kicks Bitcoin's sorry little ass. The reason for this is simple. The top-down socialism has maxed out on its ability to increase degrees-of-freedom by providing higher economies-of-scale for its constituent parts. The analogy is if all the world's water was aggregated, the surface area would be minimized but the capacity (i.e. possibilities) of the water to do useful work will have greatly diminished.

You've been reading my theory for several months and you still can't wrap your mind around a very simple and consistent concept.

Quote from: blablahblah on March 04, 2014, 06:11:35 PM

However, unless there's some repulsive force like an unbalanced electric charge pushing the droplets away from each other (as is likely the case with clouds), they will tend to merge. As the droplets merge, their entropy increases.

Earth's ecosystem is a great example of this, whereby nearly all of the water consists of liquid oceans, not clouds.

Yet the most productive work done by water (not other things in the water) is when it is peeled away for other possibilities.

We truthfully calculate the bath of the ocean provides immense degrees-of-freedom for the other things in the water, yet we don't find all the schools (traveling groups) of fish merged into one school. Ditto birds migrating. Etc.

Quote from: blablahblah on March 04, 2014, 06:11:35 PM

Now,

Quote

decentralized disorder (where in Shannon entropy disorder means maximizing the number of least probable possibilities i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom and diversity).

Can you see where you've been going wrong?
The decentralisation you seek is actually less diverse, not more. A cloud of water vapour has a far greater surface area and less degrees of freedom than an equivalent volume of ocean.

A droplet of water can't do much useful work. A single human can. The is exactly Contentionism in that structures oscillate between different balances of top-down and bottom-up order as they interact with the dynamic degrees-of-freedom in the environment. The human environment has radically changed because we invented the internet, which enables a single human to a lot more productive than in the agricultural or industrial age. For example, I all by myself programmed and marketed CoolPage.com (including the download web page editor with its one-click publishing to the free hosts of that era, e.g. Yahoo GeoCities, which was in some sense the first social network) in 1998 and obtained over a million users and 335,000 verified websites back when the internet was only about 100 million people. Before that, the most I had obtained was about 8,000 unit sales (maybe it was 30,000 including the European distributors I forget) of WordUp in the 1980s due to physical shipment of shrink wrapped software distribution.

Quote from: blablahblah on March 04, 2014, 06:11:35 PM

Of course I'm not suggesting that decentralised structures don't have their place, but your entropy argument is completely wrong.

The entropy of the water increases as the water molecules move closer together because the forces at the surface are reduced and so the molecules have greater degrees-of-freedom within the aggregate volume of the bath. The degrees-of-freedom for an individual molecule to fly off in any direction away from other molecules is out weighed by the fact that an individual molecule is essentially useless to its environment, thus water molecules have a very high surface tension (opportunity cost) to motivate them to form baths. However, as the baths become too large, the surface tension becomes very small per molecule capita in the bath volume, thus they have a motivation to exit the bath in groups in order to accomplish more useful work in the environment which is higher degrees-of-freedom overall.

This is precisely Contentionism. Entropy is relative like everything else in our universe. This is why sometimes a top-down order is more efficient than bottom-up chaos.