Notes on Decentralization
Although a crypto maximalist would always argue for a fully decentralised dApp and organisation implementing it, the use case for fully decentralised experiences and organisations is limited in practice and some decentralised design decisions will harm the system itself. What is therefore desired are partially decentralised dApps that can benefit from the service performance and quality of distributed and centralised systems, which are governed by and the trust of decentralised systems.
For example, there can be thousands of processors in the world handling millions of lines of game data at the same time. To handle these volumes over a blockchain is extremely costly - and we are not even talking about cloud gaming. So while blockchain is an important technology for handling trust between transactions and the registration of ownership, most game data is just concerned with the game itself and processing this on the blockchain provides no utility to anyone.
Other concerns are security and privacy; while blockchains provide a good solution to combat man-in-the-middle attacks, they protect little against other forms of attacks, like social engineering, malicious smart contracts and pump and dumps. Furthermore, blockchains are powerful at archiving public data, yet lack the flexibility to change, upgrade or privatise it - introducing future design challenges such as with virtual land and real estate.
In some cases, the lack of flexibility is ideal for archiving data: assets stored on decentralised content delivery networks such as Pinata and Arweave cannot be removed unless the network itself is destroyed - providing major advantages in terms of archiving and storing data. Coupled with smart contracts this allows for business cases that benefit Creators without the involvement of any intermediaries.
A major advantage of the blockchain is the tokenization of everything; communities can partake in the ownership of (parts of) the system itself, and by extension can get the rights to govern it via a DAO, allowing for completely different models of operation. By extension, new technologies can multiply the value of these tokens on the chain. For every dApp added to the chain, e.g. new wallets, exchanges, and launchpads, the total value of all tokens on the chain is benefited.
Therefore, in all design decisions, we carefully craft which aspects of the infrastructure need to be handled on decentralised networks in order to have maximum value for all stakeholders.
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