The inevitable commercialization of decentralized systems

Recently, several events happened to me, which prompted me to reflect on decentralized systems, which I wanted to share with you.

The first of them - I came across a new blog platform golos.io . This is “another” blockchain, the Russian-speaking heir to Steem . I will not go into the features of the interface, which is not too perfect yet, I will only note that next to each post there is a button for voting and numbers in rubles. It looks like this, that the author of the post gets the money. And it almost is, with some nuances. The idea is not new, but for the first time in runet is clothed in some convenient and relatively understandable form.
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It has everything - decentralization, lack of censorship and much more. But the main thing is not this, but what opens on the first page is the treasured tsiferki under the posts. In the thousands and even tens of thousands of rubles for the post. Any graphomaniac immediately lights up his eyes, he writes something (as a rule, a self-presentation article) and receives several hundreds of cherished rubles for it. All man on the hook. Somewhat later, it comes to the realization that in order to make money in this blockchain, one must be very productive, produce very high-quality or highly demanded content. A regular literate article can give him no more than a few dozen rubles. That's right, the economy has its own laws. And I would estimate this distribution by Pareto law, namely - 20% of authors receive 80% of the money.

But, nevertheless, the influx of new users to the platform does not dry out. Problem solved. Currency GOLOS is traded on several exchanges. Several dozen people from the top of the pyramid mine the main wealth, and the crowds of hamsters legitimize it. “Voluntarily and with songs!” (C).

The second point that has shaken my faith in humanity a bit is the recent installation of my BitMessage client. If you are interested in cryptography and everything connected with it, you probably heard it. In short, the bottom line is that it is a decentralized, anonymous, hung with any kind of buns protocol of communication through email and chat. He absorbed all the best and the like. It would seem that this is exactly what the doctor prescribed, especially after the Snowden revelations.

And what? For 2 or 3 hours of being online, my client did not connect to the network. And this, as I understand it, says that the number of its users is critically low.

We turn to the conclusions. We have a wonderful system for everyone, which solves a bunch of real useful tasks and which almost no one uses (correct me if I am mistaken or if I have incorrectly configured the client). And we have a bunch of cryptocurrencies, which, apart from the value of mining, do not carry any value in themselves, are a speculative tool and simply warm the environment with GPU exhaust. But, which in conditional “doing nothing” have some capitalization taken “out of thin air”.

Human nature is such that he believes in his exclusivity and has an indestructible craving for freebies. And the fact that you can turn on a computer and smoke a babmuk to earn some money pushes the masses exactly on this path, while more interesting, useful and convenient systems are being stalled.

For some reason, I have a steady impression that if you make a BitMessage fork, which will give a coin for each block found, and send a letter for the same coin + give rewards to network members for checking, then mayner crowds will appear on this network. If we develop this idea, I would suggest adding permanent storage of letters in the blockchain and the ability to transfer naminennye coins as an attachment to the letter.

But let's look at things more broadly. There are a lot of interesting solutions that are apparently afraid of commercialization. It seems to me that the key to popularity is commercialization, but decentralized. When the mass of financially interested users supports the popularity of the network. When the provision of its capacity for the needs of the entire network has a pronounced commercial value that can be cashed.