The combination of decentralization and power law is an interesting topic.
The motivation for decentralization is that most people don’t want to be bound by third parties, just because they don’t trust third parties. However, once the constraints are released, they will achieve what they call decentralization. The next thing is very interesting, they will be very happy. Quickly pick a third party they trust as a hub…
In any self-organizing network, decentralization and power law are a pair of contradictions.
All nodes have the intention of decentralization, but this is only their intention after they join the network. When they join the network, they must need some kind of reference , so that they can decide which existing node to link to, however This makes the power law popular. In other words, the more nodes are linked, the greater the probability that it will be linked by subsequent new nodes. The rich get richer and the poor stay poor. This is the Matthew effect.
We can observe this effect on Sina Weibo. Nowadays, Weibo has become a show for a few big stars. The less ordinary people pay attention, the less they have the desire to update. Celebrities are the opposite.
Let’s talk about Bitcoin mining again. In the paper, Satoshi Nakamoto emphasized that the consensus of Bitcoin is based on one CPU and one vote . Does your CPU still have the right to vote? The final say is concentrated in the so-called mining pools.
In response to this situation, anti-ASIC slogans have been put forward to take those custom expensive mining rigs out of the equation, which I didn't believe would be successful in the first place. If you trade space for time and destroy the ASIC centralized mining pool, there will still be another center. As long as the network is self-organized, there will inevitably be a center, no matter how strong everyone’s desire for decentralization is. Neither can change the fact of centralization.
The more you lack, the more you want to get it, so this is also decentralized, and that is also decentralized. I will tell you what is eternal decentralization, that is, the zero silence of the universe, when the entropy value is maximum. Every life, every thing that looks good to you, is a low-entropy body. What creates a low-entropy body is power law, not decentralization. For life, decentralization means death.
What governs our reality is the power law , and what governs our desires is decentralization , the binary confrontation between Zoroaster’s good gods and demons that lasts forever.