Decentralisation is Real

1] Physical Energy Level

In its own “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”, a large group of people first of all depends on sources of energy: food, fuel, heat, electricity. Currently, both power generation and distribution are being decentralised. The number of plants in the US grew ~50% in one decade. Tesla’s roof tiles and e-cars selling electricity back to the network, Google’s grid, shale carbons, wind turbines coupled with local storage facilities, small transportable nuclear plants lower thresholds and move the industry towards decentralisation.

2] Security & Power Level

Safety mostly involves political power when we consider society at-large. Power systems are based on various combinations of ideology/religion, media/intellectual influence, brute (police) force, and monetary/currency emission power. The former three have been in an irreversible decline for decades. The number of states on Earth has been increasing for many years, adding to decentralisation. The control of money emission has been infiltrated by decentralisation too, blockchain wave being the latest example.

3] Communication Level

The third level in Maslow’s pyramid (translated from “self esteem and love” as implied for an individual) is already irreversibly decentralised, let not temporary Facebook-like oligopolies, ubiquitous surveillance, and unification of cultural templates fool you.

Decentralisation is Often Misunderstood

In common parlance, the vector to decentralisation is clear:

More nodes. Decentralisation is when there’s a growing number of participating nodes in an interconnected system maintained by constant resources. Like thirty governments participating in European governance instead of one emperor. More roads. Decentralisation is a change happening to a system which results in growing number of node-to-node connections. Like an ability to sell your photos to thousands of places online instead of few local magazines.

However, the definition of a node is often confusing.

Take, for example, “direct person-to-person payments”. How big is the issue? What does it really improve for you and for the entire economy if you or your business “become a primary node in the system”?

When you give your children some pocket money, when you borrow few bucks from a friend, when you send some money to your relative in Mexico — you are a “node”. But do we — personally each one of us — constitute the primary level of the economy network that needs to be improved through decentralisation? Probably not.

The relations network is built up at a higher level. While every energy producing wind turbine is a node in the decentralised electricity grid, not every business, less so an individual, deserves the right to be a node, to represent the economy at its foundational level.