To talk about decentralization I suppose it’s good to first point out that generally centralized systems are vulnerable, as they present themselves as single points of failure, they are also prone to corruption by the people running them, which end up abusing those that depend on them. Think big governments, autocrat dictators in Latin America and Africa, telecommunication monopolies/oligopolies, and federal banks with arbitrary interventionist policies, etc, etc. The problem is lack of freedom, and the bigger a centralized system becomes, the higher the risks and the more devastating the outcomes when faced with failure.

Luckily we have the Internet, designed to be decentralized by arpanet to survive as a communications network in the event of war, over the decades evolved to survive and thrive for purposes unimagined. Like any good decentralized software, it only gets stronger after it’s attacked, it repairs itself and becomes invulnerable to the same threat, decentralized computer communication networks are not just robust, they are what Taleb calls “Anti-fragile”.

We’ve all witnessed how decentralized file sharing has lead the way (with much controversy) for changes in the world of media-entertainment, and how we went from simple pseudo-centralized file-sharing networks (Napster) to next generation purely decentralized file sharing networks like BitTorrent and others, now virtually indestructible and getting stronger with each update.

Next time you are sitting in traffic, think that you are probably the victim of a centralized roadway design that has made every vehicle flow through a serial channel, if the system were decentralized you’d have a multitude of options to flow through the network and get to your destination without any delays, with decentralization you have freedom of choice, and that freedom enables every participant to move faster, more efficiently.

Decentralized systems have no place for bottlenecks, bureaucracy, or a few holding all the power, decentralization empowers the many with freedom to participate in ways that otherwise would be unimaginable.

Even centralized systems built atop of the decentralized Internet have brought forth change of epic proportions, think of the power of YouTube and how it leveled the playing field for many content producers, however, being a centralized system, it’s still bound by regulations and corporate agendas that hinder it from leveling the playing field for everyone, not all legal content can be shared on YouTube, there’s a lot that has been censored and will be censored for many reasons, moral police, political censorship, etc. Decentralization for media sharing still has a job to do in the world.

Another centralized system built atop of a decentralized internet is another Google powerhouse: Google Adsense/Adwords, it completely changed the way companies advertise, without the internet it couldn’t have possibly be built.

This system serves as an automated broker that has enabled millions of businesses to advertise with budgets that would’ve never been considered by the old advertising business models on which one guy on a marketing agency would use his rolodex to call up rich companies and then place the ads on rich publisher’s ad-space. Now we have a long tail of advertisers showing ads to a long tail of consumers it has made Google mountains of money, however, it’s still a centralized system which has brought forth an advertising monopoly on the internet, Google has the best inventory, Google pretty much sets the prices and the rules, and they’ve become bullies that dictate the norms of online advertising for many, if those rules change and your business depends on it, your ads can all of a sudden be rejected, your account could be closed and you have only a tiny little textbox to appeal your case…

You can imagine what awaits for the online advertisement industry in my vision of decentralization, an advertisement marketplace without intermediaries taking an arbitrary cut and dictating the rules of who and what can be advertised, whatever the Google’s and other ad-networks are keeping as profit, this will be the immediate efficiency to be shown by the decentralized counterparty the minute it arrives, bringing advertisement costs down, and bringing together even longer tails of advertisers and publishers from all parts of the world, getting paid instantly on Bitcoin (no more 45 days waiting for your payments.)

My vision of decentralization tells me that everything that can be decentralized, will be decentralized.

The invention of the Blockchain technology by Satoshi Nakamoto has been the trigger for a peer to peer renaissance, during the last 10 years or so there have been great developments in the areas of peer to peer networks as well as all sorts of online products that have worked well for developed countries, but even though we’ve seen tremendous growth rates in the numbers of users joining the Internet in emerging regions, like Latin America, it hasn’t been easy to monetize in those places.

In my opinion, Bitcoin has done already the hardest decentralization challenge of all, it’s decentralized money, it’s decentralized banking, it’s a decentralized payment network, it’s a decentralized commodity, and it is the missing piece to not just finally monetize those emerging nations, but it will enable those emerging nation entrepreneurs to monetize us in the developed world… it levels the playing field.

So, looking at Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerated Returns, it is our duty to build upon Bitcoin so that people can use it, the bitcoins in our digital wallets are only as valuable as what they can buy and do for us, the more we can build to make Bitcoin useful, the more valuable it will become.

For the longest time some of us on the peer to peer file sharing community thought that if people could trade files in p2p fashion, they could also trade digital goods, but we didn’t have a way to provide our users with a globally available and free payment network, Bitcoin came to fill that need and now the pieces are there not just to transform decentralize ecommerce, we now have the building blocks to transform commerce as a whole.

People world wide have been repurposing social networks like Twitter and Facebook to buy/sell products and services, most likely because these are the networks they know can connect them to the largest amount of people, they’re looking to expand their commercial reach, I see this organic hacks as proof that there’s a growing need to connect people not just for sharing baby pictures and squashing candies, but for something more useful to billions of people, trade creates empathy and peace, trade creates jobs, independence and freedom.

Imagine everyone you see out there on the street, a few years from now being able to directly trade with one another, no more information monopolies by middlemen after middlemen making trade inneficient, imagine having a global network in which any two participants can find each other, where no institution can censor who gets to find who, imagine what will happen when retailers can go directly to the sources with a simple search, what happens to huge wholesale middlemen like Costco (which charge yearly fees and only accept one kind of credit card for electronic payments, no more arbitrary rules based on centralized interests), imagine how efficient and direct trade will bring costs across all industries down when you also get rid of currency exchange innefficiencies, imagine what this network does for local trade and global trade.

These are the reasons why I’ve joined OpenBazaar. A decentralized trading network which builds upon decentralized Bitcoin will have a compound exponential value-creating effect, and I hope that OpenBazaar will be a platform so that others can build on top of, so that people and systems can trade with one another in ways unimaginable to us right now.