As Quai continues to grow and more and more individuals garner interest, it becomes apparent that the multi-chain architecture, PoW2.0, and Quai’s scalable abilities a clear attention-grabbers.
However, I believe it’s safe to say the decentralization narrative is a harder sell regardless of the project. Most recently, it’s been a bit easier to use the Canadian Trucker incident, CEX issues/FTX’s collapse, and Solana’s validators going down as clear indicators of centralization downsides.
Yet, I’m still very curious if anyone has any unique takes on how to effectively communicate the value of decentralization to a layman, and any takes on the most important components of decentralization.
Imagine you are a young kid without a job, and you must ask your parents for money any time you want something. Your parents are a centralized gateway for you to access money. The downsides of this are, you only have access to money if they grant you access. If they are unavailable, you cannot get money from them to purchase what you want. If they do not like how you spend the money, they will not give you any. Your freedom to do anything which requires money, is completely dependent on your parents availability & consent.
Now, imagine you get a little older and realize the ability to earn money for yourself. Perhaps through chores/tasks for family/friends, perhaps you get a part time job after school, whatever. Suddenly you have new freedoms. You have your money, even if your parents are unavailable. You can buy what you want without asking your parents permission. You can work multiple jobs or do chores for multiple neighbors, so that if any one revenue stream fails, you have fall-backs. All of this is decentralization. You are no longer dependent on one person to give you access to money and approve how you use it. Decentralization has empowered you, as a kid, and given you freedom you didn’t know you were missing.
Many people can relate to this scenario. Most laymen will have had some similar transition in their childhood. Most people have experienced the empowerment of decentralization, without recognizing it for what it was.
I think this is a great topic to discuss, especially with how hard we’re pushing decentralization at Quai. The phrase has become overused now, but in my opinion still rings true: decentralization doesn’t matter until it does.
It’s only when centralized forces act maliciously or fail that there is widespread exploration of alternatives. It took the British Government acting maliciously for a more decentralized method of governance to be birthed from the American Revolution. It took the 2008 financial crisis for the creation of a more decentralized form of money. Similarly and unfortunately, I believe it will take a more severe failure of centralized money to spur the adoption of the decentralized alternative.
There is actually a very simple way to sell decentralization. Referring to it as reliability. Samsung was going to integrate Solana into Samsung pay, however, because Solana was so unreliable Samsung stopped the effort. If there are going to be real payment systems built on crypto they must have high degrees of reliability worldwide which decentralized systems such as Bitcoin and PoW Ethereum demonstrated. Quai will have this intrinsic reliability but also offer the throughput for practicality.