Babbitt Column | Blockchain Simulates Capitalism, Not Democracy-On Steemit Control

On February 14, 2020, Sun Yuchen announced the marriage of Tron and Steemit on Valentine's Day, and Tron acquired Steem lnc. Sun thus obtained 65 million Steem voting rights.

After 10 days, a soft fork appeared on the Steemit chain, freezing 65 million voting rights Sun obtained. The Steem team claims to be worried that Sun could cause chaos and initiated a soft fork to eliminate the impact.

The next few days, in early March, Sun Lianhe Bin’an and other large exchanges successfully exchanged several super nodes through voting, and then used a fork to restore their voting rights.

In this case, Ethereum's V God tweeted and scolded the exchange as a bribe election, and Binance CZ also pleaded guilty, claiming to cancel the ticket. Aroused the collective ridicule of the decision-making mechanism of DPOS in the currency circle, and collectively attacked the exchange to use users' coins to do evil. Proponents of PoW have also come forward to claim that PoW is better than PoS, because no currency misappropriation by the exchange will cause the decision-making mechanism to be represented.

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The Steemit incident I saw has fully demonstrated that the blockchain is not a simulated democratic mechanism. All those who accuse the DPOS mechanism of failure are not valid, and the accusation of V God is also wrong. On the contrary, this matter fully illustrates that the bottom layer of the blockchain consensus mechanism is simulated capitalism, and capitalism should have more money than anyone else.

The decentralized nature of the blockchain has been associated with democracy by a large number of people and has endowed noble value. But I think these people are fantasy.

Beginning with the "1 CPU 1 Vote" mentioned in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, voting was endowed with sacred power by the currency circle and various associations until the development of the imaginary democratic consensus mechanism of the currency circle. The currency circle has attacked a series of normal business practices with democracy, with three well-known accusations. The first is the commercial cooperation between PoW's mining pools and miners, accused of mining pools hijacking the voting rights of miners; the second is the commercial cooperation between exchanges and users in DPoS (PoS can also be) coins, accused of being exchanges Stealing users' coins to vote; and the super nodes in DPoS distributed dividends to voting users, accused of bribery.

Obviously it is a normal and reasonable business cooperation relationship between you and me, which has been accused of no reason. This is evidence that the democratic fantasy has persecuted the free market and businessmen.

Democracy is a good thing, but it requires a lot of conditions, and the blockchain cannot completely simulate these conditions. Democracy born in ancient Greece has been considered a bad thing for thousands of years. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, to the 19th century, democracy was regarded as mob politics, which was watched by the West for more than 2,000 years as a negative teaching material. In the 19th century, the saltwater democracy turned and became the standard model of Western politics. There are many prerequisites behind the success of democracy. Otherwise, it will not be watched by the West for more than 2,000 years.

The basic condition for the success of democracy is equality, and everyone is politically equal. If there is inequality, people are divided into high and low, and high people must rule low. Only when everyone is equal can it happen that everyone decides how to distribute benefits and responsibilities.

The first thing that the blockchain governs is not people, but computer resources and coins. Computer resources and coins are associated with people, but this is ten thousand miles away from what people in the world have in terms of political statistics. Everyone is equal when it comes to yarn.

People participating in the blockchain are absolutely unequal in all dimensions from ability, wealth, cognition, influence, and interest. The currency of each unit under the blockchain governance is equal.

Under the PoW consensus mechanism, the interests of the currency holders and the interests of the mining machine are not the same. Do you let the miners and the currency owners speak of equality? Think beauty. The interests of Tunbian people, speculators, mining machines, mining pools, and developers are all different. Even in the case of rising or falling prices, they all have different benefits.

It is also the same under the DPOS mechanism. As a centralized place for depositing money, the exchange is completely different from the interests of the user. If you think of equality, you can only compromise with each other to reach a certain equilibrium.

The most important point in the design of the democratic system is that any power has boundaries. The power of the people also has boundaries. Otherwise, the American people would definitely vote to divide Bill Gates' money. The president, the parliament, and the supreme law, all their powers have borders. They restrict each other, and no one can completely decide who. Absolute power leads to absolute corruption, which is true for any country in any field.

Just last month, because of the new crown virus, a community property in a city in China held a democratic vote, allowing all residents in the community to vote on whether to ban doctors and nurses in the community from returning to their own houses. The result turned out to be a ban. If there is no other mechanism, the police may not be able to bury the doctors and nurses in this community.

In the design of the blockchain, one kind of power is absolute power, which is a 51% attack. What prevents this kind of power is not the design of the system. It is not about democracy being useful, but about benefits. When you launch a 51% attack, your interests are compromised. This is the restriction.

In contrast, the restrictive power of democracy is like this. I elected a bad president. I will choose you again. After being bullied by the president for four years, the people must recognize that who made you blind four years ago. Can the blockchain do this? A group of members was selected, and then the members of the group confiscated all the users' coins. What did the users use to choose them?

Just like the Steemit community freezes Sun Yuchen's voting right, which is a reasonable and legal governance behavior? This is robbing. If there is no interest restriction, the Steemit community must have directly destroyed Sun's coin.

At the core of the functioning of democratic institutions is representation. This is why the politics of any democratic country is necessarily the competition of political parties. Political parties are known as the representatives of the people and perform political operations on behalf of the people. In modern countries, there is no way for people to directly participate in politics. Millions, tens, millions, and hundreds of millions of people directly decide how to collect taxes and how to divide the money.

The operation of the blockchain is very supportive of the representative system. PoW has mining pools to represent miners, and PoS has exchanges to represent users. This was originally a normal behavior, but people who deified decentralization into democracy, such as God V, have to say that this is a failure of blockchain governance.

The purpose of decentralization of the blockchain is not to achieve democracy, but to survive. With decentralization, a single point of failure will not cause the system to fail. External violence can strike a single central point, but as long as they can't eliminate all the central points at the same time, the blockchain system will not fail. This is the decentralized soul.

Everywhere, blockchain is not simulating democracy. Blockchain is the capitalist system. Whoever has the most money has the final say. Everyone is a businessman. Whoever steals my money and who I work hard for. What is less politically correct? Everyone fights for strength and games, not everyone is equal by God.

Author: Huang Shiliang

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