Decentralization is one of those feel-good ideas that most people don't stop to think about how much efforts is required to make it work!
The central challenge of decentralization is making individual self-interest point in the same direction as collective welfare.
You want people to act in a way that serves everyone whilst simultaneously serving themselves.
It's harder than people make it out to be.
How do you convince people to protect billions in value just so they can earn a few thousand.
Doesn't really seem like a fair trade does it?
It's not
What is demanded is generally more than what is given. As a result, something else must exist to ensure that regardless, the system can achieve some reasonable distribution.
That something else is the opposite factor to incentives, penalties.
If a person tries to steal the billions he's supposed to protect, he loses millions.
Essentially, the system is structured to reward thousands to distributed participants to secure billions, whilst the individuals risk losing millions if they attack the system.
Pretty balanced right?
Not necessarily
The above statements just assumes that there's not just billions waiting to be secured, and that there's also people with millions to stake, and also that there's thousands somewhere to issue as rewards.
Generally, most of these things don't exist at the early stages of blockchains, effectively demanding that initial incentives design and roll-out must be structured to achieve meaningful decentralization that can self-sustain.
The hard part
The roll-out is the hardest phase for any blockchain or project.
This impacts the future of it all.
Poorly planned or executed roll-outs could cause projects to never achieve decentralization.
So again, it's rather comical that we often don't look at the efforts required to build truly decentralized economies.
Smart incentive structures and sustainable economic systems are required to achieve provable decentralization. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we'd come to terms with what needs to be done to change the realities of most crypto projects today.