Community Forks - Theory vs. Practice

Community Forks due to centralization

You'll hear the term "community fork" more and more as we move to a more authentic version of web 3. We're witnessing the beginning of the great "centralization purge" as regulations, or even large, powerful entities try to squeeze centralized pain points forcing the organic part of the community to "fork away."

"You, what do you own the world? How do you own disorder?" - soad.

Moving from web 2 to web 3.

Web 3 is the concept of owning your account, data, and digital assets without a middleperson—direct ownership. The token side has led many investors, who may not understand the underlining value set that web 3 brings, which leads to them speculating on anything and everything with a token. This leads to the rise of premines, greed, and leaving founders with disproportionate control over their blockchains; billions have been made in a very short time.

A blockchain is similar to a child. You must let your child "leave the nest," or you risk suffocating the child. To try and control every aspect of what you create leads to your creation dying or defying you.

Bitcoin is much more than just a blockchain, technology-wise but also ideologically. Bitcoin was the origin of web 3 from a creation standpoint. The founder(s) created a revolutionary technology that could have made the creator(s) wealthy. To build it, give it away for free, then walk away with seemingly no financial benefits is a once and a lifetime moment. The way Bitcoin was created gave birth to the idea of digital decentralization, censorship-resistance of one's assets, sovereignty from policymakers who can dilute currencies on a whim. It gave birth to something that we truly own, and the network's gamification allows it so that no one can take over the network in a meaningful way.

Since Bitcoins inception, there were a few who have tried to walk in its footsteps. But none came close—premines have thus far flourished, allowing overly centralized network control and figureheads who haven't relinquished power but have doubled down. The spirit turned into an investment, toxicity for a buck. Since Bitcoin has small blocks and low transactions per second, web 3 needs a decentralized account layer to communicate with all of web 3.

We are far past relying on a anonymous superhero to save the day; there will never be another satoshi. However, community forks can fork out centralized control of amazing technology creators who refuse to "set free."

Entities coming to web 3 with a legacy web mindset of "trying to control things" are in for some growing pains. Web 3 isn't like traditional investments. It lives outside the scope of legacy business models; it trendsends barriers, turning every mobile device into a sovereign bank, an immutable social platform, and endless ways to monetize creativity for business models this world has yet seen. It's community-owned, and while every centralized business on earth preaches "community first," none were truly capable until now with web 3 technology.

Centralization will come at web 3 like they did web 2; they will try to buy out premines and build their own "supped up," controlled versions of things. On web 3, this is akin to competing vs. the atmosphere by trying to capture air in a giant bag.

Trying to force something unnatural on something organic, you'll either kill it or enact its survival instincts and will grow around whatever circumstance.

Trying to come in, and what is essentially a money attack, to buy up as much of the underlining governance resources on decentralized networks to control them will fail miserably. "Big tech" has made their money because money attacks work on the web 2. You can buy out a business legally and fire everyone and change the way the business operates with the snap of a finger. The employees can't fork traditional businesses like you can with open source software that is self-sustaining.

Trying to brute force your way in on web 3 will only cause it to react to survive. Trying to centralized a decentralized community is an attack, and the community will react accordingly. No longer can anyone buy out the underlining protocol in a meaningful way, thus owning all apps on that network. They will need to compete, and their money does not go nearly as far in the sharing economy that strives for true account ownership.

Community Forks

The first and last line of defense is layer zero, which can always fork and slash bad actors out trying to take over the blockchain. In theory, it sounds very simple, but how does it work in practice?

There are many more centrally controlled blockchains than there are decentralized community-run blockchains.

Looking back on our history, we could have forked Steem when the founders held over 50% of the total supply on a DPoS blockchain. Factions tried many times, when Ned started a 100% powerdown, they shook the cage more, lots of hooping and hollering, lots of pleads, lots of threats of the all-mighty fork! But it never happened. Ned backed down with the powerdown, realized that there was zero way he could powerdown and rug us in broad daylight without a hell of a backlash and tons of community dumping. By the time he could have dumped his ninjamined stake, slowly and painfully in front of all, he'd had been lucky to get pennies on the dollar for it.

Sneaky Ned stopped his powerdown, "calmed" the waters, then rugged us by night in a secret over-the-counter deal to a not-so-well-trusted entity. Needless to say, why didnt we fork earlier? Why did it take Justin Sun turning into Godzilla and stomping everywhere, destroying everything for the majority to agree to fork? Simple, you can't even get a dozen people in a room and not have someone not like someone else, let alone a community of thousands.

Many stepped up over the years and tried, offered to fork and provide resources, but when the idea went to rally, people just didnt mesh enough. Factions formed pockets, people with "their vision." It's a tough gig. Hell, I got here in 2017, summer, and there were talks of forks before I even arrived. This has been an ongoing battle since the inception of the ninjamine.

You'll hear me say it takes an alien invasion for all to come together and fork out "centralization." Some still lingered even when Justin Sun had full control over the chain as many moved to Hive. It took him censoring anyone saying anything; I remember Hivers got posts removed that mentioned TikTok. It took that level of extremity to get the last people over, the "ring the towel," and squeeze everyone over.

The longer a community waits to fork, the more established the centralized chain becomes, the harder it becomes to fork away an entire community. The gains pacify people, and it's almost impossible to separate them from each other. However, early enough in the project's life, the community is still fresh with the original vision and will fight to preserve the value proposition.

We are early into web 3, and many of us still believe overly centralized blockchains would fall by the wayside, both ideologically and investment-wise. You see, we've been sold on web 3, account ownership first and skins second. We understand the value proposition, and when we are still really small, it's a "risk" to try and sacrifice the core value proposition for short-term gains—Especially on a chain like Hive, where the largest stakeholders are locked in for 90 days.

However, as a centralized chain gains mass adoption, you'll find people defending premines and centralization due to them becoming married financially with the network. Many people built businesses and had ICOs on top of these networks, thus a community to appease. If everything price-wise is going up, why would any of them band together and fork for the sake of a more censorship-resistant chain? And if they did, they would be in the minority.

It's only when investors think censorship-resistance is the main value proposition and hurting that will hurt their investment long term is when the community is most likely to band together and fork. We saw this in real-time with Steem vs. Tron, resulting in the community fork Hive; we also saw it with BTC, small blockers vs. big blockers resulting in a smaller subsection of the community forking to make BCH.

Being centralized is not enough in practice to provoke a community fork. It takes both being early enough for perceived centralization to hurt the value proposition and the largest stake-centralizing-holder to destroy their own investment, thus forcing investors to flee out of fear for their assets. When I had Steem in my wallet, I often feared they would break the chain and GG to my funds.

One of the biggest hurdles to a community fork is, well, having a community strong enough to fork. It requires people who know the technology and who are willing to be nodes. It takes the risk of not know what the token price will be, as the token will not be listed on any centralized exchanges from the get-go, less of an issue today as it was when Hive forked, especially since Hive had no access to the larger "decentralized" exchanges out there. It takes a lot of resources and humans to have a noncentralized fork. Under an attack, people band together and "divvy" up later. Under peaceful times, the politics of who contributes what and gets what in return, can go on forever. Hive is a well-oiled machine, the entire community forked, in terms of all the top witnesses and 99% of the real (no sockpuppets) backups. It has a ride or die community ready to go, and when we moved, we made a big splash, quickly surpassing STEEM in both market cap and daily active users and blockchain transactions. You can only fake it until you make it for so long. Hey Justin Sun, we want to be the ones to choose, you always want to play, but you never want to lose.

What makes Hive so special is the same thing that makes Bitcoin so special, its creation. These blockchains are open source; it's not the technology that will make any one stand out. It's the community, the story, the censorship resistance, the birth. You cant buy what Hive did, not for all the money in the world. It's an immaculate conception, just as Bitcoins was. It was done, not out of greed, but out of survival. It was to protect what was ours. And shortly after we jumped the Steem ship to join the Hive lifeboat, the titanic was sunk, and millions of dollars in funds were stolen directly from the "dissenters" wallets. Maybe Justin Sun can terrorize your favorite premine blockchain and force a community fork, better sooner than later.

Waiting too long to fork as a community, letting centralized chains gain mass adoption and set roots, makes community efforts less feasible on that chain. Unlike the internet of old, the new internet will have a token. Regulation will come down with an ironclad. Whatever isn't bolted down will fly straight out of the picture.

Web 3 will be so abundant, having any centralized control over any meaningful amount of it will result in an insurmountable attack vector. No one should have all that power, and they won't.

Communities will rise, defi, and bring about technology that bends laws and reinvents them. The internet changed everything; old laws could not capture it nor control it. Still, until this day, regulators with their mops keep trying to stop the ocean of innovation that grows larger and larger every day.

It is not up to technology and innovation to bow down, submit, pander to political whims and regulatory red tape. It is up to lawmakers to keep up and not get in the way of innovation. This need to try and control and suffocate every little detail will not be put up with by free communities.

"Headless" DAOs & DACs using stake-based voting are the future. Token distribution that cannot be centralized. Pysudeomous worldwide nodes. Countries either adapt or get left in the dust; it isn't crypto that will be hurt by over-regulation; the entities/countries that try to slow it down will become irrelevant.

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