Topic: Decentralization as a solution to India's challenges (Read 245 times)

Thanks for the feedback / merit. Completely agree with your points. Not sure if you heard about the recent speculation regarding the strict regulations being planned for cryptos in in India. If that is true, then i believe that it would be better embraced by the student communities when it is no longer perceived as something possibly "illegal". It would be a good start nonetheless.

South Korea  / Japan / Venezuela / Malta all seem to have understood that well with their crypto regulations.

This 12 minute documentary on Malta is pretty insightful in that regard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epK0FDL__-4

Glad that you summarized the points OP. Merited your post.

I agree that we have been seeing a tendency towards centralization under the present dispensation. Yet, Modi Govt seems to be drowning in its own hubris. It is always going to lead to disaster trying to centralize decision making in a country like India. The lat time someone tried, it resulted in the 1975 Emergency.

Of course decentralization in products and services could be an efficient way out. Theoretically, this is a great idea. What we really need is to find use cases and build products that can showcase its feasibility. For that to happen, we are going to need people to focus on products and contributing to the crypto-economy rather than seeing it as simply an investment. We all could start on our own, especially those who still are in their student phase.

Glad that you've shared these articles. I don't think decentralization is a solution to India's challenges, at least not everyone gonna accept it in the first case.

Glad to share, these are just my musings, I'm no economist lol. Just your average crypto forum lurker.

I think this post deserves merit, sadly I can't add

Wow, very good points for discussion, I will surely read and try to understand your perspective. I think you are an economist, if you write on any platform please provide me link of it. Thank you.

Thanks for reading the entirety of both writeups. It is good to get some feedback. The ideas are more of a log of what I felt the crypto movement originally was all about, bringing power and trust back to the people. Of course, I too do not foresee these ideas being embraced wholeheartedly by the establishment. Having said that, I personally feel that the way things are going, such ideas may start to find more acceptance in the long run. I have always thought that crypto adoption will not come until there are truly no other choices left and people, in general, have had enough.

As requested, here is a TLDR version of the two articles -

Part 1 ---

- Historically India is a decentralized country in terms of population diversity, culture, language etc.
- Nature in general and most nature-mimicking systems achieve ultra-high efficiency and autonomy by leveraging smart decentralized consensus.
- It could be argued that the ultimate / most efficient form of human government would eventually leverage the power of such a philosophy, leveraging a bottom-up consensus-based model as opposed to a top-down chain of command.
- A trending centralization in various aspects of India such as population densities, political power, commercial businesses, and new digital platforms are a growing concern. These all lead to unhealthy monopolies, corruption, greed and a China-style surveillance state.
- Technologies such as distributed ledger systems can be put in place to ensure that India remains a decentralized country and also functions much more efficiently and sustainably due to more organic and localized consensus and population densities. This leads to localized education, job creation, wealth creation, and autonomy.
- Even electricity generation from renewables could be tokenized into a decentralized grid across the country. Power could become a tradeable commodity between villages, towns, and cities leading to more reliable, cheap and easily accessible electricity for all.
- In summary, decentralization goes way beyond a crypto-anarchist principle. It is a vital requirement for amazingly efficient, self-sustaining, self-regulating, autonomous and resilient systems of governance (humans included).

Part 2 ---

- King and peasant mindsets remain under the guise of democracy. As long as there is a supreme post of power, there will be a supreme leader with a top-down management style. Such management styles are highly ineffective for managing a place like India. With extreme centralization of power, there comes blind worship of a few blind leaders. However, with decentralization of power, there come more responsible leaders and enlightened followers.
- Technology as a tool for control vs freedom: Are we still adopting new tech in governance, administration, and finance for control or freedom?
- Blockchain: Overview, History and current technological advancements. Usage of the meta-term DLT and the common properties of all Distributed Ledger Technologies.
- Permissioned vs Public ledgers and their application differences.
- Importance of cryptocurrency / tokenization of public ledgers / DLTs. Why it is stupid to try and separate public blockchains / DLTs from their native tokens.
- Current state of crypto in India (as of 2018) and why the stance taken by the RBI / government is a potential recipe for disaster.
- Speculative: If positive regulations are introduced, then how the market can evolve from here and kickstart a revolution.
- Sharing Economies to the rescue: Rising middle-class demands, sustainability challenges, huge population densities and high unemployment can all be overcome with new sharing economy models. However, such models need to leverage distributed ledgers / blockchains in order to stay monopoly-free and trustless.
- Capitalism is flawed: Could shared economies could also take a shared ownership approach? Perhaps when resources are shared, monopolization becomes near-impossible?
- A truly shared economy with resource sharing can be only possible with trustless, public distributed ledgers.

This should give an overview of the contents and ideas explored in the above articles.

Cheers!

The articles are crazy long. The website is crazy slow. Barring those two facts, you have made a lot of points. It would really help the discussion here at BCT if you could summarize your ideas for a discussion here. We don't often get thoughtful posts like these, especially not in the India section (At least not now, People do talk of a time when the old moderator Benson led the charge, the tale goes that he has been embroiled in issues with his business now).

Anyways, the idea that Decentralization in processes could solve the problems of a country like ours is just that, an idea which sounds great but is nearly impossible to put into action. As you yourself admitted that the current dispensation would never agree to this. Most of crytpo is being co-opted by the very institutions it was meant to be an alternative for. In terms of the changes in Central bank powers, this doesn't seem to be going very far at present.

I do agree with the last part that the capitalist service provider giants with their targeted advertisements and Algorithmic recommendations oughtta go the distributed way. A lot of projects are trying to do that by removing the trusted middlemen from these use cases. Its just that people are their own biggest enemies. We just can't find a bunch of people who would do this without keeping some of that power for themselves.

Hey Bitcoiners,

Here are 2 articles that I felt compelled to write recently that explore the idea of Decentralizing India with Blockchain / DLTs. I am no expert or authority but in the spirit of open source discourse, I am sharing it here for anyone interested in such ideas. Feel free to share your thoughts on the matter as well, would be much appreciated.

Article 1 - https://www.minds.com/Cryptobabble/blog/decentralizing-india-with-distributed-ledger-technologies-pa-918027244118855680

Article 2 - https://www.minds.com/Cryptobabble/blog/decentralizing-india-with-distributed-ledger-technologies-pa-918031033260855296

Cheers!