Decentralization at team level vs. protocol

Distributed networks and decentralization are concepts much older than Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto proved that it was possible to create decentralized value that people could own, share and transfer without a middleman. In doing so, he laid the foundation for the entire cryptocurrency industry, or if you prefer, blockchain networks. Every public blockchain network needs native coins to enable decentralization itself. Coins may play a different role in each project, but they have one thing in common. It is necessary to ensure their fair distribution.

Imagine you want to start a new decentralized project. What do you need? First of all, someone has to define the goals or mission of the project and its basic parameters. Then, some research and analysis will take place. This is followed by protocol implementation and launch. For many projects, the launch is just the beginning. No protocol in the world can ever be said to be fully complete. On the contrary, each protocol continues to be worked on and developed by a team or community. That said, the most important thing any protocol has is a team. Maintenance, improvements, and new features are never-ending jobs. If the protocol works well, it will find its users. As the number of users grows, the amount and scope of work on the protocol naturally increase.

The team must be paid for their work on the protocol. Some entity or body manages the work on the project and must secure funding. Thus, if a new decentralized project is created, some of the coins usually stay with a foundation or team for protocol development.

Wait a minute. How come we’re talking about decentralization and some team is working on a protocol. Is this similar to, say, Microsoft working on the Windows operating system? There’s no way it should be. Every blockchain project should be open source. The IOG team working on Cardano has all the source code public and also all the scientific studies. Nothing is patented. Everything belongs to the community as much as to the team.

Decentralization at the team level is a difficult, if not impossible, thing. It is difficult to decentralize at this level because only a few people, often programmers, deal with a given protocol on a daily basis. Programming, networking, cryptography, and other things are too complex for ordinary people. There will always be a team behind the protocol. Even Bitcoin has a team. Satoshi Nakamoto abruptly left in silence but handed the project over to another programmer. The source code is on GitHub, people report bugs and the team fixes them and works on improvements. Trying to create governance where people understand the problems from the user side and express their opinion which is then implemented by the team is probably the best that can be achieved.

What is important to us is not control over the source code of the protocol, but control over the network consensus and funding of the development. The team delivers new versions of the protocol and the people are the ones who are motivated to keep the network running. This is where we finally get to the debate about project coins.