The Amoeba Project

I realized in the meeting yesterday, Node London is much about decentralization. Just like the internet, the nodes should be distributed and mainly working on its own without a central organ.

The discussion yesterday reflected this attitude. It was very open and de-centralized. This, as you can imagine, makes decision processes more difficult. The group relys on peers to voluntairly make decisions and carry the consequences.

My personally, I believe that there are advantages as well as disadvantages in decentralization. The advantage is its fairness. Every peer has the same influence. On the other hand, one of the big disadvantages is, the system is not efficient. I can speak from experience, because the Swiss state is struggling with its inert nature. However, the Swiss citizens have much more to say about the faith of the country.

The reason, why it is so inefficient is, because the opinions are "floating" around and everybody tries to be as fair as possible. However, it is not possible to take a decision that pleases everyone. And none of the members of the group want to be in the position to decide something that has negative influence on the others. 

There is no discussion about numbers. Numerologists do not lose time disputing if 7+4=11 or not. This is because they have agreed on the operations and the mechanisms beforehand. This idea can be mapped to a group of people discussing in a group. If everyone agrees to a certain mechanism of decision making, there will not be any discussion about any decision because it is at the end the system itself and not an individual person that takes the decision.

It is a big challenge to lay out these mechanisms ant this is basically what I will be diealing with in the next couple of months.