Split Concerns Across DAC Dimensions
For people in group (b), these are the majority of blockchain developers who still proclaim to uphold decentralization principles. They realize that the truce between openness (permissionless) and security is brittle and thus invested in sophisticated mechanism devices to maintain that delicate status quo. One such trick (device) is split and push (to higher dimensions), borrowed and transmogrified from the traditional, size-matters-to-everything, one-dimensional divide-and-conquer playbook from centralized systems design arsenals.
Split-and-push is a foundational mechanism pattern for designing decentralized systems. It is the pattern we see in earlier discussion (Part I) regarding solving the blockchain scalability challenge – it is the pattern behind the scale-up approach. The idea is to bring in several concerns – dimensions – into a concern space that multi-concern solutions can exist to satisfy complex conditions and specified needs.
Mechanisms are solutions in the concern space to satisfy various conditions and needs.
On a basic and simplistic level, we can view first-gen and most current generation blockchains as low dimensional concern space with simple solutions – mechanisms. Sure, even the simplest mechanisms took us more than couple decades to get where we are today, but they are indeed quite simple and limited, which is a problem – remember that true
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⁶¹ Central Bank Digital Currency - FEDS Notes, also Central Bank Digital Currency - Wikipedia.
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(cont.)
decentralized economy must be anchored on-chain[16]? If we want to build a truly decentralized economy we must be able to expand our concern space to accommodate more sophisticated mechanisms (solutions).
Many blockchain developers started to realize a hunch that the ways of decentralized thinking are contrived and counterintuitive – e.g., answers in search of questions⁶², or, solutions (mechanisms) in search of a bigger problem space (concern space). It is not easy, as this discussion has repeatedly shown – but we must try. So how do we epistemically build concern space to accommodate more mechanisms?
We can see the expansion of concern space as a result to mitigate the woes of leaving the centralized land toward the decentralized land. Maybe inadvertently or maybe a natural next step in blockchain evolution, layer 2 solution such as Optimistic Rollup, on top of which Metis DAO is built, is a potent example of concern space expansion – i.e., adding another concern, on- chain settlement time (OCST), converting the blockchain trilemma[20] into the blockchain tetralemma⁶³ – by inserting an extra concern, OCST, we pushed the perennial concern, security, into a higher gear of concern space. Alas, our lemma-infested struggle of decentralized mechanism design really feels like fitting a square peg in a round hole⁶⁴.
Remember we warned you earlier that leaving the centralized world means leaving our normal notion of many concepts, which are inherently centralized, such as security, behind[25]? We have to admit that security itself is a centralized concept, since it is the strongest with the centralized setup – by restricting openness. If going toward decentralization, for which we were to strengthen openness, we have to accept the consequence of lesser security[25].
Minds still lingering in the centralized world, as most people initially do, we lament the fact that keeping the same notion of security is hard in the decentralized land – the degradation of security is spiraling downward toward decentralization – that’s why we use words like dilemma, trilemma, and tetralemma, all concerns of frustration and loss. Don’t be. The breakage of strong, centralized security, is not a bad thing that we should regret – it is something we don’t really need. By parting away with centralized notion of security, we gained a vibrant open system. And we shall see that the open ecosystem can provide safety in a decentralized way.
A vibrant open system, can have lower rank⁶⁵ concern space, such as layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains, to provide lower rank mechanisms, in serving higher rank concern space mechanisms – the on-chain application and business service layer (some call layer 3[27]), like bees providing pollination service to the plants of DAC garden[24]. Obviously the concern space
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⁶¹ Central Bank Digital Currency - FEDS Notes, also Central Bank Digital Currency - Wikipedia.
⁶² In Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, After Deep Thought’s answer of 42 proves unsatisfying to the scientists, who don’t know the question it is meant to answer, the supercomputer decides to compute the Ultimate Question.
⁶³ The Blockchain Tetralemma and Layer 3 (Application Layer) Scaling.
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is the DAC garden (DAC economy) – and plants are the concerns of the DAC gardener. These
DAC gardeners – DAC developers – are the enlightened ones in group (c).
Seeing how onerous the process of adding just one extra concern (OCST to Optimistic Rollup) is – for expanding concern space from layer 1 to layer 2 blockchain – we need a super tool to expand concern space even further. Not surprisingly, this super tool is DAC.
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