Over the past weeks, some of the world’s largest institutions, namely Facebook and JP Morgan, have announced intentions to launch ventures. While many crypto enthusiasts have welcomed this , there’s one caveat, these projects are likely going to be centralized beyond compare.
And to some, this simple fact isn’t something to be excited about.
Ethereum, JPM Coin, FB Coin — It’s All Permissioned
In a recent debate at South By Southwest 2019 — a tech-heavy, crypto-friendly conference held in Austin — argued that there are only two subsets of technologies: private (permissioned) and public (permissionless). In reference to the whole “if you control your own keys, you control your own ” argument, Song explained:
“You either have control over your stuff or you don’t. It’s a zero or a one… is really useful for . Everything else has a central point of failure.”
Per , the longtime educator and industry commentator then went on to draw attention to , noting that he believes it is entirely permissioned. He cites the hack of The DAO, especially the part of the story where developers and other stakeholders reversed the effects of the game-changing imbroglio through a rollback.
Decentralized: no one can take your property away.
Centralized: someone gives you permission to keep possession of said property.
That’s why decentralization is binary, not a spectrum. You either have self sovereignty over your own property or you don’t. There is no in between.
— Jimmy Song (송재준) (@jimmysong)
While Song didn’t explicitly mention backed by corporate America, like Jamie Dimon’s newfangled stablecoin or the rumored social media-centric offering from Facebook’s his logic can be extended here.
As the Core client developer isn’t a fan of , it would hard to argue why he would be amicable towards JP Morgan’s iteration of Quorum, a private based on ’s technologies.
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Some Crypto Insiders Beg To Differ
Although Song is vehemently against centralized systems, some industry insiders have been a bit more open to the concept. Per from NewsBTC, Ari Paul, the founder of BlockTower Capital, noted that while the so-called “coporatecoins” will operate in an intranet-esque fashion, they aren’t all bad per se.
Paul elaborates that while these assets are inherently “uninteresting” to fervent crypto crusaders, who are enamored with censorship resistance, immutability, security, and peer-to-peer systems, centralized will “increase global interest dramatically.”
Laying out a hypothetical scenario, the BlockTower chief investment officer notes that 30 million of Facebookcoin users (10% of Paul’s hypothetical audience of 300 million) could eventually “stumble across ,” meaning that the (decentralized) ’s community could double in size, no questions asked. Not only would this bolster , but this influx of users would also increase ’s network value, thus increasing the actual value of .
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Published at Sun, 17 Mar 2019 19:07:02 +0000
