tl;dr: crypto is a circle of ducks wearing goggles.
It’s election season, and Ducktown is choosing a new mayor.
You’re helping to count the votes.
You plan to do your job honestly, exactly how you are told. But there are ducks here that you’ve never met before. How do you know that everyone will do an honest job?
Let’s look at two different ways we could arrange everyone to ensure that the votes are counted fairly.
The first way is the “Staircase”.
In this system, everyone sits in a row. Each duck we go back, we go a bit higher, so that the duck behind you can look over your shoulder, and see if you’re getting up to any mischief.
In this way, (nearly) every duck has some knowledge that the person in front of them is behaving, and (nearly) every duck knows they should be honest because they’re being watched by a duck behind them.
But what are the possible issues here? The main problem is that, while this is an ok system for watching the people at the bottom of the staircase, it’s a very bad system for watching the people at the top. Especially if the few ducks at the top all have the same colour shirt, and support the same candidate.
How does any duck near the bottom have any sort of certainty that the ducks at the top, who aren’t being overseen, are counting the votes fairly? They don’t.
So let’s look at a different system. What if you all sit in a Circle?
This instantly solves the problems that are caused by the staircase. Now nobody is out of sight and out of scrutiny, everyone can see everyone, and it’s much harder for the “top” ducks to cause mischief, because now they are being observed under the same rules as everybody else.
Not only is this system fairer, but everyone gets the benefit of knowing that it’s fairer.
Now, honest ducks can happily count the votes, comfy in the knowledge that everyone is on the same footing.
But can we make this even better? Let’s get high-tech.
What if all the ducks were wearing goggles that record and save everything that they see?
Now it would be even harder to cheat. Even if you distracted a couple of ducks for a moment, there would be a constant risk that you had been caught on camera.
Even if you edited your camera footage to hide your mischief, you couldn’t edit everyone else’s camera footage. There would be a constant, permanent record of everyone’s behaviour, held by many people in a way that it could not be easily messed with by a single person.
Which is where we arrive at crypto. “Decentralisation” is simply a way of describing the system that we have laid out above, and it has the following key characteristics:
Everyone can “see” everyone
Everyone keeps a permanent record of everyone’s behaviour
That permanent record is very resistant to getting messed with, because everyone has their own copy that they can check against each other.
Who benefits in this system? Every honest person (duck) who now can do their honest job, knowing that it’s much harder for other people to be dishonest.
Who loses in this system? The ducks at the “top of the staircase” who, in the old system, could do whatever they want, but who are now held to much harder-to-break rules of good behaviour.
We live in a world of staircase systems. If a bank misbehaves, we hope they’ll get in trouble with the government. But what if the bank and the government are so high up the staircase that we really have no idea if they’re behaving, keeping each other honest, or even working together against us?
This is why crypto as an idea is never going away. It is a way of arranging ourselves that is good for honest players and bad for dishonest ones. No temporary failure or scandal can ever undo that simple truth.
It also explains why certain people (often speaking on behalf of the ducks at the top of the staircase) have such a problem with this technology.
The dream of filling the world with decentralised systems is a utopian one. It’s a dream of building a world that protects honest actors, and challenges dishonest ones, in a way that no staircase system in the world can aspire to.
It is a world that is not only fair, but provably fair to all of us.
Every single existing crypto project could fail and we would still have the idea that a circular system, with everyone keeping a record of behaviour, is a massive revolution in making life hard for the bad guys.
And that’s something that, now that we know it’s possible, is never going away.