A friend asked these questions below over the weekend. 

a. How much decentralized do you think a project should be?
b. How much centralization is too much
centralization?
c. Is the midpoint truly a good place to aim for?

So here is a thread of me answering it.

A DAO should be the ideal decentralized entity, after all, it's in the name. The reality is that in the end, DAOs are not fully decentralized, at least not yet. We're all still learning, experimenting and reiterating in the space.

However, people are fine with this. I believe that what matters to them is having transparency on what actually goes on. 

Also, them having a say when they want to voice their opinion. They might not be active and might have someone pick up the workload but they still want to be aware of what's going on.

However, the issue of whether your voice counts is debatable, especially during snapshot voting. 

What can your 3,000 tokens do when there are people with 3,000,000 tokens, lol. Quadratic voting wen?


I've also observed that humans need people to be in charge. That's just how it works.

If you bring up a task and keep it for anyone. Most times you don't get to see people or qualified people who pick it up. 

You even have cases of people abandoning the work because there's no sense of accountability with it, it's a DAO after all.

This even shows in voting apathy thus the habit of DAOs introducing delegation being a thing.

So to summarise my question, projects should be structured in a way where all voices can have a say in the affairs of things.

Whales will always exist but the project should be executed in a way that a 51% vote lays in the hands of 51% of its holders and not a case where 5% of the holders can make a 51% vote.

While everybody expects others to act in good faith, what happens when something "corrupts" one of the important holders

or multi-sig (projects where this is implemented)? Decentralization comes first, that's the ethos of the community. 

It's okay for people to take charge (lead) but the community should be aware and also support it.

I'd like to know what your thoughts are on this topic.

So I'll be trying to address these questions in one place. I've been working with a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO) for almost 3 years now and there are a couple of things experience has taught me.