It’s unlikely that blockchain / NFT’s will become widely adopted. History proves that human’s like a central authority, just not one that actively works against them.
I think the evidence is not so clear, it seems circumstantial and situational on what humans prefer. Humans invented the internet and email which is extremely decentralized. Datacenters are centralized but edge computing is decentralized. Constitutionalists across the world preferred dencentralizing powers of the central/federal governments to a certain degree. We like decentralizing supply chains to reduce risks but also centralizing them for reducing costs (supplier-to-supplier logistics). The world is literred with examples from either end of the spectrum.
Both centralized and decentralized systems can have a central authority. All of the examples above have one or more of such authorities. The fundamental premise of a blockchain is antithetical to this
Everything trends towards centralization. Tech especially. All the top chains are heavily centralized in (Hash rates, holdings, influence, Insert blockchain metric here). Blockchains has trended towards centralized entities and personalities and i expect the trend to continue.
This also makes it unlikely to be widely adopted. In a centralized evolution of the blockchain, rather than run by a widely public, known, and possibly elected entity, these nodes are run by an anonymous collective. That’s a regression in the trust-value chain for most real world applications
up until around 2017, that's how blockchain worked and gained traction.
And now most high level entities in blockchain tech now have identities/companies and individuals associated with them. Twitter has allowed these identities to stay 'psuedo-anonymous' sometimes but their 'identities' and leadership influence over the chain/ pools and infrastructure has remained.
>That’s a regression in the trust-value chain for most real world applications
Fascinating. I hadn't considered this. Humans like central authority, and if dictators and monarchs were fair there would be no democracy. Extrapolating on this thought, could a democratic blockchain work? I can't even fathom "how", but some sort of ability to elect an entity who votes on your behalf. With an opposition, etc...
Some version of it may be implemented by America switching to a digital currency.
There would be a central regulatory bank that administers financial transactions and serves as a source of truth while Point of Transaction registers send the data for the plusses and minuses in every non-physical cash transaction event.
It wouldn't supplant the physical dollar in any reasonable time as there are many reasons why such bearer bonds would be useful, but I could see it displacing the VISA/MC/AMEX/DISCOVER dominance over electronic financial transactions in America at least.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not but i'll bite. Delegated proof of stake is exactly as you describe and there are 10+ $1B chains that have this mechanism.
What you're describing is referred to as governance in the blockchain community, and there is a ton of pre-existing literature and live examples of governance in action on chains like Ethereum. Go fork or try to build one! Governance is a killer feature of smart contract systems.