Hey friends,
It's 2026 and most of you are gone but I still have this lingering question in my mind, although not many of you care for decentralization anymore.
I don’t think having more money should automatically give someone more control over a blockchain, I really think this not the right direction we are taking as industry. It doesn't lead to any form of proper decentralization at all and I think undermines the whole point of blockchain as a whole.
In a stake-weighted system, you can increase your influence by acquiring and staking more tokens. I understand the reasoning: you’re putting more capital at risk. But I don’t think that settles whether wealth should determine how much say someone gets, especially in DAO and governance.
This is a big part of what interests me about the work we’re doing at Humanode.
We use Proof of Biometric Uniqueness, or PoBU. It uses private biometric checks for liveness and uniqueness, with the aim of giving each real person one validator with equal weight. Buying more HMND doesn’t increase your validator weight.
You still have to get the verification right, and people can still coordinate with each other. There’s a paper on PoBU that goes into those questions:
https://papers.humanode.io/pobu.pdfFor me, equal weight per person is a direction worth pursuing. We already have plenty of systems where money decides who gets heard, what about proper egalitarian systems? Fundamental don't interest a lot of people these days, and it's sad ;(.
Do you think putting more capital at risk should give someone more validator power? Why? Why not?
