Many excellent points have been made. I’ve revised the additions to the ‘Mining Centralization’ topic to hopefully include this additional info and better capture the positive attributes of the safe network in this respect. Let me know if this appropriately captures the major points:
The network has a technique (based on the sigmoid curve) to minimize centralization. This technique is unseen in blockchains. The algorithm results in diminishing returns to farmers that supply significantly above or below the average of other vaults, which creates strong incentives to maintain a decentralization of resources on the network (especially in the xor space). Minimizing centralization of the xor space is essential to maintaining the security of the network. This is discussed on the MaidSafe blog post about keeping safecoin decentralised.
There are different forms of centralization that may happen in the safe network, each with their own possible motivators, severity and impact.
- Economic centralization of safecoin rewards, similar to the primary cause of bitcoin mining centralization
- XOR space centralization, which poses a risk to data integrity
- Governance centralization, ie controlling resources that determine the network rules
- Organizational centralization, similar to bitcoin core vs competing implementations
The ability to form these different kinds of centralization depend on several factors
- the intended behavior of participants due to incentives put in place by the rules of the network
- the actual (possibly irrational) behavior of participants compared to the rational behavior determined by the incentive structure
- divergence between specialized and consumer ‘resources’, ie bandwidth, storage, computation etc and how this affects behavior
- organizational and governance decisions, which depend on feedback of many types
The safe network has balanced these considerations differently to blockchains (both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake), mainly due to the underlying structure of the network.
It’s worth reading the discussion on the safe network forum titled ‘How is Farming Centralization Disincentivized’ to further understand decentralization on the safe network.