Consensus outside blockchain
Decred’s killer feature is good governance, and with good governance, you can have any feature you want.
"Consensus outside blockchain" is about how "internal cryptoeconomics of an open-source decentralised system" couples with the economics of other systems (physical resources(mining, etc.), human teams (developers) and their aspirations, etc., etc.). There is plenty to (re)learn and experiment. Blockchains aren’t just tech, they’re new economic systems is an excellent article, which shows that the interaction of tech and economics is at the heart of "All Things Crypto".
the debate between Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum) and Daniel Larimer (EOS, Steeemit, BitShares)
The initial motivation is the situation with DPOS of EOS, which looks like a plutocracy by Vitalik. This is because token owners in DPOS (Delegated PoS) give their votes to the delegates. The number of delegates is very small, and, in particular, there are currently high rewards(about 400mil USD per year) to the delegates, while in any PoS (and DPOS) there are no expenses associated with running the (delegated) stake node. In his typical technical manner, Vitalik continues to argue that bribery is bad, and Casper PoS will deal with bribery and plutocracy.
Dan Larimer argues in seemingly more basic and generic way that there are The Limits to Crypto-economic Governance. Interesting analogy of blockchain as a radio station. Governance is as much on-chain as off-chain. Prefer to be practical rather than too mathematical. Cryptography cannot prove censorship in the sense somebody needs to be on-line and reply back with cryptographic verification. No closed economic system (which is very clear for PoW and energy consumption). Finally, he concludes by a) off-chain governance will support the community goodness and most optimal composition b) practical off-chain governance is preferred because "right and wrong" cannot be defined mathematically.
Yet Vitalik replies further with mainly technical points, including a point about clear situations of collective mistrust and unaccountability.
This debate is the core issue of cryptoeconomics by the leading thinkers in the cryptoWORLD. These two thinkers had their different paths and debates before (see Twitter and YouTube light-weight debates). Great debate, yet it seems no sharp verifiable problems posed. The status-quo remains, and "the future will tell".
This discussion is also reviewed in the issue 42 of excellent series called Token Economy, since the end of March 2018 happened to be once again the time of Governance Experiments.
Useful analogies?
Examples from physics, sociology, ...
Famous physicists and economists join the crypto chase...
Myron Scholes (Nobel in Economics for Black-Scholes model) as advisor for SAGA coin, another version of stablecoin. He played a big role in the famous hedge fund LTCM, which collapsed.
Shoucheng Zhang as advisor for ArcBlock, which seems to be a generic blockchain as any other including enthropy and AI ideas. Explosive and stimulating speculations in the video. Prof Zhang is also well-known for SO(5) theory of high-temperature superconductivity, which is likely not relevant for the cuprates superconductivity.