According to webmd.com, "The average human has about 10,000 taste buds." Each taste bud is controlled and analyzed by a centralized brain. Depending on the person's taste, the brain decides whether the food is liked or disliked. When on bites into a slice of pie, the tongue relays serotonin to the brain, indicating a positive experience. However, a defensive experience arises if one bites into a lemon or a habanero pepper.
Like the tongue, a decentralized network's nodes and/or miners – the "taste buds" of the network – come to an agreement on the status of the previous and current blocks. Each node has a say in the validity of the blockchain by confirming that its previous and current blocks match up with the other nodes. Depending on the validity of the transaction, the network is able to discern bad actors from good ones. In other words, each node can "taste" the blockchain and then communicate with the other nodes in agreement on the current block. If each node agrees that the current block and all blocks before it indeed "taste good," then they come to consensus.
For many, this layered opinion will leave a bad taste. The problem is in total decentralization of governance. Many altcoins and decentralized projects deploy these governance protocols. In short, each node's voting capacity correlates with how much stake it has in the system. This leads to inefficiencies and, more alarmingly, a return to the hierarchy that our current financial system runs on.
Taste buds do not make their own decisions and do not have the control over what they think the taste is. The brain is the single entity that controls and translates what the taste buds are telling it. Similarly, each blockchain node should not have its own say in the flavor of the transaction. There must be a central "brain" that makes the decision as to whether the overall network tastes good or not. Without a central authority that can discipline bad actors, the blockchain becomes a gift for criminal activity.
The problem with the current decentralized governance movement is the inability to keep each person accountable for their involvement in potentially malicious activities. Unlike the tongue, if one person claims on thing and controls a large stake of the proposed token, that person has more influence than a group of people with a combined stake. Instead of all the taste buds contributing to a central decision, bits and pieces of the ecosystem will inevitably believe separate things. In the end, this "decentralized governance" protocol is controlled by the wealthy who make the decisions for the entire ecosystem.
This sounds like a poorly thought out pseudo-solution to the same challenge we have dealt with for centuries: each participant deserves equal say in a process they all participate in.
Blockchain technology does have some useful tasting abilities. The fungibility and double-spending problems that Bitcoin fixed are groundbreaking for this generation. However, we have gone in the wrong direction with DeFi, DApps, and tokenization. There must be a centralized attestation intermediary that communicates between individuals, the network, and their local judicial branch. By implementing an old flavor into the new blockchain-backed system, centralized governance can be both anonymous and accountable. Public key infrastructure is an old flavor that has been forgotten by many but a new iteration has the power to fix the existing security problems of the internet.
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