What dimensions of decentralisation is BeefLedger focused on developing?

We see decentralisation in multiple dimensions. These include the following:

• Geographical - how spread out activities are;

• Control / Ownership - how concentrated is ownership of key resources is;

• Decision-making - the extent to which decision-making can be devolved or is held in the hands of a few;

• Technical - the number of machines that are involved in maintaining a data system;

• System Grammar - the extent to which the grammar of a system (its various rules) can be used and modified by system participants without approval or authority from a small number of select authorities; and

• Membership - the extent to which there is diversity in network membership, which introduces additional dimensions of richness and complexity.

Technical decentralisation is an important dimension for network security. That's why we have developed the BeefLedger Vaults initiative, which makes it possible for anyone to become an active part of the network.

By reducing barriers to entry to deploying Vaults, we can also impact the diversity of ownership / control over key physical infrastructure. The more owners the better. This is a big difference to many other supply chain + blockchain projects, which ultimately limit the number of network computing nodes and create an economic system that is aimed at growing the value of the Nodes themselves.

In terms of System Grammar, our organic multisig protocols make it possible for network members to form new multisig groups, whereby each group's members can set the applicable approval rule for that group (x of n). This supports another axis of consensus - that is, social consensus - which is built on top of technical Node-based consensus. We are empowering members in a number of ways by doing this. Firstly, members can set and modify the applicable rules to suit their particular requirements. This rule is also the threshold that must be met to change the rule. Secondly, by ensuring the applicable rules can be changed, it is possible for the network or parts of the network to adjust the consensus thresholds based on changing circumstances.

These design features enable the system to support progressive devolution / decentralisation in a way that suits the context of members, individually, as sub-groups and as a whole. This supports organic subsidiarity as a mechanism of social consensus.

Geographic distribution is important for a range of reasons. For us, one of the key ones is actually related to the nature of real supply chains, particularly in food systems. Food production is exposed to climatic risks (drought, floods, natural disasters etc.) which tend to be spatially confined. Diversification of asset ownership across geographically distributed ecosystems makes sense as a risk mitigation. By definition, as more supply chain actors install Vaults, the Vaults themselves will take on geographic and ownership decentralisation properties.