To be more specific, suppose mechanism designer A encodes beliefs/values/aesthetics X into a mechanism M, which gets deployed in a robustly decentralized fashion. Then, upon philosophical breakthroughs totally updating X into X’, A encodes X’ into a new mechanism M’. The troubling idea I’m pointing to is that coordinating the pivot from M to M’ seems exceedingly difficult, likely much more difficult than coordination in the absence of a robustly decentralized fashion. And this is only in a world of one mechanism designer: things get much more troubling in the real world of many competing mechanism designers A and many competing beliefs/values/aesthetics X.
One downside of decentralization you missed is the idea that protocols are slower to update than any other software, which in some scenarios leads to a lock-in risk.
To be more specific, suppose mechanism designer A encodes beliefs/values/aesthetics X into a mechanism M, which gets deployed in a robustly decentralized fashion. Then, upon philosophical breakthroughs totally updating X into X’, A encodes X’ into a new mechanism M’. The troubling idea I’m pointing to is that coordinating the pivot from M to M’ seems exceedingly difficult, likely much more difficult than coordination in the absence of a robustly decentralized fashion. And this is only in a world of one mechanism designer: things get much more troubling in the real world of many competing mechanism designers A and many competing beliefs/values/aesthetics X.