A continuation of my post from earlier, I now move on to see if I can clarify what I believe “permissionless” should mean, and why I think the concept is being misconstrued by many in the crypto space.
As a preface, all I did was google “permissionless blockchain”, and there are a variety of hits that discussion permission vs permissionless blockchains.
I picked one from a law firm link on page 1, as I think they have less incentive to be potentially biased compared to a media outlet, though I did not read every hit from my search. See here: https://freemanlaw.com/permission-and-permissionless-blockchains/
Relevant excerpt here:
As you can see, the “permissionless” nature of the blockchain is really used in the context of permission to participate in the upkeep of the chain (i.e. being a validator). Anyone can, so long as they meet the requirements set forth in the chain’s governance model (for Harmony, I believe all validators can vote, but only elected ones that have achieved the minimum stake required, can generate rewards and have their work counted for consensus…but I could be wrong).
It is not meant to apply to any USER of the chain, in my opinion.
However, even in that sense, for the most part, usage of the chain is also permissionless — anyone can add Harmony mainnet to their metamask, and start using it. I don’t think this should extend to “abusing” it.
And this is where the “blacklisting wallets” part comes into play. If you are a user of the blockchain (and maybe also for malicious validators), but your intent is to be malicious, perhaps we as the stewards of this chain decide that we want to deter you from further access/profiting off your actions. Since the chain is decentralized, transactions are transparent. We can identify these addresses as the actors, even if the owner identity remains anonymous. The chain is still decentralized because the consensus mechanisms are still untouched by this “blacklist wallet” feature.
Decentralized and permissionless does not mean ungoverned. Personally, I would hope that the community of Harmony users do find importance in setting forth deterrents for bad actors.
I do agree that proposals need to be well-thought through before being implemented. But I think the rhetoric of any types of “control” or “censure” ability being against the “ethos” of a decentralized and permissionless blockchain to be a bit off-base.
Harmony is one chain among many. Nobody forces a person to use a particular chain, which has a particular structure is governed with its own set of rules. If one does not like the structure/rules of a particular chain, then just don’t use that chain. I would hope that if we can get thoughtful, useful, mechanisms in place, we (the community of Harmony users/governance tokenholders) can deter potential malicious actors from wanting to use the Harmony chain.
When I originally started writing these threads, it was in response to a Twitter thread I saw that encouraged many to come on here to vote “no”, due to what I think is a misunderstanding of the terms “decentralized” and “permissionless”.
After looking at the initial proposal itself, I do think there needs to be more thought into the design of such a mechanism (as some mentioned, if consensus is required, how do we ever act quickly enough to blacklist an address in many cases?). However, that’s a separate issue than the general question of just “is it ever okay for this chain to be able to blacklist wallets”? I don’t think it goes against the “ethos” of the Harmony chain. In fact, since Harmony espouses a mission of building bridges and working together/being harmonious, I think the ethos clearly favors strong deterrents to bad actors that seek to do harm to other users on the chain.