Your post definitely got me thinking.  I'm going to go in a bit a tangent from the original feel of your post.  Your post got me thinking of anarchy.

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> The beauty of a decentralized environment is that essentially everyone is able to take their own lessons into practice and behave as they see fit.

When I started with steemit, there was a high percentage of self-proclaimed anarchists.  The majority of posts were about crypto going to the moon and how government and taxation was theft.  :-)

A rough definition of an anarchist is   anyone who "is able to take their own lessons into practice and behave as they see fit."

In my head ... I've always been comparing the social experiment that is the steem ecosystem,  to what I believe peaceful anarchy would be like.

- When folks don't like to frontend of steemit.com, they move to a different front end. (busy.org and many, many others)
- There are those that will always game the system for their own gain
- Folks who simply want to troll others posts, downvoting and negative comments that provide little value.
- The vast majority of folks on the platform are awesome!


When it's time for a fork, there is chaos.    That's basically when it becomes clear that this is a democratic platform and not an anarchist platform.  
- The witnesses are all voted in by the population (elected representatives)
- The posts for and against the changes proposed in the upcoming fork fill the feed
- Folks will claim that they will leave if the fork goes through... some do, most don't
- once the fork goes through, everyone realizes that it only had a subtle difference on their lives compared to the way it was before.

So, essentially, steem is a decentralized democracy.