Transition to decentralization

In this article, we will review the different definitions of decentralization, and how members of the blockchain community have applied those definitions to advance the technology. A good way to think about decentralization is to associate the word with devolution. There are three main forms of decentralization, or how power is transferred.

In a post on Medium.com, Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of Ethereum, detailed the following three forms of decentralization: Architectural Centralization: – How many physical computers does the system consist of? How many computers can withstand a crash at any given time? Political centralization: How many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that make up the system?

Logical Centralization: Do the interface and data structures that the system presents and maintain look more like a single interconnected body, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: If you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves still function fully as independent units? Let's quantify this with an example. It's very likely that the computer or tablet you're reading this on was made by a company with a CEO and an executive board.

This company will very likely have business units that take care of many components of building, marketing and selling the device you use. The CEO and board of executives provide direction to the various business units so they can work together to build computers. If the company splits, the CEO and board of executives will have to make the decision (or be motivated) to split the company.

Individual parts of a company cannot decide to do this alone. If the part of the company that assembles consoles decides that it no longer wants to be part of a larger company, they don't really have the option of separating from another company. Another example Vitalik uses is language.

Speakers of any language follow grammatical rules and best practices despite the fact that there is no central authority that forces people to speak a certain way. The organizations that publish dictionaries have no direct control over the language. The people who speak the language control it.

This is why languages ​​evolve over time, with structure and character depending on the place and time in which they are expressed. An example of this is how Latin evolved over time into the modern Romance languages ​​of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan. No central authority decided that Latin should develop into these languages.

In this case, language is a logically decentralized thing. In the case of block chains, they are politically decentralized because no single person has individual control over them. It is also architecturally decentralized because its infrastructure has no central point of failure, with each node maintaining a copy of the blockchain.

But blockchain is logically centralized because the system behaves like a single computer even though it is spread across all nodes participating in the network. Decentralization (both politically and architecturally) allows blockchains to be: Less prone to failure because they rely on many separate components. It is difficult to attack because the networks are spread across many computers.

It is difficult for users with malicious intent to take advantage of users who use the platform for its intended purpose. If one node stops working, or even 100 nodes, the blockchain continues assuming at least one node is running. This makes the blockchain very resistant to attacks.

The blockchain does not stop working even if power is lost in an entire country. This makes blockchain very flexible, which cannot be said about many of the current systems we use on the Internet. Currently, companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google dominate the Internet.

They offer many free or cheap services because they are able to collect valuable data about their users, and find ways to monetize that data. As a modern Internet user, one is never sure where their demographic and personal data is being used. With decentralization, also called Web 3, data does not need to be stored in centralized systems.

Data can be independently verified and individuals can transact directly with each other, rather than requiring a central entity to verify these interactions. Micropayments have become a viable way to reward people for the value created. Users control how their data is used and accessed online, and can be paid for using their data.

Decentralization removes central control of systems. Instead of a single company being responsible for writing information to a central database, the responsibility for recording transactions falls on anyone who wants to participate in the blockchain. This is a major shift in thinking,