Topic: Is True Decentralization a Myth? (Read 376 times)

That's certainly true, mate. Considering that the world is somewhat dependent on a centralized model, many people have resorted to centralized exchanges. These same exchanges are largely dominant within the mainstream world. With unmatched liquidity and user-friendly platform, people are able to perform crypto trades without the need to worry about anything else. Of course, these centralized exchanges are prone to many risks such as hacks or theft. But most people don't seem to care about this. Even with the inception of decentralized exchanges, the centralized realm is still leading the crypto industry. This is bad since crypto was meant to overcome the middleman in the first place.

Given how big the crypto industry has grown, it's hard to be able to achieve 100% decentralization. There are too many players in the industry with a lot of power and wealth, making them hard to beat anytime soon (like Binance and Bitmain). At least, we could try our best in decentralizing the crypto realm as much as possible. The more distributed nodes there are for several cryptocurrencies on the market, the better for their decentralization. PoW-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum can be "solo mined" whenever it's possible in order to maintain their censorship-resistance. It's the best thing we could do at the moment in order to minimize risks of centralization as much as possible. But be aware that achieving 100% decentralization seems rather impossible at the moment.

Nonetheless, with the advent of dApps, DEXs, and even non-custodial mixing services, crypto could finally maintain its decentralized nature for years to come. There needs to be an effort from the developers, and community as a whole, in order to allow crypto to remain as is for the foreseeable future. Just my opinion

Bitcoin is completely decentralized,no one can control or alter its codes even if satoshi wants too but we are using exchanges,wallets and other services which all are centralized so they know who were paying bitcoins to them which makes bitcoin as pseudo-anonymous.

It varies from coin to coin. Some coins indeed are centralized in nature. Ripple is the most famous one among them. It is in top 10 and has existed for years now. Regardless of his centralized nature, the coin is being used by enterprises. It is fast and transactions are not too expensive wither. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is the number one crypto coin which is truly decentralized. Investors love this feature. Governments hate decentralized stuff.

Well, money is certainly a primary point, ask yourself a question, would you care about BTC if it had no value?

It really depends, for me decentralization exist but not in all crypto projects. Another thing is because of the SEC regulation it open up the decentralization was been broken where we can freely do everything without submitting any informations of us.

Decentralization and privacy are entirely different things.

You can use the privacy coins on the market right now to completely cover your tracks. Monero, Zcoin are a few of them.

On the contrary, projects like Chipmixer are wholly rubbish and useless. Still, if you want privacy, privacy coins are a solution, I'm sorry, but this is off the table. You can do your research.


The servers of the projects claiming to be decentralized are located in different countries. That's why they don't have their servers.

Surprisingly, someone who says these words believes in Bitcoin, if you don't believe in real decentralization, why do you follow cryptocurrencies?

I'm sorry, man, but I've got some bad news for you, there are decentralization and privacy. Please read some technical documentation before participating in the discussions here.

Due to FATF guidelines its mandatory to all exchanges to do kyc to all there users and exchanges also share there users information to other exchange for cross border payments. in thats senerio true decentralization is not achieved because of interface governments.

At least considering that there are people who care about it, decentralization is not a myth. In fact there is, but giving very little worth.
Will there be no volume, no liquidity without centralization? I don't think like you. You exclude decentralization because you are used to the centralized system.

There are two kinds of crypto currencies. One of them is centralised like Ripple and another is decentralised like Ethereum. I do not believe that decentralised coins will fully replace traditional services, but a kind of a mixture is very possible.

I have already expressed my opinion on the matter but I think again will not be superfluous. I say that decentralization is the shifting of fees for the data centers and most importantly it is shifting responsibility for possible glitches on the shoulders of the hamsters, no more, and the blockchain is getting complete control when reaching someone 51% computational power.

I don’t think that there is any system that is developed by human being that can be 100% accurate as we could still see some problems like the one you pointed out but that is not to say bitcoin is not a true decentralized coin, it may not have been 100% but to an extent still better than most of the other project that we have in the market which I never expect them to even have such thing because of the selfish interest they will always out in developing such project.

Secondly, we the later users are the ones that have even turned this around for blockchain and for the main reason the cryptocurrency was established because if not, we would not be seeing all these centralized exchanges but more of decentralized exchange.

As what you have said already, cryptocurrency have some level of centralization… Decentralization depends on how each person perceive that word. If you feel it's decentralized and if it meets your expectation of decentralization, then you can call it as decentralized. Doesn't mean that a currency is decentralized, there's no involvement of others. No. As long as there is someone higher, or someone who can control most things, and you're under it, just like the government. It's not a full decentralized system. It's like decentralization has a limitation and one part is the only one decentralized but not everything.

IMO it's not a myth. It's more likely people are not ready for.

Centralization creates volume, liquidity and so on. Not only on exchanges but in any market. That's why you have a middle-man in almost every business who makes centralization and then liquidity. At food markets, at crypto exchanges, at fiat currency exchanges, etc.

Platform evolves and we are witnessing more and more useful DApps. IMO DPapps are the 'true' future and I'm investing every free resources in it.

I believe that it is matter of time. Creators and early investors of many altcoins now hold a big portion of "their" cryptocurrencies, but they will slowly distribute coins among users because sooner or later they will be pushed to do that. Look at Bitcoin, the decentralization is growing day by day because Bitcoins are slowly distributed among all users. And if you distribute these coins in airdrop, you will get competitive advantage like Stellar did it.

Now confidentiality is at a very weak level for most coins, which say that they are private. in most cases, all transactions can be tracked

It is.
They are claiming to be decentralized storage but they keep the data on their server which is centralized, there are so many projects claimed to be a decentralized project but none of them is a true decentralized project.
a true decentralization works in the theory but not applicable in reality because the government will take a measure to get involved in it. they will not allow such a thing called pure decentralization because it might affect them.

Great analysis mate. Some of us was expecting that the 100 percent decentralization was achievable in our current financial system (*the truth its not) I think its only a part of a larger perspective, how can we achieve a complete decentralization when our financial institution, commodities etc. still rely and built on the top of a *Centralized finance  ecosystem. Let's accept the truth that Decentralization is just an alternative option of a financial governance. 

No, I don't think it's a myth.

There are hundreds of decentralized applications around. Besides, some projects offer decentralized internet, decentralized storage, and much more.

Also, privacy coins allow users to exchange completely confidential (literally) money.

I've used almost all of them, and my opinion is that everything is going well by now.

I wouldn't call it a myth, but maybe an utopia, similar to the laissez-faire (free-market) system. In this world none of the countries are using a pure free market system. The government will always find a way to interfere, some say it good and some say it bad. We don't know since we couldn't do real world experiment about it.

Ok back to the topic. Could we do this 100% decentralization things?
- Developer decentralization;
- Node decentralization;
- Miner decentralization;
- others?

Yes in theory, but not feasible in the real world environment.

Cryptocurrency with the agenda of decentralization is a myth. We can't really become decentralized.

It doesn't mean decentralization is not good but I think there is a lot of disadvantages attached to it which is why we can't fully be decentralized

Not only that,,, even the old miners themselves generally saw what happened with BCH and then they themselves decided not to go with SegWit2x. This to me shows that even though people have been against Bitcoin, they know now that what they proposed was wrong and dangerous.

People will still choose and their choice is very clear in today's price.

I think coins like Bitcoin will remain decentralized because mining will continue. Transaction data is not stored in a data center and is spread across all the computers that record it and this is a decentralized form of Bitcoin. For tokens, centralization might occur because the supply controller is still in the developer team and the team can intervene in the market price

In fact there are a number of big players fighting over for bitcoin to be centralized for themselves, we can see with the dramas that have already taken place.
People who really want bitcoin to be decentralized prefer to keep quiet and keep trying to introduce bitcoin to everyone with all their expertise.

You have a very good point mate, in as much as we claim to see cryptocurrency fully decentralized this has never been the case in most of the major  cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. Almost all those who still operate using the PoW consensus protocol are can be centralized if those nodes with high computing power can come together to attack the network. However, these nodes have stayed honest  because of the benefits that they gain from the network other than the reward that they would get if they should harm the network.

100% decentralization is a myth but we are should trying to achive as much as possible

decentralization is not a myth.. its just meterpretered differently by people and also being used by project leaders in different ways to confuse people.
its just like privacy is being used by mark zuckerberg to confuse people. he is saying that facebook cares about privacy while it does not cares about privacy at all , but in technical level it does so you can not complaint, while they are selling your info to hunderds of organizations..
same thin decentralization.. you can have many levels of decentralization and scammers use that to confuse you.

only projects who are close to decentralization are BTC and ETC
dont believe if someone tells you otherwise

I believe that we have over 200 million users of cryptocurrency, and believe me that not everyone really understand what decentralization is all about, some of them just know that people are using crypto, while some of them are just more concerned about the use if it for investment whether it is a decentralized project or centralized project.

Very few people that are really more concerned about decentralization will really not care much about this project because their name already said it all, it has already said what they intend giving to the public, and people like me will not even look back into the project to see what they have to offer because I personally already have a little doubt about the project and its future growth.

Some people only see decentralized is about exchange, although not all but mostly discussion is about market that means centralized, wallet, etc. I will agree with you because if Bitcoin is centralized, and controlled by some organization or maybe government, people across the world wouldn't use it easily like now although in some country it has been banned.

With ASIC mining that is hard to achieve. Some company developed better ASIC miner. They make them and mine on their own. This was is and will be reality. Someone from Guatemala or Swaziland or Tadzikistan cant dream to afford that miner.   True mining decentralisation can only happen with algos that favourite CPU mining.

One computer one vote a smart guy used to say.

Decentralization is not a myth because if decentralization is a myth then the government should already stop the operation of cryptocurrencies especially Bitcoin. Bitcoin should not be available in the internet since the government doesn't want to deal with bitcoin because of its anonymity. Decentralization exists and it helps a lot of people in doing transactions.

It became more of democratic rather than saying it is decentralized.
The agreement that users will make is by having a choice or an option.
We could stop using it and go back to the normal one or just the old one. That is better than nothing.


Yeah, I also disagree with people calling it manipulation.
We are going larger in numbers now and if we are holding even just 1000 satoshis in our wallets then manipulating it will be difficult.

The first objective of blockchain technology implemented in BTC may be decentralized. However, over time, it continues to grow.
In this case, many developers end up creating blockchain-based projects in which decentralization is no longer 100% due to one thing or another.
And of course, the concept of decentralization will relate to the type of platform or coin or token offered.

POW or DPOS/POS have its own disadvantage and advantage. As per the possibility of 51% attack and holders have not power in POW system and totally controlled by the miners. We can see that when there will be an implementation to the any improvement proposal and the miners the only party that has the right to give vote. In POS system has the different mechanism. But as far as I believe bitcoin is the only true decentralized blockchain which is not even controlling by a team behind it like almost of all coins in the market except dogecoin.

POW can be centralized, DAG is verified as a centralized system.

Who cares about decentralization if there is no profit? Already the market has changed a lot compared to the past, most of us forgot what our main goal is. How many of us are using DEX? maybe 1 from 10. Because DEXs are not profitable. The profitable ones are Binance's IEOs and what they list. Do not get me wrong, but the truth is so painful in this regard.

Cryptocurrencies that are close to the true decentralization: Bitcoin, Grin and Cardano.
Bitcoin and Grin are very close to achieve the true decentralization because they do not have CEO, there is no person with special power and I believe that in the future the wealt will be redistributed.
And Cardano promises to achive more decentralized blockchain with the Shelley update, everyone who owns ADA will be able to maintain the blockchain.

 Complete decentralization is a myth. However 'good enough' decentralization is probably closer to reality. At least for BTC and some coins. For smaller cap coins decentralization may be a myth however, as the rich would centralize ownership of POS coins, while the poor would only be a small fraction. Just the way it is.

Define "True Decentralization" and you quickly notice that doesn't exist. Everything is centralized by the very fact that everything is focused on somewhere, even if the area is wider. Real power in decentralization is the permissionless blockchain, and it doesn't really matter how far we get on decentalization because there's no end on that road that would be some ultimate decentralized product. Just getting far away as we can from absolute centralization is enough for me.

SegWit2x shown us that miners don't have full control over Bitcoin - they simply follow the price, meaning they have to follow the community.

As for developers, Bitcoin is an open source project, everyone is free to contribute, those who don't agree with maintainers can create their own versions. I'm sure if developers did something that wouldn't be accepted by the community, people would just run the client that they agree with.

Bitcoin's supply distribution isn't a big problem, since we don't have PoS.


People tend to exaggerate the power of manipulation.

In conclusion, Bitcoin doesn't have any big problems with centralization.

There is no full decentralisation. I repeat! There is no full decentralisation. I doubt if there is going to be such. But there are platforms that are far less centralised than the other. That is what blockchain implemented concepts provide: far less centralisation. This ‘far less centralisation’ only creeps towards true decentralisation.

But, hey, I would still prefer 'far less centralisation' to traditional centralisation.

Only time will tell if true decentralisation is achievable or not.

No, it's not a myth atall. Nothing is impossible really.  People probably don't understand what true decentralization is, or don't know how to make things truely decentralized or don't want people to know that true decentralization is possible. I don't want to say much about this. I believe a time will come when most people will yern for true decentralizion.

I don't know what decentralization can be exactly other than what it is now in case of crypto currencies or bitcoin, to be very specific. Decentralized means owned by no one, having no central authority or server. Altcoins are a bit different than bitcoin in this case. There are so many of them, all varying from each other. If it was possible to control crypto currencies, then China would have already taken over bitcoin.

We may not get complete decentralization from cryptos but we can get more freedom of using it compared to the current fiat,Why this is happening because we choose decentralized platforms to by cryptos which are working under the regulations of governments so they need to follow the laws from government so they seek for consumer details which makes the system not to be completely decentralized.

If everyone buying cryptos from decentralized platforms then this may change.

I wouldn't say that it is a myth, but rather something that is not very easily achievable.

There is bound to be some degree of centralisation here or there along the way of using even decentralised cryptos, whether it's on the exchanges, trusting a third party to hold escrow, etc.

Sometimes, these central points don't necessarily need to be eliminated despite traditional outlooks. From a pragmatic standpoint, it's unlikely we'll ever see a system that can be truly decentralised, because that's not feasible.

different customs as parties to manage on uses with distinctive as appealing release on moderation as extensive with offers to connects on network with the blockchain helps as securing least on waste to work on latency as the server connects to deliver notables on exchange with the function of utilization.

Decentralization is very unlikely in my opinion, because without supervision it will be very wild. Regulations are needed so that KYC is now common in the crypto world

yes it's just a myth, but decentralization right now is good enough. it might not really be the decentralization that we want, but that's enough than using centralized technology. as long as it's not controlled by the government or an institution like the central bank, that's enough for me. Pow and Pos have flaws, and indeed from the beginning this technology was not perfect, so we have to understand it

For now we might not consider them perfect as we all know they can still all improve and can still have many ways to progress and be entirely decentralised. But for now as government finds it unacceptable for them as they don't have control over things that's why they should still be sort of customization happening in different projects.

PoW is determined from a lot of HASH, the more hash a person has that he can control mining. like bitcoin right now which is controlled by a few big companies.

and no different from Pow, PoS is the same. the more coins they have the more stakes they get. so from the start there was no perfect decentralization. if someone still asks this now, I think it's too late.

there is no perfect decentralization, all consensus has its drawbacks. so don't be surprised by this. but I think the current blockchain technology (except POS / DPOS) is better and far from centralized. even though it's not perfect yet, but we can still compromise on this.

I quite agree on OPs statement. Even though the platform is really made to be decentralized, there would always be a point that it becomes centralized. For instance, mining pools are centralized in the sense that mining rigs work together under a single mining pool to get block rewards, then only it would be distributed in the true decentralized network of nodes.

But one thing came into my mind. Think about torrents, the famous file sharing protocol that uses P2P connections to find fragments of files over the network. Isn't it truly decentralized?

Just like a true democracy, we would never have a true decentralization. Arguably the most decentralized coin bitcoin is controlled by miners and developers while the largest amount are hold by early adopters and whale investors. The price is mostly determined by the manipulation rather than the market. For any other coins, thing are much worse.

I tend to believe too that Bitcoin is not fully decentralised yet due to unequal distribution because large miners can influence prices and has partial control in the ecosystem. But once it will become more diversified and distributed equally among users worldwide then full decentralisation might be achievable but very slim possibility.

Sadly but surely, there's no way to achieve 100% decentralization these days. There has to be a certain level of centralization for a system to function as intended. The only way I'd see decentralization would work is if everything is performed by AI, instead of human beings. Other than that, there will always be the ambitions of greed and other factors that would make any system obtain a certain level of centralization. In the world of crypto, some coins are more decentralized than others and vice versa. It's best to take our efforts in ensuring the crypto industry remains as decentralized as possible. Of course, most people still depend on centralized exchanges to perform their crypto trades which greatly defeats crypto's purpose. Luckily, we have diverse solutions (like DEXs, non-custodial mixers, etc.) that maintain the crypto industry censorship-resistant in some way.

Nonetheless, it's safe to say that "True Decentralization" is just a myth than anything else. The term "decentralization" has become a buzzword where many companies use it for their own benefit. Even Ripple claims it's XRP Ledger to be decentralized when that's not truly the case. Hopefully, people would understand how crypto truly works in order to avoid many misconceptions about its design. Just my opinion

I'll take 95% decentralization over any centralized option out there any day. Agree that BTC has a few centralized points, due to the way it's mined. Actually more a fan of POS, however these are prone to 51% attacks if the supply isn't diversified enough amongst it's users, meaning a whale could potentially buy up more than half of it's supply over time.

It's a funny discussion, since it proves that more and more people is starting to actually care about this topic, meanwhile we see everyone trade their favourite cryptocurrencies on centralized exchanges, which is as close to as centralized as you can get. It boggles me every single day, that no one seems to scare, I guess everyone is just in it for the money Haha! 

I have a strong feeling that once people actually DO start to care, that projects like Blocknet for example, will be major players, since their DEX solutions will off set peoples need to stay anonymous while trading. As the bigger players are entering the scene, with millions of dollars to play with, I'm sure a LOT of these guys, would love to hide their money this way. As we've seen so many times, the rich and wealthy hides the majority of their money from the tax man, I wonder why 

Complete decentralisation is not possible, I mean some one needs to keep a check of what is happening in the ecosystem. 80 percent of the world is living under centralization. We few are enjoying the perks of somewhat decentralization. Isn't that good enough.

Cryptocurrency gives a decentralized system where we transact anonymously but we have also to remember that this is not a fully decentralized because there are some transactions that you still need to do a KYC especially on withdrawing your funds from a wallet to your bank. What we have right now is better compare before, everyone knows already the real meaning of fiat money with a slow transaction system. 100% decentralized or not at least we are ahead to yesterday and we are looking forward to a better financial system.

Decentralization exists. Our perception of it is wrong. Some say Bitcoin has centralized mining, not true decentralization. Instead of thinking about absolute decentralization, we should think of increasing money options. Having crypto options is a way to decentralize our money from existing financial system.

Even within Bitcoin, if you take all the forks of Bitcoin into account, the whole ecosystem is fairly decentralized. We have many coin variants, mining algorithms. That is decentralization.

Our lazy brain somehow fools us to think decentralization means search for truth. Decentralization is not about searching for the absolute, centralized truth, one true coin. It's about freedom to choose what we want to do. Decentralization is detachment from existing system. We give it up to find new alternatives. They could be better or worse than what we leave behind. The choice is always ours. Do Your Own Research.

Since Bitcoin was created, Blockchain technology promised to bring full decentralization over people's funds. Each cryptocurrency has a certain level/degree of decentralization depending on the consensus algorithm used and the number of distributed nodes worldwide. While Bitcoin is known to be the most decentralized cryptocurrency today, it still has a certain level of centralization attached to it. PoW is not perfect, as well as, PoS, DPoS and other consensus algorithms.

In the search of "True Decentralization", I found out that there's no such thing. One way or another, a cryptocurrency will have some level of centralization as nothing is perfect in this life. Which is why, I'm starting to think if "True Decentralization" is more of a myth than anything else? What are your thoughts?