Topic: There are no decentralized cryptocurrencies (Read 404 times)

As long as I am getting to reap the benefits out of bitcoin without interference from any third party, I don’t care whether you call it centralized or decentralized. I am free to use it the way I want to and that’s all I care about.

You misunderstand my use of  the word. I mean equal in terms of worth & importance and that all hierarchies we create are merely ideas we can choose to agree or not agree upon.

And with "we" I mean all human beings.

There are many cryptocurrencies that are decentralized. Bitcoin is most decentralized Cryptocurrency entire whole ecosystem. XRP, Etherium are also decentralized Cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin itself is fully decentralized as it was created for peer to peer cash transfer. There are coin like XRP, USDT, BNB that are created by centralized institutes and they have the control to manipulate the blockchain. While nobody can control or manipulate the BTC blockchain. Exchanges that require KYC are not part of Bitcoin decentralized ecosystem.

When we start ignoring all the services which are asking to clear KYC, we could solve this. But, in this busy world everyone (including myself), goes for KYC mandatory services (for exchanging, gambling, etc) for quick and ease access and killing the true purpose of bitcoins.

We must develop community based P2P exchanges to skip centralized exchanges and should support only gambling services which are promising about No-KYC-forever. I guess we cannot lead a life without dependent on any of centralized services but we could stay anonymous by  protecting our privacy/identity to ensure the decentralization.

The only really decentralized coin is surely Bitcoin. For me decentralization means that there is nobody who can really control this system and change something on his own. We don't know who was a creator of Bitcoin so there is no such a big influencer like in case of Ethereum. 
But you are right that we are still not in complete control over blockchain as there are companies that control internet.

Would it be possible with Filecoin and IPFS?  I once encountered a discussion about this where they can decentralize hosting.

It's not hard to see why we also need the centralized system for governments to have control over what is theirs to take. Not everything is up to be decentralized using blockchain we've seen more decentralization of some kind.

XRP is centralized because 50% of the tokens belong to the company Ripple Labs and that's one kind of centralization.
ETH is centralized because if Vitalik dies, the project may not go on after that and this is some kind of centralization too.

You are probably looking into the direction of redundancy. Introducing an additional novel method of communication wouldn't make it more "redundant". Reason being, if people needs to get a completely new tech just to use Bitcoin, then you are raising the barrier of entry. You need new equipment which has to be visibly installed or obtained. It would only exist if the government which the users are in supports Bitcoin. Using an infrastructure that doesn't already piggyback on the country's core infrastructure is counterintuitive.

First I would like to say that what is the problem if Bitcoin is decentralized and dependent on the central internet? I think it is still decentralized and this will not affect anything, if we follow your logic we will find that there is no real decentralization actually but there is less or more centralization, well maybe with Web 3 we will move to a more decentralized Internet, maybe also in the near future we find a decentralized Internet that depends on The blockchain is not subject to any central authority.

we all truly equal?.. is a grammar paradox

..we are all unique, just like everyone else..


we all truly equal?.. is a grammar paradox

..we are all unique, just like everyone else..


lets take amazon servers. if they were all networked together in one warehouse, in only america. and only connected to one ISP. where that ISP was servant to US government regulations.. then that would be centralised.

blockchains work, as-is. by not being in one country, under 1 ISP, under one government.

blockchains do not work within just one central point. thats the point of blockchains. the issues/paranoia you have on the subject is actually fixed and a non-issue from the very beginning. its the whole point of blockchains existence and creation

I wholly agree, I understand that the definition of decentralization is what is crucial here. I included the framework a cryptocurrency is working within and is dependent of, which is not part of the cryptocurrency itself. -Which does not mean that the cryptocurrency is failing in being decentralized. The main postulation I make in the title is in fact incorrect.

Should I change it?

Thinking a bit more about this, my ponderings are actually about the framework which the crypto is working within and which ideas would be pointing towards possible solutions should that framework in any way break or become intentionally or accidentally limited in terms of the functionality of any blockchain technology.

I like to visualize technology that might be possible in the future, like some quantum scalar-wave communication tech that is not limited to any geographical distance and also not time-delayed like ordinary radio tech. Studying the EPR experiment, quantum entanglement and surrounding research and information strongly suggest, at least to me, that it is very much possible. It would allow for a truly peer-to-peer new "internet", and with open source community-driven hardware as well as software, we would be on the next step towards actual information freedom.

Just babbling on here haha...

I think that a decentralized Internet could be a great thing, but given how everyone is already so used to the one we have now, I'm not sure it's possible to switch to a different system (at least, not globally). But the Internet isn't that bad, and given that there are tons of ISPs all over the world, I'd say that access to it IS pretty decentralized, and I don't think it's likely that anyone could be cut off (unless it's a confined space like prison or a totalitarian country like North Korea). Also, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe it's possible to find a workaround and use Bitcoin without the Internet (it would be very difficult, of course, but still).

Most cryptocurrencies are in fact decentralized by definition, because there isn't an actual central authority that regulates it. The degree of decentralization is the point of discussion here. That has to do with how any entity is feasibly able to control Bitcoin, and the answer for that is that it is not easy. You can restrict access to it, through GFW or something similar but it isn't effective till you block it off entirely.

Even if you establish a hermit empire like NK, you don't compromise the decentralization of Bitcoin. You merely lose access to that part of consumers but it doesn't compromise the decentralization of it otherwise.

Well we are on that, it is not theory that decentralization is currently happening, it does not depend on the infraestructures depend of the individuals to carry it out and understand what it really means.

There is no link of internet and VPN with the centralized / decentralized nature of bitcoin.

You need to detach ISP's from crypto currencies, ISP's are not inherent to cryptocurrency. Yes, an ISP generally stands in the way of you and sending crypto, but by inherent nature cryptocurrency does not rely on an ISP, so it's not a productive argument to make.

Take it one step further from ISP's. Who controls the ISP? The government. You could argue that crypto isn't decentralized because you might live in a jurisdiction that proposes crypto taxes or strict regulations on any sort of trading. Again, governmental intervention isn't an inherent, by design, property of crypto, so you wouldn't correct in making that argument.

Your fundamentals aren't faulty, because you essentially make the case for free and fair internet without purview of the government. But tying this to bitcoin isn't the best application of your concern. It's comparing apples to oranges.

I agree with you, we don't need to focus on whether bitcoin is centralized or decentralized, but just look at bitcoin that has been running for years but is still safe and cannot be hacked by any system. As a player, it is enough to just look at the positive and don't need to be stuck with negative issues that can cause people to be afraid to invest in crypto.

Thanks for all the input, all of the answers are valuable to paint the picture so to speak. As much as it might actually be a non-issue now and maybe always, we don't really know what kind of technology will emerge in the future and how big the possibility it will be for any individual to utterly create and/or control ones own piece of tech.

As for "being paranoid"-comments, haha, just look at the world.. Look at it! What the funk are we doing as a species on this planet? Are we not all truly equal? Why do we pretend otherwise? Well, that's another discussion

Again, Thank you all for your input so far.

I think the big misconception is; Decentralisation is always a good thing, while in certain situations decentralisation could potentially cause more issues than its worth. Personally, I'm not bothered to some extent on compromising in certain aspects, as long as my main principles are catered for; security, privacy, and freedom. At the moment, there are ways around ISP's being dicks, and while they have definitely been working on preventing that in recent times, they haven't succeeded.

I suspect something like the Tor Project will be incorporated in many countries internet providers once people start to realise the freedom they could have. It'll only take a few large scale events to make it happen, but it will likely happen. Probably, being spawned due to the fact that governments will be looking to restrict their populations more so in the future, and with the evolving technology retaining your privacy will likely become a thing of the past. That'll be the time when people start looking for alternatives.

China is probably one of the more public governments on restricting their population, but that's by no means as effective as they like to admit.  

If the internet is the only problem, there it's not a problem.

As long as there's the internet, anything can be accessed with the use of a VPN to bypass the restrictions. I don't see it as a big problem actually and in the time bitcoin has already existed, it was never brought up to be a serious issue to destroy the decentralization of bitcoin. Maybe you are just overthinking but I like how your mind works, you dig deeper but I tell you, this thing is not a concern at all.

The truth is that at some point a compromise has to be made, bitcoin is decentralized but the purpose of bitcoin was to forfeit the need for a third party to verify the validity of the transactions when making a transaction online, and when it comes to that point bitcoin succeeded.

Now it is true that bitcoin is built over a centralized network which is the Internet, but even if the Internet could be decentralized as well now we need to consider that the Internet runs above the electric grid, which is a another centralized network, so while the OP is right Satoshi needed to begin somewhere, if he had to wait until everything else became decentralized then we should probably had to wait for bitcoin for decades, and that in the best case scenario.

If we continue to look at things the way that you are looking at them right now, then we might as well give up on everything. Let’s just not go down that road for now, at least with Bitcoin we have been able to achieve that decentralization to an extent. There are even wallets these days that can send Bitcoin without having to make use of the Internet, the transactions are made offline from one person to another.

And even on the blockchain, the transactions you make only shows your address and where the transaction is going to, it doesn’t really show who is behind the transaction, because your identity is not revealed on the platform. So the privacy Has been achieved to an extent.

yes you have just said what i said about mutually agreed communication. but failed to realise that each country has more then one ISP. and each ISP has its own policies.

EG a russian ISP has different policies than a US ISP
russian government cant tell a russian ISP to "take down" a US ISP or the US government access to the internet. if they could, they would.

what you have to realise with each IP access/webpage visit, there is a handshake protocol. where parties agree on the communication method. yes in most cases they all agree on the same language format of data, but thats not centralisation. thats communication. consent/agreement at each interaction.

being centralised is a single point of control/failure. where everything has to go through one single point. and one entity has full control or can collapse it all. but thats not how the internet works

i know you are trying to imagine the internet as a polygomists house. where all the women in the house is married together with one man and where the man of the house then 'owns' all his wives to do as he pleases by his naive thought that being married means control.

but thats not how marriage works.
just because they speak the same language and have a mutual agreement. does not mean the man can rape his wife anytime he wants. he needs their consent with each interaction/event. women have a mind of their own, their own independance and their own choice to just say no. or more often "not tonight i have a headache".

just because there is a russian polygomist in one house on a street does not mean he controls the whole street of woman. yes he can TRY to lock his wives up to not be able to talk to neighbours. but he cant lock all the houses up to stop other families from talking to each other. and sooner or later even his own wives will find a way to get out and talk to the neighbours.

yes russia can get its russian ISP to shut down. but this only affects russian customers. not the internet. russian customers can then just use satalite or cellular to access other international internet access servers.

when you learn about handshaking and data formats and protocols you start to see the internet is about consent, not control.

no government can just say 'tomorrow the internet shall only speak in digital russian'.. all countries, all isps and all servers have to agree to a protocol for it to then happen. and that does not happen very easily if at all. russia cannot just change/stop the internet.

Let's say you managed to decentralize the Internet somehow. You have decentralized the software. What are you going to do with the hardware that connects to your newly decentralized internet? That's centralized as well. Most of it is probably closed-source. Can you trust your CPU, your GPU, and everything you connect to your USB ports (mouses and keyboards)? If we want decentralization, shouldn't we also build our own computers and the individual hardware components?

Some amount of paranoia is OK if you are being your own bank, but not too much.

Internet is to some degree centralized, but it's not exactly easily controlled. Even people in China manage to use VPN and TOR to bypass government's control and access free media. The biggest threat for crypto is a scenario when the government just shuts down all internet connection in certain location, which is something that governments like China and Russia have been actively working on. Being internet-only currency can certainly be a downside in certain edge cases, but this doesn't mean that crypto as a whole is centralized.

I guess the interpretation of decentralization is a bit wrong here. What I think decentralization of bitcoin means is that I am free to use whenever I want to use it, its not the case with my money sitting in banks (the centralized). Secondary, IMO Eth is not a decentralized crypto since it has a founder and there is a community of developers maintaining the blockchain.

You shouldn't be so obsessed with all the "centralized vs.decentralized" thing.
Many industries and many parts of our life are centralized and making them decentralized will simply break them.Being stuck in the centralization=bad and decentralization=good paradigm is a great oversimplification,if you ask me.
The economy and the entire human civilization are driven by two processes-competition and cooperation.
Sometimes competition can increase the levels of efficiency in a system,but sometimes cooperation can bring synergy and more benefits for the people/entities,who are cooperating.
Is competition similar to decentralization and is cooperation similar to centralization?
I think that the human civilization needs both centralization and decentralization,but in the right niches and industries.

There is no such thing as fully decentralized,,, I think this is the point we all need to understand and accept. The internet is in parts centralized and in parts not, it is the best case of how decentralization can work, when you look at how it is run and accessed all over the world.

With crypto, Bitcoin is the most decentralized of all, I believe followed by Ethereum. There is no possibility for total decentralization, but always the possibility for more decentralization, which happens with Bitcoin more and more.

This is the fundamental reason why the next step of decentralisation is needed to plan for.

"They" do not have the good of "we the people" at heart, which is getting more blatantly obvious by the day now.

As in becomes the world's most used and accepted payment method? I don't see that happening. If they can't govern it, they don't want it.

Tell that to Ross Ulbricht and those who were operating Silk Road and see how far that gets you. I mean sure, you can create a dark web marketplace and the government can't simply shut it down. But let's not kid ourselves that people and services can't be stopped, blocked, and shut down when there is enough interest to do so.

you can verify a signature by your self it means any tx even without internet.
if is still on internet, (blockchain) try to modify it.
satellite doesn't need internet to work. there is a product that allow to receive/send tx without internet https://blockstream.com/satellite/

While you are right and ISPs may silence this and that, you're omitting that:
1. In a democratic country the ISP will go for profit, hence won't completely silence a customer.
2. If the ISP filters certain things then tunneling / VPN can, in most cases "fix" this.

So the ISP cannot create a perfect "wall" if one is... resourceful.

So while your suppositions may stand correct in a dictatorship, the rest of the world will just go as usual. And the rest of the world is big enough to not be seen as centralized (else we can end up to "bitcoin is centralized: one can mine it only from Earth" odd exaggerations).

I think that's because the government is operating a number of those dark web sites or at least keeping close tabs on them to follow money flows to build social graphs, mine data, and collect intel, etc.

No, I didn't know that, but it being possible makes sense.

Otherwise, I enjoy your reflection of my description above. My purpose here is not to criticise, but to see what Ideas could possibly be valid in the future when the next step of the evolution in decentralisation is due. We, as a civilisation, seldom look forward, but seem to stride to keep things as they are, until a next step is forced by crisis or stimulated by genius breakthrough. Without ideas beyond where we are at in any given moment, there is no future but a repetition of the past.

---

With your argument banks are not centralised either, because there are many banks all over the world.

I know ISP's are not one entity. But they are all centralised in the way that each of them facilitate access for more than one singular user each. I believe that all countries have a cooperation between ISP's and governments, which have the potentiality of ISP's being used as tools by tyrannical leaders to silence opposition. That is the type of centralisation that is definitely not beneficial for humanity.

I get the idea that blockchain runs on the internet and you're connecting on it as the internet is controlled by a central power and they're the ISPs. And as for ISPs, they're controlled by the government. But with that comparison, I'll give you an idea and example of a decentralized place. Are dark web and deep web centralized? They're also running on the internet but there's no way to control them. The government can't even stop them.

the internet is interconnected...yes..
..but ISP's are not centralised under one company, which are all using one DNS

its funny how you start your idea by literally using a plural to describe ISP's and not a singular context.

just because computers are networked together does not make them a single entity controlled by a single point of failure/entity.

the internet has different ISP's in different countries with different policies. if it was all centralised, wouldnt you think russia would have taken out the US 'subsidiary' of your imaginary conglomerate by now

There are not and can't be any decentralized projects on planet Earth because our solar system is extremely centralized because (1) the sun is a single point of failure in our system (if it fails, so does everything including our decentralized project), (2) we depend on the sun and hope that it will not burn us, in fact it is an authoritarian system, which means that is antithetical to the very concept of decentralized systems, (3) the systems that we build on Earth matter neither for the sun nor the Universe. In short, Bitcoin doesn't make sense and solves no real problems of universal scale.


Do you know you can become your own ISP and grant access to yourself?

Indeed, you are correct.

But consider the situation where crypto more or less takes over, and tyrannical leaders use regulation, ISP's and controlled infrastructure to block the whole phenomenon to keep control over the population. We've seen it in several countries already. I believe it is a discussion that needs to be had, not least including people much smarter and more technologically experienced than me.

Your arguments are more philosophical rather than technical and real. If we start going down that path we would soon realize that even your being is not decentralized simply because you can philosophically argue about anything and bring reasons why you found truth where there is no facts.

The blockchain is still on the internet.


The sattellite is connecting to the internet, isn't it?
And, The blockchain is still on the internet.


Which one?


I agree, that is why I want to know what ideas other people have about this. The only decentralized payment method today is to exchange goods and services for other goods and services, which is highly unflexible.

you can create and manage completely off line a bitcoin wallet (check glacier protocol).
you can also receive block through satellite and not just internet.
decentralization is something really hard to achieve.
and for what we know (taking in account several index and pattern) there is just one crypto coins really decentralized.
it's really hard to have another coin decentralized, from the scratch, probably it can happens, but PoW that helps bitcoin blockchain it's something close impossible to achieve

Where have you been the past over 10 years? :-D

...as of now. As long as we have ISP's who grants us access to the internet, or any part of that internet, hardware-wise and otherwise, is controlled by any central authority or produced non open source.

Don't get me wrong, I love what is going on.  BTC and friends are shaking up the world monetarily and the potential for a future where traditional banks and their power over the little people (that's 99.9999% of us) are no more.  It is a light in the tunnel, if we can keep our eyes from being fooled by the artificial lights designed to lead us back into the darkness.

But. As long as we rely on any centralized system, crypto can not be truly decentalized.  How do we solve this?  What is the next step towards true decentralization? A world-wide cascading network of long range radio devices (HAM, LoRa, etc) that people can assemble and program themselves?

What do you think? Or are the fundamentals I presented above faulty? Please let me know!