❌ [Analysis] Let's Ditch "Decentralized" – Tony Sheng

The word "decentralized" is one of the most used and often discussed words in crypto, yet people are unclear what it actually means. “Decentralized” is defined as the opposite of “centralized.” In other words, “decentralized” is an “antonymic definition”–defined only as the opposite of something else. An antonymic definition is highly susceptible to semantic drift: the evolution of a word’s meaning as a result of careless usage. &nbsp Due to the ambiguous definition of the word, it is unclear under what conditions are systems decentralized enough. According to Nic Carter, an ideally decentralized distributed network has the following three properties:

1. A meritocratic, public delegative democracy to make top-level, extra-protocol decisions
2. A widely dispersed network of miners or stakers (no individual with more than 5% distribution) that make intra-protocol decisions
3. A prolific number of cheap and distributed nodes that validate the transactions of the network

The recent paper by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance also tries to describe decentralization as a property that emerges from the roles, behaviors, and influence of actors on each layer–protocol, network, and data–of a distributed ledger. Even Vitalik frames it as "When people talk about software decentralization, there are actually three separate axes of centralization/decentralization that they may be talking about…

1. Architectural (de)centralization — how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time?
2. Political (de)centralization — how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?
3. Logical (de)centralization— does the interface and data structures that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: if you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully operate as independent units?

…Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computer)" &nbsp While these attempts to disambiguate things embedded in the term “decentralized” move the discourse forward, all three authors would agree that they have not achieved a useful canonical definition for the term. “Decentralized” is a platonic ideal that trust and power are distributed in a superlatively fair way. It’s not something that can be reached, but a useful thing to reach towards. &nbsp A loaded term like “decentralized” confuses discourse around individual properties that can be defined and described like censorship resistance, security, governance, and distribution. It has become a word that means “the opposite of all the bad properties of legacy systems.” It’s the perfect word for scammers and authoritarians to hide behind. Instead of a descriptor of the material world, “decentralized” should be used only as an ideal like “holy”. We should challenge ourselves to use more specific language.

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