Decentralized

Full Title or Meme

Decentralized is a term that is badly missed used in the Web3 world to mean Distributed, which is not what it means in English.

Taxonomy

• Centralized = total order
• Decentralized = many point where order is maintained.
• Distributed = Each point decides how to create order for themselves.
• Anarchy = Order? who wants order?

Examples

Decentralized applications (or dapps) is like a digital app found on any smartphone or laptop, with the additional feature of employing blockchain technology to keep users’ data out of the hands of the organizations behind it. Just like cryptocurrency is decentralized money, dapps are decentralized apps. The blockchain stores copies of its expanding stack of data on a large number of participating computers, known as “nodes,” all at once. These computers are owned by users, not by the creators of the dapp.

Problems

In business, as in life, we see a constant tension between the efficiency of centralized control versus the resiliency of decentralized or even distributed control. This results in a constant churn where one cycle increases efficiency and then the reaction is to increase resilience or innovation. Humans do not seem to have been able to damp this ongoing cycle. See the wiki page on Decentralization for more details.