Decentralization

A technical and marketing buzzword use amorphously to refer to an unclear set of aspirations about a technology or community. Appeals to decentralization will often involve co-mingling with other loaded or misinterpreted words such as:

  • Immutable
  • Decentralized
  • Trustless
  • Secure
  • Tamper-proof
  • Disintermediated
  • Open/Transparent
  • Neutral
  • Direct transfers of value

Use of term decentralization is often falsely used interchangeably with "democratization", which has an orthogonal meaning.

In information technology it refers to a type of network topology in which a system has no single point of failure and whose workload or actions are performed in parallel by multiple computers which provide a shared service. The internet is the canonical example of a decentralized network.

References

  1. Walch, Angela. 2019. ‘Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems’. C. Brummer (Ed.), Crypto Assets: Legal and Monetary Perspectives, 1–36. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244.
  2. Becker, Moritz. 2019. ‘Blockchain and the Promise (s) of Decentralisation : A Sociological Investigation of the Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Blockchain’. In Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2019, 6–30. https://doi.org/10.3217/978-3-85125-668-0-02.
  3. Soatok. 2021. ‘Against Web3 and Faux-Decentralization’. Dhole Moments. 19 October 2021. https://soatok.blog/2021/10/19/against-web3-and-faux-decentralization/.
  4. Zhang, Zhexi. 2019. ‘The Aesthetics of Decentralization’. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/123614.
  5. Allen, Hilary J. 2022. ‘DeFi: Shadow Banking 2.0?’ William & Mary Law Review, Forthcoming.
  6. Tante. 2021. ‘The Third Web’. Nodes in a Social Network (blog). 17 December 2021. https://tante.cc/2021/12/17/the-third-web/.
  7. Weaver, Nicholas. 2021. ‘The Web3 Fraud’. USENIX. 16 December 2021. https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud.
  8. Diehl, Stephen. 2021. ‘Web3 Is Bullshit’. 4 December 2021. https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html.
  9. Levine, Matt. 2022. ‘Web3 Takes Trust Too’. 10 January 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-10/web3-takes-trust-too.
  10. Aramonte, Sirio, Wenqian Huang, and Andreas Schrimpf. 2021. ‘DeFi Risks and the Decentralisation Illusion’, 16.
  11. Arnosti, Nick, and S Matthew Weinberg. 2022. ‘Bitcoin: A Natural Oligopoly’. Management Science.
  12. Azouvi, Sarah. 2021. ‘Levels of Decentralization and Trust in Cryptocurrencies: Consensus, Governance and Applications’. PhD Thesis, University College London. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10139069/.
  13. Babu, Asvatha. 2020. ‘Behind the Veil of Decentralization: Analyzing Blockchain Frames and Sponsors in US News’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3749482.
  14. Bodó, Balázs, Jaya Klara Brekke, and Jaap Henk Hoepman. 2021. ‘Decentralisation: A Multidisciplinary Perspective’. Internet Policy Review 10 (2): 0–21. https://doi.org/10.14763/2021.2.1563.
  15. Garrod, J. Z. 2016. ‘The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society’. TripleC 14 (1): 62–77. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v14i1.692.
  16. Halpin, Harry. 2020. ‘Deconstructing the Decentralization Trilemma’. ICETE 2020 - Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications 3: 505–12. https://doi.org/10.5220/0009892405050512.
  17. Humayun, Syeda Mariam. 2019. ‘Creation and Resilience of Decentralized Brands: Bitcoin & the Blockchain’. PhD Thesis. http://hdl.handle.net/10315/37662.
  18. Mannan, M. & Schneider, N. 2020. ‘Exit to Community: Strategies for Multi-Stakeholder Ownership in the Platform Economy’. Georgetown Law Technology Review 4 (1): 2017–19. https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/exit-to-community-strategies-for-multi-stakeholder-ownership-in-the-platform-economy/GLTR-05-2021/.
  19. Manski, Sarah, and Michel Bauwens. 2020. ‘Reimagining New Socio-Technical Economics Through the Application of Distributed Ledger Technologies’. Frontiers in Blockchain 2 (January): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00029.
  20. Rocas-Royo, Marc. 2021. ‘The Blockchain That Was Not: The Case of Four Cooperative Agroecological Supermarkets’. Frontiers in Blockchain 4 (April): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2021.624810.
  21. Sai, Ashish Rajendra. 2021. ‘Towards a Holistic Assessment of Centralization in Distributed Ledgers’. https://ulir.ul.ie/handle/10344/10766.
  22. Sai, Ashish Rajendra, Jim Buckley, Brian Fitzgerald, and Andrew Le Gear. 2021. ‘Taxonomy of Centralization in Public Blockchain Systems: A Systematic Literature Review’. Information Processing and Management 58 (4): 102584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2021.102584.
  23. Schneider, Nathan. 2019. ‘Decentralization: An Incomplete Ambition’. Journal of Cultural Economy. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2019.1589553.
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