Understanding Decentralization

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Decentralization (or decentralisation) is the process of redistributing or dispersing functions, powers, people or things away from a central location or authority.

Decentralization is not multiple central authorities that trusts each other.

Decentralization is where everyone is an independent authority and does not need to trust each other.

The internet is fairly decentralized (not talking about DNS / SSL). I don't need to ask ICANN if this guy is really 84.223.248.25 when someone makes a request, I just send packets to that address and if the source IP was forged it would arrive in the wrong destination. That's trust free. Same thing with Bitcoin, I *don't* need to trust a miner spent processing power mining a block, I can verify it through their Proof of Work.

Decentralization is not root central authorities that you trust or start to trust.

[Coinseeker]

[SamS]

Not a lot of "love one and other as you love yourself" there...

Back on topic, I don't see how a decentralized network is actually possible in the absence of a global currency. The need for an interface back to Fiat really does imply some sort of distributed network to me as I don't think it's realistic to believe that individuals will become FX traders -- way to much risk. Can someone give a simple transaction based example -- theoretical -- of a decentralized crypto-currency network that doesn't ultimately devolve back to a distributed (nodal) network?