If institutional money drives the market…
Is crypto still decentralised in practice?
Or we are watching it slowly move from decentralisation?
Crypto was never decentralized. Crypto emerged because people do not have the time or knowledge to understand the technical and economic essence of Bitcoin, so various scammers exploit that ignorance.A group of scammers gets together, raises money from VC capital, launches some project of their own, keeps a huge premine for themselves, hypes it up, and then dumps it on fools.For example, XRP, Solana,ETH and similar projects are,all scams.
I think you are confused. Bitcoin is a crypto (short for cryptocurrency) and Bitcoin is decentralized. Now that proves you are wrong when you say Crypto was never decentralized, and take note, Bitcoin is the first successful crypto recorded in the history.
Yes, there are crypto that are centralized even though they claimed to be decentralized, but this never deny the fact that crypto can be both centralized and decentralized depending on the blockchain mentioned.
When we say decentralization, we mean that no one can change the rules unilaterally. Bitcoin is money digital cash. Everyone is a peer in that monetary network,Bitcoin is software, and that software is not located in one place. Each of us runs our own copy on our own computer. For anyone to change the software, they would have to convince all of us to upgrade to a new version.Everyone decides for themselves which software they will install on their computer.
And Bitcoin is a crypto.Altcoins are not true peer-to-peer networks. In most altcoin systems, you do not have a large number of independent users running their own software. In practice, the network is maintained by a small number of large companies or centralized actors.I hope I helped you understand it, but you will understand it best if you install Bitcoin and then try installing, for example, an Ethereum or some other altcoin node. That is where the difference becomes obvious, because almost nobody runs a node there.
Do you really understand what a peer-to-peer network means? You just oversimplifies everything and cryptocurrency does not work like that. Each altcoin have their own level of users. Not because one has a small user base, they are not P2P network. I believe you just want people to believe something what you believe, even though it is not an accurate fact.