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Huh, was expecting the article to be about different meanings of centralization and how Bitcoin doesn't meet all of them -- to use Vitalik Buterin's terminology

Huh, was expecting the article to be about different meanings of centralization and how Bitcoin doesn't meet all of them -- to use Vitalik Buterin's terminology[1], it's not logically decentralized (being ultimately based around a single consensus ledger). Instead it's claiming that Bitcoin isn't politically decentralized like it claims to be. [1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

placeybordeaux 9y ago
Yeah bitcoin is distributed, it functions as if it has a ~10m global semaphore. The actual details are much more complicated, but with the current design you are not getting around that, current efforts are to build systems that only settle to the chain when trust is broken.
dozzie 9y ago
> being ultimately based around a single consensus ledger You managed to got two things wrong in one short sentence: it's not single ledger (everybody at each point have their own version, only to some degree compatible with anybody else), and it's not consensus ledger, as in consensus problem a.k.a. Byzantine generals. Bitcoin never aimed at consensus, it was always about timestamping the documents (transactions).