Lecture 2.1: Centralization vs. decentralization
Decentralization is not all-or-nothing
example: email
Which is a decentralized system.
But what has happended in the last decade or so, is that a dominance of a few web mail providers which are sort of centralized service providers.
This might be a good model for understanding what might be happening to Bitcoin.
Aspects of decentralization in Bitcoin
five questions:
- Who maintains the ledger?
- Who has authority over which transactions are valid?
- Who creates new bitcoins?
- Who determines how the rules of the system change?
- How do bitcoins acquire exchange value?