Decentralisation means dispersing authority across two dimensions: access to information and ability to influence decisions. Bitcoin and Ethereum fall short of true decentralisation because most users can't access hidden data like mempool transactions or participate as validators, while cost and inconvenience keep them from running full nodes.
The question is, back to decentralization, you said distribution of authority is the key here. Is that, what does authority really mean when you say that? Is it authority over decision or some, or authority over like division? What does authority imply?
I think there are 2 core dimensions to authority. The first one is the ability to access information. If you don't have access to information, you cannot have any authority over the situation. And the second dimension is the ability to contribute to decision-making. If you cannot contribute to decision-making, then you don't have much authority. These 2 dimensions, access to information, access to contributions to decision-making, are fundamental to authority in any organized setting, but these 2 dimensions are to be examined separately. You can imagine a system where an agent has access to all the information out there, but has no authority to make any decisions. Or vice versa, you can imagine a decision maker that actually does not have access to the information on the ground. Imagine a dictatorship whereby the person, the dictator makes all the decisions, but everyone else is so scared of the dictator.
They still have to—
They're scared for their life that they don't actually tell the person what's going on on the ground 'cause they're afraid of ending in jail or being killed. In that case, you have a decision maker without access to information. So if you want to fully disperse authority in a system, the theoretical maximum that you can get is when you have a system where every agent, every member of the organization, for instance, or every user of the digital platform can access all the information that is relevant to their environment, and they can all equally contribute to the decisions that are made about the future of the organization or the future of the digital platform. In the context of Bitcoin or Ethereum, that would mean If we want to fully disperse authority, that would mean that every user should be a validator, every user should be a miner, every user should be running a full node, right? If you don't have that, well, you are not reaching the theoretical maximum—
Decentralization.
Decentralization, which I'd rather call authority dispersion, because essentially you will have many, many agents who actually don't have access to all the information, And cannot contribute to decisions.
But we do have access to information because it's on the ledger, no? Or what other information are you talking about that if I participate to the network, but I'm not a miner or contributor, I don't have access to? What's the missing piece?
Well, I mean, there's a lot of different categories of information that are particularly important on these platforms. For example, looking at the transactions that are in the mempool, but they haven't been processed yet, right? If you're just a baseline frontline user, you don't see those data. You have to be a miner to be able to get to see this information. If you are not a developer in the project, you won't see the discussions that are taking place sometimes offline about What are the potential software upgrades that we are considering, which are strategic decisions, right? So if there's like different types of, if you don't run a full node, you won't see the entire history of the transactions, right? So there's just different categories of information that nobody technically is excluded from accessing them, right? Everybody can set up a mining node.
But in practice.
But in practice, it's not happening. And there's reasons why it's not happening in practice. Like it would be inconvenient, it would be costly, It's not needed for ensuring the security of the system. But then we have to accept that if in practice it's not happening and nowhere near what people, you know, we're not anywhere close to this like fully dispersed authority, we need to be okay with the claim that yes, in theory it could happen, in practice it's not happening. But the consequence of that is we don't have a ton of authority dispersion in the system. We don't have a ton of decentralization, in fact, in the system. We have to be comfortable with just acknowledging that the claim that X is fully decentralized is not true.
Ha.
