Do you know what the main advantage of decentralization is over centralization?
Innovation.
The ability for anyone to contribute makes decentralized systems advance at a much greater rate than those which operate centrally.
Blockchain is garnering a lot of attention at the moment. It is starting to get on the radar of some major enterprises. IBM,for one, is really establishing itself as a "blockchain" company soliciting other industries to embrace the technology. Of course, what IBM is offering is not decentralized. Corporations want to retain control hence are going to opt, for the most part, for a centralized system.
While this is progress, it is not revolutionary. Creating shared databases will certainly lower costs while reducing the friction on many transactions. Supply chains are easier to manage with the potential to eliminate some steps. However, the full effect is in decentralization.
What does decentralization look like and what is the impact?
I will sum it up this way: Steem.films, DBooks, and bSteem.
These are three projects that were announced in the last few days on the STEEM blockchain. These were put together by individuals who saw a need and filled it. It is nothing more than an individual or group of individuals getting an idea and following through with it. They required no approval from management. There was no meetings to see if it fit into the corporate culture. These people did not have to wait to see if their application would be approved by some central entity.
Instead, they created something they believe the user base would like and put it out there. Now it is up to the community to determine the success or not.
Compare that to the Steemit. Before making this comparison, I will acknowledge, the scale of the projects differs greatly so that much be taken into consideration. Nevertheless, the point still holds true I believe.
We are anxiously awaiting the release of SMTs, the community feature, and an automated sign up process. Some of these ideas were floated to the community over a year ago. As we enter the 2nd quarter of 2018, we are still awaiting them.
I do not write this to take a shot at the people over at Steemit. What I want to emphasize is the fact that Steemit is a company that has employees who are compensated in some form to produce what it needs. This is centralization. Only the employees at Steemit (and whomever they contract with) are working on these issues. Everything that is being done is inside this frame work.
Let us contrast this set up with the mobile application (another thing that was mentioned as being put out by Steemit). eSteem is a mobile interface that many stated was a decent application. Personally, I didn't use it so I will not comment about that. No matter what the view is on it, the people behind bSteem felt they could do better. So they went ahead with their project. Again, the user base will decide which one it embraces, if it doesn't embrace both.
This is the unleashing of human potential. When people have the freedom to see a problem AND create a solution, that is what advances a society. The Internet was suppose to provide this except the corporations, ie Google and Facebook, were able to get in and centralize it. Hence, we spent the last 20 years seeing what could have been the greatest breakthrough in innovation stall out.
The white paper that appeared a little over 9 years ago talking about a decentralized public ledger changed the world. While it was not known at the time, it provided the basic framework for unleashing the power of humanity. Right now we have tens of thousands of people developing stuff on different blockchains. In a couple years, that will be millions.
STEEM has under a million users with roughly 60K of them daily active posters. Even with those numbers, we see a great deal of development and innovation starting to come out. Imagine what it will look like when there are 5M or 10M people on this blockchain. Instead of 500 or 1000 developers, perhaps we see 5 or 10 times that number.
And that is why 
This is a major reason why I believe so much in the potential of blockchain...it is unleasing the power of humanity.
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