As a cryptocurrency enthusiast, I like to read the history of Bitcoin and how people think about it. What bothers me the most, is that some influencers believe that Bitcoin is not created to be a decentralized currency. Unlike a lot of people who are toxic in this cryptocurrency community since maybe they have a large stash of Bitcoin, I like to dig deeper about their ideas and why they believe it is true.
Source: TheDigitalArtist | Pixabay
There is no word "decentralization" or "decentralized" on the Bitcoin whitepaper.
I could only find two sentences that contain the word "central" on the Satoshi's whitepaper. As follows:
A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every transaction for double spending.
In the sentence above, Satoshi explains the common solution to solve the double spending problem, i.e., some kind of masternodes.
This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them.
In the sentence above, Satoshi explains the genesis block and block rewards. That's it! I could not find another sentence contains "central."
What Satoshi really meant by "decentralized"
I further search about "central" word in Satoshi's post in 2010, here are my first two findings:
It is decentralised. After you have connected to the network the first time, you no longer need IRC.
In the post above, Satoshi explains that the node list does not matter since once you connect to the network, you could connect directly to Bitcoin nodes without an intermediary.
Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency! Bitcoin is a digital currency using cryptography and a distributed network to replace the need for a trusted central server. Escape the arbitrary inflation risk of centrally managed currencies! Bitcoin's total circulation is limited to 21 million coins. The coins are gradually released to the network's nodes based on the CPU power they contribute, so you can get a share of them by contributing your idle CPU time.
In the post above, Satoshi emphasizes the decentralization is the ability to trust no one (node/server) and about the economics of Bitcoin.
Discussion
Perhaps decentralization is not about the number of Bitcoin nodes, hardware specification, miner hashrate distribution, etc., but about:
- The ability to get the valid data without the need to trust the nodes;
- To participate freely in the network; and
- To have the economic system governed by the code.
What do you think?