In recent hours, Vitalik Buterin started a discussion on Twitter about the meaning of decentralization and how it is welcomed by the community.
The discussion involved other exponents of the blockchain world such as block.one CEO Brendan Blumer.
People who say "full decentralization is overkill, you only need non-custodial" are missing the point. A fully decentralized (or "serverless") application is valuable because it gives users the confidence that *it will always be there*, so you can safely build on top of it.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 7, 2020
Buterin emphasized what it means to be completely decentralized, stressing that it is not enough to have non-custodial services, but it is necessary to have services and tools that are autonomous and that anyone can use according to their needs, using Uniswap or Tornado Cash as examples, thanks to which anyone can interact with the protocol in a free and effectively decentralized way.
A dApp (decentralized application) completely decentralized and without a structure to rely on, thus “serverless“, allows moving forward no matter what, while a centralized app would have problems in case the server goes down.
Brendan Blumer’s response to this concept is interesting:
How do you define full decentralization and where do you think it exists? Can something fully decentralized ever change, and if so, who as the authority to decide? Must it be democratic? Plutocratic? How does delegation through mining pools or super-nodes impact such status?
— Brendan Blumer (@BrendanBlumer) April 7, 2020
His point of view questions the “who” and “how” when it comes to the creation of a decentralized service since it is necessary to agree on the type of protocol and system, and also on who should decide which system is better, attempting to provide their vision of decentralization.
Blumer concludes with a comment on one aspect of the vote delegation or miners, making a direct comparison between EOS and the PoW (Proof of Work) blockchain, deeming it better to have millions of token holders delegating to 21 nodes, rather than having millions of miners that are connected to only 3 mining pools.
The two exponents have thus certainly different visions on what decentralization is.
Moreover, considering that Ethereum will in the future switch to a PoS (Proof of Stake) system, Vitalik Buterin argued in his tweets that PoS is better than PoW.
