Executive summary of Let's ditch "decentralized" by Tony Sheng

This is a summary of Let’s ditch “decentralized” by Tony Sheng published on 3 September 2018.

Executive summary

The word “decentralised” became widespread only at the time when Ethereum was released. “Decentralised” is best defined as the opposite of “centralised”. “Centralised” is can have many meanings (e.g. censorship, tampering, inequality) and so can “decentralised”. Tony Sheng argues that the blanket term should be ditched and replaced with how well a cryptonetwork addresses each aspect of a centralised system, such as censorship resistance, tampering resistance, equality. The essay provides a detailed overview of such aspects.