Don’t Be Fooled. Blockchains Are Still Centralized.
It’s hard to talk about blockchain without hearing the word “decentralized” , “the power is in the hands of everyone”, “you don’t have to trust anyone.” But is it true? Probably not.
To achieve true decentralization, every part of a system must be decentralized. There are a lot of so-called “decentralized” blockchains that are not truly decentralized at all.
They’re difficult to spot, but many of today’s cryptocurrencies have a lot of centralized single points of failure.
I’ll show you, with examples, where and how you can find them.
Node providers
Let’s start with the basics, how do you connect and talk with a blockchain?
The majority of people don’t know this, but almost 99% of the time you will use a centralized server (specifically, it’s called “node provider”), owned by a single company.
This company can decide, at its own will, to blacklist you from accessing the blockchain or specific smart contracts/tokens.
If you think this is unlikely to happen, well, it already happened!
Infura and Alchemy are one of the most popular Ethereum “node” providers. When the…
