Decentralization: an incomplete ambition

Abstract

Decentralization is a term widely used in a variety of contexts, particularly in political science and discourses surrounding the Internet. It is popular today among advocates of blockchain technology. While frequently employed as if it were a technical term, decentralization more reliably appears to operate as a rhetorical strategy that directs attention toward some aspects of a proposed social order and away from others. It is called for far more than it is theorized or consistently defined. This non-specificity has served to draw diverse participants into common political and technological projects. Yet even the most apparently decentralized systems have shown the capacity to produce economically and structurally centralized outcomes. The rhetoric of decentralization thus obscures other aspects of the reordering it claims to describe. It steers attention from where concentrations of power are operating, deferring worthwhile debate about how such power should operate. For decentralization to be a reliable concept in formulating future social arrangements and related technologies, it should come with high standards of specificity. It also cannot substitute for anticipating centralization with appropriate mechanisms of accountability.

Toward a Formal Scholarly Understanding of Blockchain-Mediated Decentralization: A Systematic Review and a Framework

“…In contrast, the main scope of the present effort accentuates the archetypical nature of decentralization and how that archetype has informed and shaped the emergence of blockchain-mediated decentralization. Moreover, this work addresses the conclusions outlined in recent research by Schneider (2019) that urge for more specificity when discussing decentralization.…”

Measuring Decentrality in Blockchain Based Systems

“…This resulted in just a few mining pools validating most transactions. Better decentralization of miners means higher resistance against censorship of individual transactions and consequently a higher trust in the system [39]. In [29], [30] and [32], the authors discuss several ways to define decentrality and the ways in which systems unintentionally may move to centrality.…”

Towards a Theory of Digital Network De/centralization: Platform-Infrastructure Lessons Drawn from Blockchain

“…This interrelationship can contribute to conceptual confusion, as decentralization along one dimension may influence or cross over into decentralization along another dimension. Without accounting for this interrelationship, measures will over-or underestimate the amount of decentralization" (see also Schneider, 2019).…”

“…With the exception of a handful of very recent works and articles (Arrunada, 2018;Schneider 2019;Troncoso et al, 2017;Walch, 2019a), the majority of the works do not critically enquire the concept of decentralization by asking what decentralization means in the context of blockchain, how it should be defined and conceptualised, and how it relates to or emerges from centralization. Even among the ones that do critically examine the meaning of decentralization in very general terms (Walch (2019a) defines centralization as "power"), very few adopt a comprehensive and multidimensional approach (Schneider 2019 is an example).…”

“…However, it is only necessary and never sufficient to characterise the entre blockchain system as decentralized. Whenever a system is multidimensional, decentralization is not merely a function of the characteristics of the single dimensions, but a dynamic and relational characteristic of a system as a whole, which also takes into account the dynamic interdependencies between layers and dimensions (Schneider, 2003(Schneider, , 2019. As a result, the mere focus on the static symmetries characterising each dimension underestimates the degree of centralization of the entire system as it does not capture the asymmetries emerging from the dynamic interactions between different dimensions over time.…”