A decentralized protocol must ensure that any user cannot spend a coin twice. Thus, Peer-to-Peer transaction is not really only between two entities as you can think. There a protocol in the middle which ensures that all transactions in a block are valid. Every user must trust the protocol that its transaction will be added to a block and the value will be delivered as expected. A decentralized protocol acts as an honest trust machine from point of users. If you dig deeper you will find that it is the team behind the protocol to which users really trust.

A team writes the source code of a client. The client is then publicly offered to people who are willing to keep the network running. Those people install the client on their computers and are rewarded for that. It works like that for all public and open networks.

Building protocol is a never-ending story

The building of a protocol is continual work and never ends. It is not possible to create a piece of software and be done with that forever. Such software would get obsolete very soon and be replaced. There are many reasons why the protocol must be constantly maintained, changed, and improved. People make mistakes. Thus there are always many bugs in the protocol which must be fixed. By fixing them, new bugs might be introduced. A bug is something, that can be misused by an attacker. The team cannot just let it be. Even if you get rid of all bugs, there are external conditions that change in time. New people come and want to use the protocol so there is a higher demand for scalability. It is important for mass adoption since if new users mean that transactions last longer time then people will migrate elsewhere. People will require new features or improvements. The team must listen to users and try to realize their wishes. Internet throughput is better and better every year, disc storage is cheaper, some cryptography cipher the protocol uses get old or can be cracked and there are new ones available. The team must react to all these events to stay relevant.

A centralized team behind decentralized protocol?

There are always real people behind the protocol. It might be a team or a few individuals around the world. It does not matter. The source code of the protocol is open and public. Mostly available on GitHub. Everybody in the world can find, it, see it and propose some change.

You can find Cardano repositories here: https://github.com/input-output-hk

Even if everybody can propose some change, either as a proposal document or directly in the source code, the important is who is responsible for accepting and approving proposals. There are always just a few people who have the right to merge changes in the source code into a so-called master branch. It is a branch from which a new client will be built to be publicly offered to people. In other words, behind every client, there is always a source code from which it was created.

Well, there is a globally run decentralized protocol and just a few centralized individuals who have a strong position to influence the shape, features, and abilities of the protocol.

I wrote another article about decentralization:

How to define ‘decentralisation’?

A plethora of individuals has become fond of blockchain technology, mainly owing to the ‘decentralisation aspect’ as it…

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