Bitcoin is extremely centralized. Every transaction is recorded in a centralized ledger. That ledger may be distributed, but that's not the same thing as being decentralized.
is bitcoin truly decentralized? in the sense that there’s a centralized ledger that anyone can access and see transactions? i know the ledger is copied and decentralized to all nodes but for instance if i go on the street corner and buy something with cash, no one in the world knows other than the participants. with bitcoin everyone in the world knows and it’s recorded for all time
bitcoin is not decentralized because all transactions are on a single public ledger. How the ledger is computed and verified is distributed however the product is a single central source of truth. There is nothing centralized about having a single objective "reality". Decentralized systems do not have a single source of truth and by their very nature are inconsistent.
In other words, whether the blockchain was computed by one central bank or individual miners doesn't change the nature of bitcoin in it's use. Which is a centralized public ledger.
I wouldn't be surprised if bitcoin was an attempt to shine a light on the black market. Similar to how Tor was created to hide the activities of state spooks.
I believe you're thinking of the ledger as a distributed ledger and applying 'centralized' as a description, which it is not. Bitcoin is a decentralized ledger.
No, not all cryptocurrencies are decentralized. There's nothing about a blockchain that requires decentralization. It's a key tenet of some of the coins, but not all.
Bitcoin is both distributed and decentralized. In a world with 100 people, you can say that a system is sufficiently 'decentralized' if 10 of the people ran nodes, independent of eachother, where if any of the nodes lied or crashed the system would continue to work, and where few or no nodes collude with each other. It doesn't require every single one of the 100 people to hold the blockchain.
Bitcoin nodes is a bit like peer review of a dozen academics keeping each other in check, only it's based on math and cryptography and proof of work. The proof of work ensures it's not possible to lie to other nodes without expending lots of money on mining and risking not getting any reward in return when your blocks are rejected. And even if you lie, nodes can't send money they don't earn due to the public-key cryptography. And instead there are hundreds or even thousands of such nodes and miners, and we call that decentralized.
In other words you can run a decentralized system with thousands of copies of all transactions, as opposed to all 7 billion people needing to store a copy and relay every transaction to everyone else.
Beyond that, not all transactions need to even be stored by the nodes that are needed. If you sent me a dollar in 1990 and I spent that dollar, and whoever received it from me spent it and so on tens of thousands of times now in the past 25 years, then there's absolutely no practical reason for me to store the data on our transaction in 1990. It can be pruned. And so can all the transactions between 1990 and 2014, and most transactions in 2015 of that particular dollar, except the last recent few.
Concerning security of the blockchain the vast majority (an ever growing number) of transaction data can be safely thrown away.
Some research universities and businesses might save that data for posterity/research/datamining, but for the network to operate, to function, you can prune something like 99% of the data.
Decentralisation isn't black and white, it's all relative. Bitcoin is more decentralised than fiat currencies and traditional banking. Isn't that obvious?
I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is.
Unlike fiat cash or gold, you can't spend it without an internet connection (in order to sync up the public ledger and submit the transaction).
You're subject to miners to approve your transactions, which in theory should be democratized, but isn't really since it's based on computing power, which in turn can be bought or centralized in mining pools.
You're subject to a small cabal of developers' whims in having to use the reference client and hardforks to patch up bugs in the protocol. In theory that should also be democratized, with people free to use whatever forks they want, but in practice it's centralized with everyone fleeing to whichever fork all the mining pools go with.
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