Re: decentralized vs distributed payments

> People always talk about 'decentralized' money when it's 'distributed'. What's the difference? A distributed system is shared over many hard drives. A decentralized system goes one step further. It does not have a central point of control.
> 

So far so good.

> In the case of bitcoin the central point of control is the protocol which says "longest chain wins".
> 

No. That is not a central point of control, that is just the protocol rule.

> A pure decentralized system would be much simpler. It would take the essential essence of money (a ledger + transactions) and have no other constraints. Each entry in the ledger would point to an entity. Each value in the ledger would be an amount. That's it. There is no pre ordained protocol.
> 

More accurate would be to call that a purely malfunctioning system.

Any decentralized payment system needs to solve the double-spending problem, and this one does not.

Cheers,
Greg

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> On Sep 24, 2015, at 7:06 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> People always talk about 'decentralized' money when it's 'distributed'. What's the difference? A distributed system is shared over many hard drives. A decentralized system goes one step further. It does not have a central point of control. In the case of bitcoin the central point of control is the protocol which says "longest chain wins". That means the chain with the most electricity is valued and all other chains are valueless. If you agree on the central tenet (and a few rules) you can participate.
> 
> A pure decentralized system would be much simpler. It would take the essential essence of money (a ledger + transactions) and have no other constraints. Each entry in the ledger would point to an entity. Each value in the ledger would be an amount. That's it. There is no pre ordained protocol.
> 
> Any agent or group can use their ledger for operations of the system. But that's boring. When it becomes interesting is when ledgers start to interact and form protocols spontaneously. Fortunately the web facilities this quite well. A ledger is easy to program, a beginner programmer could write a ledger in less than 10 minutes. It would look something like:
> 
> {
> coinbase : 1000
> identifer1 : 0
> identifer2 : 0
> }
> 
> Then transactions are just diffs on that. It can run in a browser, on the web, on a server or even on pen and paper. Once distributed systems like this emerge and create spontaneous protocols through P2P consensus, we'll have a truly decentralized money system.
>