Decentralizing a cryptocurrency is difficult
When the UK's VISA network crashed on Thursday, it provoked giggles from Bitcoin supporters. The BTC network has worked faithfully since its inception nine years ago, without governments or regulators or hardware failures capable of stopping its progress.
It is the resistance to the censorship of Bitcoin, achieved through its decentralized design, which has given the digital asset a large part of its value. It is true that most of the investment in cryptocurrencies at this time is speculative. But the reason why BTC is trading at about US $ 8,000, and BCH at US $ 1,100, is because the ability to store digital wealth in a way that can not be exploited is huge.
We know that Bitcoin can not be confiscated, pirated or confiscated because the attackers have been doing everything possible to do it from the first day and have failed.
We do not need to like your intentions, but we can appreciate the fact that your efforts have contributed to the increase in the value of Bitcoin, with each failed attack that adds to the faith invested in the inviolability of the network.
The newer gangs, in comparison, have not yet been tested in battle, which is reflected in the value of their native cryptocurrency. With two of the most publicized blockchains of all time, EOS and Tezos, which was launched this month, the debate on decentralization has returned with strength.
All cryptocurrencies start centralized
Just as a newborn needs its mother to survive those precious first months, at the beginning, a chain of blocks needs its creator. For starters, Bitcoin was very centralized; with no one other than Satoshi to supervise mining, it was inevitable.
But as more users joined the network, Bitcoin made the transition to a decentralized model, and in a year it was no longer Satoshi's toy, but the world's. Each blockchain that has come since then also started in a centralized way, with its creators trying to remedy this "as soon as possible".
Unlike Bitcoin, however, many of these chains have struggled to make much progress in that direction.
NEO: Chinese blockchains are famous for their excess of centralization, with NEO as an excellent example. It was supposed to have been decentralized months ago, but it remains under the control of the company, which has the power to re-establish the network in case the dBFT system does not achieve consensus.
IOTA: technically a DAG (directed acyclic graph) instead of a conventional blockchain, IOTA is even more centralized than NEO. While it is likely that NEO will eventually reach a certain degree of decentralization, it is doubtful that IOTA will work in its current incarnation without a central coordinator to rest things whenever there is a technical problem.
Cardano: Cardano, of Charles Hoskinson, will use a Participation Test algorithm called Ouroboros, but it has not yet been implemented, and, therefore, during the last 12 months, the cryptocurrency has been strongly centralized.
Once Ouroboros is implemented, Cardano will be more distributed than at present, but if that constitutes a "true" decentralization it is a matter of debate. Like EOS, Cardano's consensus mechanism will place control in the hands of a few whales whose currencies and votes will dictate decisions.
EOS: The decentralization, or the lack thereof, that comes with EOS has been fiercely debated in a network that is less than a week old. 21 block validators - trusted entities such as Bitfinex - serve as delegates that control the network. The EOS delegated PoS algorithm puts a lot of control in the hands of a few. A two-thirds majority is required to reach a consensus.