BitShares Forum
Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: bytemaster on January 12, 2015, 09:40:00 pm
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http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/12/Decentralization-Scalability-and-Fault-Tolerance-of-Bitcoin/
Bitcoin is all about decentralizing the control over money through objective consensus on ownership. What often gets lost in the discussion is the difference between decentralization, scalability, and fault tolerance. Bitcoin is an example of a decentralized system whose scalability is limited by the power of an individual node rather than the combined power of all nodes. This means that a systems ability to become distributed for fault tolerance, decentralized for control, and scalable for performance are not linked together by the number of nodes. In fact we could say that attempts to combine these roles via the same mechanism will carry with it the combined limitations rather than the combined benefits. Hence economies of scale and free market competition will tend to minimize unnecessary fault tolerance (redundancy) while centralizing for performance. If we are not careful this will result in centralization of control.