- While we need abstractions to understand something about the world, describing a system as “decentralised” or “centralised” often hides too much about the real dynamics the system exhibits.
- A more useful mental model of decentralisation is that decentralisation is a continuum bet
- If we want to compare two systems “decentralisation scores” we have to find a function that maps them onto the continuum.
- Example:
- For crypto protocols, decentralisation can vary along multiple axis. For example we could start our analysis with a [0,1]^5 where 0 means 100% centralised:
- If a protocol is 0% decentralised along on axis, the whole system can not be described as decentralised. Thus the function could the product of the X_n.