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Cryptocurrency seems to be selling out. Bitcoin and other digital currencies were designed to circumvent the centralised control of big banks and instead be managed by its network. But now they are growing similar to the very institutions they’re trying to sidestep.
Decentralisation is key to cryptocurrencies, because there is no Federal Reserve or European Central Bank to lend legitimacy to the cause. Instead, decentralised networks authenticate transactions so no individual user has the power to manipulate the process, but everyone has the power to check it.
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However, Emin Gün Sirer at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues monitored the bitcoin and ethereum networks from 2015 to 2017 to see how decentralisation was faring. “There is a lot of noise made about decentralisation, and then when you look at it, it’s not all that decentralised,” Sirer says. On top