
Quantifying Decentralization - dEnigma
https://news.21.co/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c28e
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mirekrusin
One person can hold 1 or 5000 addresses, it doesn't make sense to draw pretty
plots from it.

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dane-pgp
Indeed, and there may be strong financial/legal incentives for doing so.
Similarly, many developers may all be employed/funded by one organisation, and
multiple clients may share large amounts of code (and be unable to avoid
accepting large changes made to the upstream project).

So, while I appreciate the great effort to quantify the level of
decentralization in the cryptocurrency space, I think the article mostly just
exposes the subjective decisions being made by people who make claims about
decentralization. Even that could be a big step forward for debating these
technologies, though.

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SomeStupidPoint
> We certainly don’t argue that the particular choice of six subsystems here
> is the perfect one for measuring decentralization; we just wanted to gather
> some data to show what this kind of calculation would look like. We do argue
> that the maximum Gini coefficient metric starts to point in the right
> direction of identifying possible decentralization bottlenecks.

It seems the article is mostly to reframe the discussion.

I haven't even seen _bad_ versions of these measures compiled before. Debating
the choice of bucketing strategy (and other such) is a massive improvement.

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antichaos
According to the author's definition, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have a
Nakamoto coefficient of 1 and a Geni value of ~0.92, meaning that they are
equally centralized and brittle.

How is the proposed metric any useful in measuring and comparing
decentralization of blockchains?

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SolarNet
They discuss this, it shows how both Bitcoin and Ethereum have different
dominating factors, how one has centralization in some areas the other does
not and vice versa. Use the resulting numbers are the same, but examining how
they were arrived at is the interesting point. It's not like positions of two
balls at time 0 is the interesting number, it's how their differing properties
affect the equations that determine their eventual position.

