Arvind Narayanan and others have proposed a framework in their book, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, Princeton University Press, that can be used to evaluate the decentralization requirements of a variety of issues in the context of blockchain technology. The framework raises four questions whose answers provide a clear understanding as to how a system can be decentralized:
- What is being decentralized?
- What level of decentralization is required?
- What blockchain is used?
- What security mechanism is used?
The first question simply asks you to identify what system is being decentralized. This can be any system, such as an identity system or a trading system.
The second question asks you to specify the level of decentralization ...
