Eugen RochkoHm, I actually don't know if there's a word for it, but I was talking about blockchains with someone, and one of my points is that the blockchain is decentralized, but also kind of isn't, in the sense that there is only one ledger that everyone shares. This as a counterpoint to a federated system like Mastodon, where every server can exist independently of others. Is there a word for this?
Actually maybe my issue is that I consider "distributed" to be a subset of "decentralized", when maybe they are separate properties, in which case you could say the blockchain is distributed but centralized..?
Yuval Marcus@Gargron Wait, are you saying that a blockchain is centralized because there is only one ledger? How is that centralized? There is not one authority that can append to the blockchain. The blockchain is supposed to be the same ledger shared across many machines. We say that cryptocurrencies are decentralized because in theory there is not one central authority that "mines" and secures the network (that anyone can join and help mine)--of course this is not fully accurate: http://hackingdistributed.com/2018/01/15/decentralization-bitcoin-ethereum/
@Gargron I may have found an answer to the dilemma. We can say that Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are decentralized but that they're conceptually centralized around a global singleton. Ie. the concept of a Blockchain. So the system is decentralized in that not one person controls authority but it's centralized around a common concept (the global singleton). This makes sense for the purpose of Bitcoin but maybe not for social networks.
See Network Topology section: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/concepts/