There are always parallels drawn between markets – whichever they be, as there are always guidelines that govern general investor sentiment and mathematical models dictating statistical means and norms. A perfect example is the correlation between traditional trading and the cryptocurrencies market, where near identical algorithms and forecasting models are used to predict chart behavior and trends. There is truly little innovation, regardless of the hype.
The same can be said of the founding principles of the blockchain market, such as total freedom, transparency, independence of third parties, decentralization etc. The parallels that can be drawn with such bold terms reminiscent of the French Revolution’s “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” can be found in what modern social networks like Facebook, Twitter and the others were once claimed to be. But, the latest events that have shocked social consciousness of the tyranny of social networks are clear illustration of the inevitable devolution of any system into total centralization. The same is already happening with blockchain networks.
A shining example of the encroaching centralization of blockchain is the Ethereum network with its 2.0 update that is aggressively pushing forth staking as the new consensus model. Freedom is never for free, as there is no such thing as free block generation. Running nodes is an expensive business and the data generation is never openly available to anyone, only to those connected to the network. Bitcoin is just as sinful in this regard, as mining gains difficulty with every halving and its growing costs are centralizing access to the data over time. This automatically negates the purpose of decentralization and its freedoms, raising the question as to whether blockchains are truly decentralized.