Nouriel Roubini, a well-known American economist and a critic of
Nouriel Roubini, a well-known American economist and a critic of the crypto sector, said that decentralisation in cryptocurrency is a myth and claimed that no system, currency, or protocol could exist in a peer-to-peer ecosystem. He also accused Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum of being a dictator in this field. He said,
“Decentralization in crypto is a myth. It is a system more centralized than North Korea: miners are centralized, exchanges are centralized, developers are centralized dictators (Buterin is ‘dictator for life’ ) & the Gini inequality coefficient of bitcoin is worse than North Korea,”
Buterin, in the face of such an accusation from Roubini, remained positive and replied,
“I don’t think that’s a fair characterization; if you look more deeply at the actual processes of ethereum governance you’ll find that while a technical elite does exist (as in all cryptocurrencies), my own involvement is much less pivotal than it seems from the outside.”
Cryptocurrency is genuinely decentralised as a system where, miners, atleast theoretically gain dominance over the market, but individual miners who fuel the mining pools are there voluntarily and could leave anytime they wished to. However, there are several existing large blockchain protocols that give a certain group of users more authority over the network. But, its structure is made in such a way, that interested users, in the open-source development community can suggest solutions, offer proposals and changes to its codebase. There have been many instances where codes provided by anonymous developers have been integrated into the blockchain.
Buterin also emphasised on how public blockchain systems could be further decentralised by multiple client implementations which enable miners and node operators to cast votes on the best software available, decentralised exchanges and by implementing specific protocols in proof-of-stake, which is a way to validate block transactions based on how many coins a person owns.