50 shades of decentralization

People often talk about decentralized networks and less often about distributed networks. Is there any difference? Let’s have a look at it.

Distributed network

The term distributed is related to the infrastructure. Distributed networking is the network system over which computer programs and their data are spread out across more than one computer, and communicate complex messages through their nodes, and are dependent upon each other.

The goal of a distributed network is to share resources or secure data. In the crypto-space, there is a need to distribute mutual consensus and keep a ledger in many independent nodes. We do not want to let a single node decide about the validity of transactions. Instead of that, we let a single randomly selected node propose a new block (including transactions) and then let the rest of the nodes in the network decide whether the block will be accepted or not. The majority of nodes in the network mutually decide what is the single version of the truth in any single moment.

Decentralized network

A decentralized network is very close to the meaning of a distributed network. Still, there is a…