Why I don't see many advantages in decentralized platforms
Honestly, from my point of view, I don’t see many advantages in decentralized platforms, where my personal data is distributed across nodes worldwide in public. In this post, I would like to note some key points about the current landscape and problems in the on-chain world that you should know.
For example, let's take a look at the Bitcoin blockchain:
1) Block size limitations: The Bitcoin blockchain is limited due to its block size, which restricts how much data can fit in a block.
2) Expensive storage: Storing data on the Bitcoin blockchain is expensive and limited because it must be replicated across all nodes, and blockchain data constantly grows.
3) Slowness: For Bitcoin, a new block is mined approximately every 10 minutes, and full confirmation of transactions can take up to an hour.
4) Lack of privacy: On public blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, all transactions, amounts, and wallet balances are visible.
5) Limited smart contracts: Bitcoin doesn't have, or has limited, Turing-complete smart contracts.
6) Out of your control: While there’s no centralized “third party,” control is distributed among nodes and validators outside your control.
7) Immutability: On-chain data cannot be deleted; it stays forever there.
8) Hard to upgrade and deliver: Significant changes usually require a hard fork.
9) Nodes and validators have their homes: Some of them could be regulated or even shut down, that’s exactly what makes decentralization stronger than centralization — the network keeps running.
Engineers are trying to solve these problems, but most of them affect nearly every blockchain in one way or another.
In Hashmate, I made different decisions:
1) Privacy by design: You don’t have to expose your information to the service, and the service never asks for personal data.
2) Principle of minimal knowledge: The platform knows as little about you as possible. In fact, it has only what you provide.
3) Your data means your data: Once you delete something, it’s gone forever. On-chain? Right, your data stays there forever, due to the immutable nature of blockchains.
4) Centralized decentralization: Nowadays, practically all mid-size projects and platforms are distributed under the hood. I mean load balancers, replicas, computational and storage nodes. The difference is who controls this infrastructure — random people or a company. So, it’s more about Ownership than Privacy.
5) Easy upgrades: Centralized control over infrastructure allows easy delivery of changes and upgrades.
6) Public content: Most content is public by its nature.
Just to be clear, I’m not against decentralization or anything like that. My main point is that we can build truly centralized and fully private platforms as well — it’s just that most existing ones lack many essential core privacy features.
TO SUM THINGS UP:
- Decentralization doesn’t mean Privacy.
- Decentralization means Distribution.
- Privacy is about design, not Distribution.
- Public decentralization means your history and transactions are visible, trackable, and stay there forever in public.
- Just one good thing I could really say is that decentralization could mean Ownership — but your data is spread across nodes that you don’t control.
- Being on-chain is still expensive.
When I’ve advocated in the past for P2P, the goal was never to necessarily have the network automatically copy and distribute. And blockchain is not my thing.
It’s about everyone being able to host on their own and connect to each other. This was the original web.
I completely agree with you, and recently noticed that the decentralization narrative is often confused with privacy, but they’re different concepts that serve different purposes.