by Yujin Kwon, Jian Liu, Minjeong Kim, Dawn Song, and Yongdae Kim on September 30, 2019
Decentralization is an essential factor the should be inherently considered in the design of blockchain systems. Even though people design systems for good decentralization, in practice, we often observe that blockchain systems are highly centralized. Bitcoin and Ethereum, as representative examples, are already well known to be highly centralized in terms of network and mining. In fact, poor decentralization appears not only in PoW-based coins but also in coins adopting other mechanisms such as proof-of-stake (PoS) and delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS).