"Perhaps one of the most fascinating abilities of the mammalian brain, is that it can generate flexible behavior that is generalized across contexts.

For example, lets say you spent a few weeks learning how to make just the perfect lasagna. You learn that skill in your own kitchen where you are familiar with the location of all the utensils ingredients and appliances as well as the layout of the kitchen itself.

Finally you get invited to your friends house to cook your famous lasagna. Even though you never used their kitchen before, you are still able to navigate and cook efficiently, but how is this possible? Because if you think about it, you have never been in that particular situation. So this must be a totally new problem right?

Well, the answer lies in the ability of your brain to generalize. Your able to kind of strip away the particular sensory contexts of your kitchen and extract the abstract notion of lasagna cooking procedure. At the same time you know the general principles of how kitchens work so one quick glance at the location of the oven and the utensils is enough to relate that particular layout to your inner model of kitchens. This generalization requires information about the world to be organized into a multi-purpose coherent framework known as a cognitive map."

However, what if the generalizations were misappropriately applied? What if you tried to cook lasagna at a barbeque?

Okay so I need to apologize for that attention getter. I was going to do a shorter one about how your brain uses association to be a faster database than any computerized database that exists today, but I guess the one I chose to use is actually more relevant.

With that out of the way though, lets dive into what a federated system is and what in the world do we even mean when we say something is decentralized?

"Bitcoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen." https://bitcoin.org/en/faq

While decentralized and peer to peer. Is everything decentralized also peer to peer? If we generalize as we tend to do, we might think that is the case based on the information we have been presented. Bitcoin is decentralized and that means it doesn't rely on middlemen, right?

This Illustration from “On Distributed Communication Networks” is often used by cryptocurrency proponents who declare that decentralization is a spectrum and therefore Eth is decentralized. So our cognitive map becomes even more dysfunctional. We've learned that Bitcoin is a kitchen and we arrive at the Eth BBQ and wonder why we struggle to make Lasagna.

In this illustration, you can clearly see that the decentralized graph does indeed have middlemen.

Perhaps then, Bitcoiners are the problem. We shouldn't say Bitcoin is decentralized and we should rather be saying Bitcoin is distributed right? Well, actually, lots of Bitcoiners do trust middlemen. Lots of Bitcoiners don't run their own node and so for them they trust someone else is running Bitcoin and not BCash. So in that sense decentralized is pretty accurate right?

However, still the ability to become self sovereign and unruggable and stay in the consensus that you desire is still there. Whatever we call that it is very different from Eth. It is peer to peer and socially constructed. The technical pieces are a second layer with the social being the first layer. Evidence of this can be found in Bitcoin's downtime. The technology behind Bitcoin at one point said there are 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoin (In addition to what Bitcoin was already mined) Value Overflow Incident. This did not resolve well on the social layer and so the technology changed to fit the social consensus that there are in fact only 21 million Bitcoin.

This self sovereignty has become part of the cognitive map for what decentralized means. So the etymology of the word decentralized has changed.

The United States is a federation of states. So we can immediately see that we wouldn't call the United States decentralized and especially we wouldn't say "The United States is decentralized just like Bitcoin" lol.

"The Fediverse" refers to a social network of which mastodon is part of.

Image source: https://fediverse.info/

Look at that graph. Makes you think the fediverse is decentralized right? Did you know that first of all fediverse has accounts. See, fediverse just propagates posts to other websites, but the users still have to create accounts on one of the websites in the fediverse. When the website that your account belongs to bans your account, your ID in the entire fediverse also goes away and you have to restart.

Fedi-mint advocates were right to call themselves federated rather than decentralized. Imagine if we called a fedi-mint a "Decentralized Autonomous Organizational Mint" DAO-Mint or something similar. Have we thought through what has the same structure as a fedi-mint, but calls itself decentralized? Well first of all a fedi-mint is literally a multi-sig between a bunch of trusted people and you are not one of the multi-sig signers. So Liquid is not decentralized nor does it claim to be in fact Liquid refers to itself as a federation, but DAOs are federations.

I hope that by now we're noticing a common trend.

Nostr is also not considered decentralized. It isn't peer to peer. It relies on server client architecture, but you can switch between websites at will and your ID is more so connected to your keys than any given server.

Its kind of like users who trust a server to store and verify the blockchain for them. The websites they connect to all propagate data, but the users still need to connect to the websites.

So Bitcoin is decentralized, but you can still use it in ways that are not decentralized. Is Bitcoin decentralized for you specifically? As in, do you use Bitcoin in a decentralized way?

So the difference between something federated and something decentralized comes down to the fact that something that is federated has a federation that votes and makes a decision that people are subjected to. Whereas something decentralized inherently means no one is subject to anyone else its all just a bunch of agreements between individuals that amalgamate into one coherent system.

Networking architecture terminology plays a part, but is overall not very good for understanding how and why Bitcoin is decentralized. Social mechanisms are a lot better for understanding how Bitcoin is decentralized. How people come to socially agree on certain constructs like what words mean or what we're going to call money or what family actually is (blood or relationship based family) all of that has done a lot more for understanding Bitcoin decentralization than any concept that came from computer science. Blockchains can be subverted into centralized or federated things.

With Nostr, we did a pretty good job at kicking off the web3 narrative. Nostr is a modern web 1.0 protocol. Can we come together and correct the misunderstanding of things getting called decentralized that clearly aren't? This is my contribution to that effort as of today.