“Nowadays, it seems that the terms “decentralize”, “enable” and “empower” are over-hyped.”

The prevalence of this terminology in the ICO space simply demonstrates this point. Blockchain itself, has now become such a buzzword you would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of the new technology.

But this is good, and very much overdue. Look no further than the political and regulatory environments where cryptocurrencies are already making an impact. They are creating a competitive market with traditional money, forcing central banks to be more alert within the sector.

However, it is my firm belief that if one excludes the monetary effect of cryptocurrencies from the equation, the impact on society of decentralization and blockchain is highly underestimated. This is apparent as some primitive forms of decentralization through blockchain applications are already starting to emerge.

However, the drawback is that given the current scalability limitations, we cannot expect the technology to impact our society in the short term. Although I can affirm that the pace of technological progress in blockchain is accelerating and as shown below.

During the early days of blockchain as a technology (2015–16 so to speak) the concept of blockchain itself was very unknown. Back in the day, if Bitcoin was reported on, it was in regard to its number of forks. Later on, the word started to spread around media sources.

Much of blockchains success can be attributed to two factors:

The monetary explosion of Bitcoin, which has attracted the world’s attention towards cryptocurrencies and later blockchain The advent of Ethereum and its success in attracting communities of developers to build and create on top of this new technology.

These are not bad factors of course, had it not been for the speculation around Bitcoin, it would have taken another 10 years to get blockchain into people’s minds. And had it not been for Ethereum, we would all still be developing on colored coins.

And for those of you who understand what colored coins are, understand the big difference here.

I am not going to describe what colored coins are because, luckily for the developers, they are a thing of the past. You can find more information here.

What is my point here?

To all the critics of the hype around cryptos: had there been no financial interest in the first place, there would be no market. Blockchain as a technology would need another 10 years to advance.

Instead, right now, the underlying blockchain protocols are competing for the best talent to develop on top of them. To developers, this is good news. For technological progress, this is good news.

For the different protocols, I believe that only a few will dominate, not necessarily just one, as different paradigms might fulfill different needs (libertarians, censorship-resistant-ledgers seekers, corporates, banks, governments, central banks).

For example, one emerging field (which I will leave for another article) are Decentralized Ledgers. Blockchain is one class of DLTs (Decentralized Ledger Technologies).

Decentralized ledgers are governed by different consensus algorithms, which means that they are not all necessarily censorship-resistant as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

In fact, reintroducing the element of trust in the nodes becomes more suitable for business needs. This situation very much resembles the internet in the early days, where corporates were communicating through their semi-isolated networks. Eventually public blockchains will scale and everyone will be building on top of them.

Decentralized ledgers abstract from the concepts of block size, block time, and from the sequential concatenation of blocks where the whole database must be shared by the miners in order for the network to operate. Therefore, they are a potentially ideal solution for corporate environments where parties already trust each other, not needing a trustless environment.

Blockchains, by design, are slow. The main reason being that the database of a miner’s has to be constantly in sync with the other nodes on the network, producing latency as a result. This is at odds with centralized databases which are optimized for performance. Further, blockchains like Ethereum are aimed at being accessible from standard consumer computers, therefore posing further constraints for enterprise businesses.

Ok, now it’s getting complex. How do you choose between so many alternatives? How can you discriminate? What are the pros and cons?