Editing Dumb contracts (section)

== Decentralized ==

Bitcoin originally used this term to refer to the absence of structural (or hierarchical) organization needed to record account balances. The Bitcoin system is thus an emergent property that arises through the gradual consensus reached by allowing equal and open participation of everyone who uses it (in this case miners acheive the consensus.)

This property of consensus is quite different from a reputation system or a democratic voting protocol because the process is achieved through a one-way, cryptographic protocol that can’t be cheated outside the assumptions made by the protocol – a guarantee that made Bitcoin famous.

Unfortunately, this term is abused to refer to any kind of organizational structure run by multiple people (ironically, one of the key things Bitcoin solved through proof-of-work.) Examples include The DAO where multiple investors in the system vote on proposals submitted to The DAO.

B &amp; C exchange, BitShares, and OpenBazaar also label their systems as decentralized when the original (and implied meaning) that was popularized by software like BitTorrent and Bitcoin is completely different. There are numerous examples of this misleading term being used to market projects in the blockchain space and it needs to stop.

Recommended definition: distributed.

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