What makes an application decentralized

Earlier in this book, we discussed distributed versus decentralized systems. A distributed system is one that is made up of a number of computers, with the work of the system distributed across all of these machines. Typically, the computers in a distributed network are placed in different geographical regions to protect the system from outages such as power failures, natural disasters, or military events. A decentralized network is not only distributed geographically but also in terms of authority and control. A distributed system such as the Amazon cloud can be worldwide in scope but still under the control of a central authority. A decentralized system has no central authority.

Defining a decentralized application

A well-known resource to blockchain-based decentralized applications is the whitepaper written by David Johnson entitled The General Theory of Decentralized Applications, DApps. In this whitepaper, he identifies four key criteria to be a...