> Celsius's collapse exemplified what one commentator called a "pervasive problem in the crypto industry, where financial services that claim to be decentralized ... are actually centralized entities, with the power to control the flow of crypto assets."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius_Network
I would like people to keep this in mind when they somehow confuse Web3 (distribution via crypto ledger) and the term decentralization. Those concepts are not related in any way.
We already had decentralization. It's called the BitTorrent protocol which is more decentralized than most Web 3 projects.
Yes and no. BitTorrent uses two protocols. One of those protocols is highly centralized and advertises users and their requested data packets as well as their available data packets to a centralized registry. A second protocol is used to transfer available data packets between users.
The appeal of BitTorrent is not that it is decentralized but that it, in a narrow legal context, doesn’t violate the law as copy protected materials are passed between users on a secondary protocol without touching the centralized system advertising data availability.
This hasn't been true for almost two decades. DHT exists so trackers are not required [0]. So now both protocols are decentralized.