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The Decentralisation Lie We All Agreed To Tell
We were going to abolish banks. we built better banks. honestly not bad
Thejaswini M A
Apr 12, 2026
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I never fully bought it. Not because I was smarter than anyone, but because the people shouting loudest about decentralisation were also the ones most aggressively trying to get your money into their ecosystem. That combination has never, in the history of anything, been a good sign.
I watched it anyway. You had to, since it was the most interesting show running. A whole industry built on the genuinely radical idea of trustless money, populated almost entirely by people you absolutely could not trust. The irony was in the walls.
And now, slowly, in the way that all obvious things eventually become officially obvious, everyone is arriving at the conclusion that some of us had been sitting with for a while. The decentralisation was always more costume than conviction. The dumb money was always the point. And the people who built their entire personality around “banks are the enemy” are now shaking hands with the most centralised political establishment on the planet because it’s good for the portfolio.
I’m not even angry about it. I’m just watching because it’s a very good show.
October 31, 2008. Financial crisis still smoking. Satoshi Nakamoto publishes nine pages. The proposal was electronic money that needs no bank, no government, no permission from anyone. Two parties transact. No intermediary takes a cut, or central authority decides if you’re allowed.
To be fair, the original pitch was good. It came directly from a world where hedge funds and central banks had placed overleveraged bets on the economy, profited from the losses of ordinary people, and received government bailouts for the trouble. The anger behind it was legitimate. If we’re not supposed to be fed up with a system that lets the elite keep the jackpot while the public covers the tab, what’s left to be mad about? right?
The architecture Satoshi proposed was elegant precisely because it removed the human element. No single point of control means no single point of capture. Instead there were thousands of nodes, all equal, all checking each other. You couldn’t bribe the network or couldn’t just call it up and threaten it. Couldn’t freeze someone’s wallet because a regulator had a bad morning.
Leaderless by design, a beautiful idea.
People want to date the rot to the VC money flooding in, or the NFT circus, or the FTX collapse. Those were symptoms. The actual condition started much earlier, almost immediately, if you were paying attention.
The problem with decentralisation is that it’s expensive and it’s slow. It requires coordination between thousands of participants who have no particular reason to agree with each other. Centralisation, on the other hand, is efficient, fast, and profitable. So the moment real money entered the equation, the economics started doing what economics always does. The industry split. And very few people said so out loud.
In May 2017, the top two Bitcoin mining pools together controlled less than 30% of the network’s hashrate. The top six pools had less than 65%. That was actually the most decentralised Bitcoin mining had ever been.Nine years in, and already past its peak. By December 2023, more than 55% of the hashrate was
controlled
by the top two pools, and 90% by the top six.
blockchain.com
Today, Foundry USA controls approximately 30% of the total hashrate and AntPool holds around 18%, together just under 50%.
And then in March 2026, the abstract finally became concrete. Foundry mined six consecutive blocks and triggered a rare two-block chain reorganisation, overwriting valid blocks from AntPool and ViaBTC. Smaller miners
watched their
legitimate work get erased from the ledger.
Bitcoin has never suffered a 51% attack. The network’s integrity has held. But the concentration risk the whitepaper was specifically designed to prevent is no longer theoretical. It is a number on a chart that keeps moving in the wrong direction.
b10c
@0xB10C
We just had a rare-ish two block fork/reorg between Foundry and AntPool+ViaBTC. Foundry mined six blocks in a row.
bnoc.xyz/t/two-block-re…
4:29 PM · Mar 23, 2026
·
383K Views
36 Replies
·
83 Reposts
·
402 Likes
The whitepaper described a system where no single actor could do that. The whitepaper turned 18 this year. Make of that what you will.
Now I want to be precise here, because the lazy version of this argument gets it wrong. Trust me, I tried that version too.
Take every crypto product currently generating real users, real volume, real revenue. Most of them are not decentralised.
But did they ever say they were? Collapsing that distinction is how you end up making an argument that sounds sharp but lands on the wrong target.
Stablecoins.
Crypto’s only unambiguous success story. Used for trading, remittances, payments in countries where the local currency is losing a slow war against inflation. As of 2025, USDT and USDC together account for
93% of the total
stablecoin market capitalisation, and stablecoins are processing trillions in transaction volume, like never before.
@
visaonchainanalytics
USDC and USDT are both issued by companies, and both can freeze your wallet. Forget all that; both hold their reserves at banks, the very institutions the whole thing was supposedly built to replace. DAI, the decentralised stablecoin that people point to as proof the dream is still alive, holds around 3-4% of the market.
Nobody sold you USDT as a decentralisation product. The pitch was always efficient.
Move dollars across borders in minutes, settle in seconds, no correspondent bank, no SWIFT code, no three-day clearing window. They kept the issuer and removed all the slow, expensive infrastructure sitting between the issuer and the user. The revolution that traditional finance is actually losing to is a centralised dollar, reissued on a blockchain, by a company.
That was the promise and it delivered on it.
Hyperliquid.
Billions in volume, fast, genuinely impressive. Also run, in any meaningful sense, by 16 validators. In March 2025, during the JELLY
incident
, those 16 validators reached consensus and delisted a token in under two minutes, turning an impending $12 million loss into a profit for the protocol. Two minutes. Getting Ethereum governance to agree on anything in two minutes would require a natural disaster and probably still generate a dissenting blog post from someone in a timezone nobody remembered to include.
Some people called it FTX 2.0. That framing was wrong. Hyperliquid made a company decision. What it got credit for (what it earned) was fixing the problem, reimbursing users, introducing on-chain validator voting for future delistings, and moving on. The issue is that for a while, Hyperliquid’s marketing spent considerable energy insisting it was not a company while operating exactly like one.
Prediction markets.
Polymarket had one of crypto’s first genuine mainstream moments during the 2024 US election. Journalists cited its prices. People who had never held ETH used it. Not once did anyone ask whether it was sufficiently decentralised. They asked if it was accurate. It was. Nobody went on ethics, a few articles here and there on insider trading and the truth machine framing, yeah some of them were mine. It was just a product that worked, using crypto as plumbing rather than personality.
I could write a whole section on DAOs here, but “decentralised autonomous organisation” is already the funniest three words in the English language. I’ll leave it there.
This is what’s working. Most of it works considerably better than what the whitepaper described.
There are two kinds of crypto now.
There is the infrastructure side: products built for efficiency, scale, and real use, which traded decentralisation for performance and were mostly honest about it.
And there is the protocol side: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, which are genuinely still doing something structurally different from anything that came before, where the decentralisation is not a marketing claim but a design property that has survived serious adversarial pressure. Products optimise for what users want, and users want things that work. Industries concentrate under competitive pressure with real money involved. It is just how things go. Let’s not even call it a moral failure. The revolutionary vocabulary of the protocol side kept getting borrowed by the product side, long after the two had stopped being the same thing.
Founders who quoted the cypherpunk manifesto in 2019 pitch decks were sitting in Senate hearings by 2023, saying they had always wanted to work constructively with regulators. Decentralisation was, for a large portion of the industry, a regulatory strategy dressed up as an ethos. If no one is in charge, no one can be held liable. The ideology kept lawyers and regulators confused long enough to raise money, ship products, and in several notable cases, exit. Once regulation became unavoidable, the ideology was folded up and put somewhere it wouldn’t cause trouble.
There are still genuine believers. People who came to crypto because they had personally watched a government destroy a currency, freeze accounts for political reasons, or exclude entire populations from basic financial services. They were the moral cover for an industry that was, mostly, trying to get rich. Which is allowed. But no costumes.
If you ask me, the trade was probably worth it, and the people who made it know that, even if they won’t say so in those terms. The decentralisation argument, in its pure form, was always going to struggle with contact with reality. Nobody really sat down and decided to kill decentralisation. It just turned out that when you gave people a choice between a product that worked and a principle that didn’t, they picked the product. Every time, without announcement, without a funeral.
What I find genuinely funny, in a very specific late-night way, is watching the political dimension of this play out.
Before signing a single piece of crypto legislation, before appointing a single crypto-friendly regulator, the Trump Organisation’s income rose 17-fold in the first half of 2025 to $864 million — more than
90% of it from
crypto ventures.By early 2026, the Trumps had cashed out at least $1.2 billion in actual dollars from World Liberty Financial alone, per a Wall Street Journal analysis. His 19-year-old son Barron was listed on the project website as the “DeFi visionary.” 5 mins silence for whoever wrote that, honestly.
@
fortune.com
The man called Bitcoin a scam in 2021. By 2024, he was on stage at Bitcoin conferences. The crowd that had spent years arguing that no government should control your money watched an active president personally profit from the industry he was regulating, and the primary response was price predictions and “bullish.”
There’s a concept in economics called revealed preference. What you actually do is more informative than what you say you believe. The revealed preference of the decentralisation movement, when tested by actual political conditions, turned out to be - we care about decentralisation right up until caring becomes expensive, and then we care about the price.
I’m not even judging it particularly. I’m just noting it, for the record, because someone should?
The “we’re going to change the world” energy of 2017 and 2021 is mostly gone. The NFT crowd dispersed. In the metaverse, people found other things to be confidently wrong about. What’s left is quieter, less messianic, and considerably more honest about what it’s actually doing. The protocol side is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and the product side has built things that are incredible. The revolution still produced useful financial infrastructure, changed how value moves around the world, and made a significant number of people very wealthy.
My point is just this. Say what you are building.
If you are building a centralised exchange with better UX and crypto rails, say that. If your stablecoin is issued by a company with freeze capability and reserves at a bank, say that. If your DAO is functionally controlled by three wallets and everyone in the room knows it, you can probably just say that too. Users can handle honesty. What they cannot handle indefinitely is the gap between the story and the reality. And eventually, they stop handling it by leaving.
Satoshi has been silent for fifteen years. Maybe they saw this coming and decided the show would be more interesting to watch from offstage. Or maybe they just knew when to leave.
5
1
Share
We were going to abolish banks. we built better banks. honestly not bad
Thejaswini M A
Apr 12, 2026
5
1
Share
I never fully bought it. Not because I was smarter than anyone, but because the people shouting loudest about decentralisation were also the ones most aggressively trying to get your money into their ecosystem. That combination has never, in the history of anything, been a good sign.
I watched it anyway. You had to, since it was the most interesting show running. A whole industry built on the genuinely radical idea of trustless money, populated almost entirely by people you absolutely could not trust. The irony was in the walls.
And now, slowly, in the way that all obvious things eventually become officially obvious, everyone is arriving at the conclusion that some of us had been sitting with for a while. The decentralisation was always more costume than conviction. The dumb money was always the point. And the people who built their entire personality around “banks are the enemy” are now shaking hands with the most centralised political establishment on the planet because it’s good for the portfolio.
I’m not even angry about it. I’m just watching because it’s a very good show.
October 31, 2008. Financial crisis still smoking. Satoshi Nakamoto publishes nine pages. The proposal was electronic money that needs no bank, no government, no permission from anyone. Two parties transact. No intermediary takes a cut, or central authority decides if you’re allowed.
To be fair, the original pitch was good. It came directly from a world where hedge funds and central banks had placed overleveraged bets on the economy, profited from the losses of ordinary people, and received government bailouts for the trouble. The anger behind it was legitimate. If we’re not supposed to be fed up with a system that lets the elite keep the jackpot while the public covers the tab, what’s left to be mad about? right?
The architecture Satoshi proposed was elegant precisely because it removed the human element. No single point of control means no single point of capture. Instead there were thousands of nodes, all equal, all checking each other. You couldn’t bribe the network or couldn’t just call it up and threaten it. Couldn’t freeze someone’s wallet because a regulator had a bad morning.
Leaderless by design, a beautiful idea.
People want to date the rot to the VC money flooding in, or the NFT circus, or the FTX collapse. Those were symptoms. The actual condition started much earlier, almost immediately, if you were paying attention.
The problem with decentralisation is that it’s expensive and it’s slow. It requires coordination between thousands of participants who have no particular reason to agree with each other. Centralisation, on the other hand, is efficient, fast, and profitable. So the moment real money entered the equation, the economics started doing what economics always does. The industry split. And very few people said so out loud.
In May 2017, the top two Bitcoin mining pools together controlled less than 30% of the network’s hashrate. The top six pools had less than 65%. That was actually the most decentralised Bitcoin mining had ever been.Nine years in, and already past its peak. By December 2023, more than 55% of the hashrate was
controlled
by the top two pools, and 90% by the top six.
blockchain.com
Today, Foundry USA controls approximately 30% of the total hashrate and AntPool holds around 18%, together just under 50%.
And then in March 2026, the abstract finally became concrete. Foundry mined six consecutive blocks and triggered a rare two-block chain reorganisation, overwriting valid blocks from AntPool and ViaBTC. Smaller miners
watched their
legitimate work get erased from the ledger.
Bitcoin has never suffered a 51% attack. The network’s integrity has held. But the concentration risk the whitepaper was specifically designed to prevent is no longer theoretical. It is a number on a chart that keeps moving in the wrong direction.
b10c
@0xB10C
We just had a rare-ish two block fork/reorg between Foundry and AntPool+ViaBTC. Foundry mined six blocks in a row.
bnoc.xyz/t/two-block-re…
4:29 PM · Mar 23, 2026
·
383K Views
36 Replies
·
83 Reposts
·
402 Likes
The whitepaper described a system where no single actor could do that. The whitepaper turned 18 this year. Make of that what you will.
Now I want to be precise here, because the lazy version of this argument gets it wrong. Trust me, I tried that version too.
Take every crypto product currently generating real users, real volume, real revenue. Most of them are not decentralised.
But did they ever say they were? Collapsing that distinction is how you end up making an argument that sounds sharp but lands on the wrong target.
Stablecoins.
Crypto’s only unambiguous success story. Used for trading, remittances, payments in countries where the local currency is losing a slow war against inflation. As of 2025, USDT and USDC together account for
93% of the total
stablecoin market capitalisation, and stablecoins are processing trillions in transaction volume, like never before.
@
visaonchainanalytics
USDC and USDT are both issued by companies, and both can freeze your wallet. Forget all that; both hold their reserves at banks, the very institutions the whole thing was supposedly built to replace. DAI, the decentralised stablecoin that people point to as proof the dream is still alive, holds around 3-4% of the market.
Nobody sold you USDT as a decentralisation product. The pitch was always efficient.
Move dollars across borders in minutes, settle in seconds, no correspondent bank, no SWIFT code, no three-day clearing window. They kept the issuer and removed all the slow, expensive infrastructure sitting between the issuer and the user. The revolution that traditional finance is actually losing to is a centralised dollar, reissued on a blockchain, by a company.
That was the promise and it delivered on it.
Hyperliquid.
Billions in volume, fast, genuinely impressive. Also run, in any meaningful sense, by 16 validators. In March 2025, during the JELLY
incident
, those 16 validators reached consensus and delisted a token in under two minutes, turning an impending $12 million loss into a profit for the protocol. Two minutes. Getting Ethereum governance to agree on anything in two minutes would require a natural disaster and probably still generate a dissenting blog post from someone in a timezone nobody remembered to include.
Some people called it FTX 2.0. That framing was wrong. Hyperliquid made a company decision. What it got credit for (what it earned) was fixing the problem, reimbursing users, introducing on-chain validator voting for future delistings, and moving on. The issue is that for a while, Hyperliquid’s marketing spent considerable energy insisting it was not a company while operating exactly like one.
Prediction markets.
Polymarket had one of crypto’s first genuine mainstream moments during the 2024 US election. Journalists cited its prices. People who had never held ETH used it. Not once did anyone ask whether it was sufficiently decentralised. They asked if it was accurate. It was. Nobody went on ethics, a few articles here and there on insider trading and the truth machine framing, yeah some of them were mine. It was just a product that worked, using crypto as plumbing rather than personality.
I could write a whole section on DAOs here, but “decentralised autonomous organisation” is already the funniest three words in the English language. I’ll leave it there.
This is what’s working. Most of it works considerably better than what the whitepaper described.
There are two kinds of crypto now.
There is the infrastructure side: products built for efficiency, scale, and real use, which traded decentralisation for performance and were mostly honest about it.
And there is the protocol side: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, which are genuinely still doing something structurally different from anything that came before, where the decentralisation is not a marketing claim but a design property that has survived serious adversarial pressure. Products optimise for what users want, and users want things that work. Industries concentrate under competitive pressure with real money involved. It is just how things go. Let’s not even call it a moral failure. The revolutionary vocabulary of the protocol side kept getting borrowed by the product side, long after the two had stopped being the same thing.
Founders who quoted the cypherpunk manifesto in 2019 pitch decks were sitting in Senate hearings by 2023, saying they had always wanted to work constructively with regulators. Decentralisation was, for a large portion of the industry, a regulatory strategy dressed up as an ethos. If no one is in charge, no one can be held liable. The ideology kept lawyers and regulators confused long enough to raise money, ship products, and in several notable cases, exit. Once regulation became unavoidable, the ideology was folded up and put somewhere it wouldn’t cause trouble.
There are still genuine believers. People who came to crypto because they had personally watched a government destroy a currency, freeze accounts for political reasons, or exclude entire populations from basic financial services. They were the moral cover for an industry that was, mostly, trying to get rich. Which is allowed. But no costumes.
If you ask me, the trade was probably worth it, and the people who made it know that, even if they won’t say so in those terms. The decentralisation argument, in its pure form, was always going to struggle with contact with reality. Nobody really sat down and decided to kill decentralisation. It just turned out that when you gave people a choice between a product that worked and a principle that didn’t, they picked the product. Every time, without announcement, without a funeral.
What I find genuinely funny, in a very specific late-night way, is watching the political dimension of this play out.
Before signing a single piece of crypto legislation, before appointing a single crypto-friendly regulator, the Trump Organisation’s income rose 17-fold in the first half of 2025 to $864 million — more than
90% of it from
crypto ventures.By early 2026, the Trumps had cashed out at least $1.2 billion in actual dollars from World Liberty Financial alone, per a Wall Street Journal analysis. His 19-year-old son Barron was listed on the project website as the “DeFi visionary.” 5 mins silence for whoever wrote that, honestly.
@
fortune.com
The man called Bitcoin a scam in 2021. By 2024, he was on stage at Bitcoin conferences. The crowd that had spent years arguing that no government should control your money watched an active president personally profit from the industry he was regulating, and the primary response was price predictions and “bullish.”
There’s a concept in economics called revealed preference. What you actually do is more informative than what you say you believe. The revealed preference of the decentralisation movement, when tested by actual political conditions, turned out to be - we care about decentralisation right up until caring becomes expensive, and then we care about the price.
I’m not even judging it particularly. I’m just noting it, for the record, because someone should?
The “we’re going to change the world” energy of 2017 and 2021 is mostly gone. The NFT crowd dispersed. In the metaverse, people found other things to be confidently wrong about. What’s left is quieter, less messianic, and considerably more honest about what it’s actually doing. The protocol side is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and the product side has built things that are incredible. The revolution still produced useful financial infrastructure, changed how value moves around the world, and made a significant number of people very wealthy.
My point is just this. Say what you are building.
If you are building a centralised exchange with better UX and crypto rails, say that. If your stablecoin is issued by a company with freeze capability and reserves at a bank, say that. If your DAO is functionally controlled by three wallets and everyone in the room knows it, you can probably just say that too. Users can handle honesty. What they cannot handle indefinitely is the gap between the story and the reality. And eventually, they stop handling it by leaving.
Satoshi has been silent for fifteen years. Maybe they saw this coming and decided the show would be more interesting to watch from offstage. Or maybe they just knew when to leave.
5
1
Share
文檔 ID：
8aef5b5a-b8ba-4a55-ac55-15aa7770a72a
向量 ID：
doc_8aef5b5a-b8ba-4a55-ac55-15aa7770a72a
建立時間：
2026-04-14 01:33:44.806518
更新時間：
2026-04-14 01:33:44.806518