Crypto Academy Season 3 Beginners' course - Homework Post for Task 2: Decentralization - pros and cons by @papi.mati

Decentralization, in the simplest words, is giving a power to every person who is engaged in some process instead of keeping all the power in the hands of one person or very narrow group.

In decentralized medias you are free to express yourself and you take all the responsibility for your actions while in centralized version, your expression would depend on the opinion of the other people. In that meaning decentralized media would be represented by steemit while centralized by most of the newspapers (print depends if the editor will accept your article) or standard social media with their regulations prohibiting some sort of the content.

That sort of autonomous in making the decisions about your own cryptocurrency includes the freedom to make the withdraws, payments, buying and selling the tokens and every other action which you could imagine. Users don't need the permission of others to make any action related to the funds which they own. The opposite to that situation would be centralized money management, for example parents which doesn't allow their own kid to buy an expensive toy for his own money.

That freedom of expression which decentralized cryptocurrencies offer is very safe, as the information in the block is impossible to change by anyone. It's stored on many computers connected in a network (nods) so there is no one person who would be able to block the information transfer.

Pros and Cons of decentralized cryptos

Let's start with pros. There is much more of them. It shouldn't be surprising, if it would be the opposite, the cryptocurrency wouldn't exist until now.

✅ Crypto is safe - it's practically impossible to hack it, as it would require enormous amount of the energy. Even though cryptocurrency is safe, it's still slightly possible that some hacker will steal our money, in example by getting the password to our wallet account
✅ You have a full freedom to manage your funds
✅ Transfer the money often is faster than in conventional banks
✅ There is no censure, everyone is allowed to manage their funds as they want. Account cannot be freezed by the court (like in conventional bank) or nationalized (it's a situation when the country takes control on part or whole our funds in case of some unusual situation, like war or other crisis).
✅ Transferring the power from the top to the bottom
✅ Transparency, no risk of fraud. Every single data about the transaction is saved and available to everyone to see. From the other hand, many people accuse the cryptocurrencies that using them helps in avoiding taxes, which partially is true.
✅ Fast and effective share the information, understood as the money transfers and, in case of decentralized social platforms like steemit, literally as the information.
✅ No transaction limits, no days off like in conventional banks. You don't have to worry that because of some sort of public holiday your transaction will be delayed a day or two - crypto is much better than the regular banks with that.
✅ No control of the banks, but in most cases control of the trading platforms which in some cases are centralized
✅ Lower transaction fees. Sure, it varies a lot and depends on what cryptocurrency and what trading platform do we use, but usually the price of the money transfer is much lower than in the conventional banks.

There are also some disadvantages. I believe most of them might be fixed soon though:

⛔ Misuse of funds or, in critical cases, potentially using it for the illegal actions.
⛔ Launching the system requires a lot of money and experienced people.
⛔ It's energy consuming and as long as the energy doesn't come from green technologies, quite environmental unfriendly
⛔ It is not possible to get back the money once sent, so when we will commit the mistake, getting back our money depends only on the person which received them and their decision if they want to give it back.
⛔ As most of the cryptocurrencies are not very popular yet, their price is often quite unstable. It's risky, as we can lose a lot of many when we keep our savings in crypto tokens, but... It's also the opportunity to increase our savings drastically
⛔ Like I mentioned, it's not so popular yet, so... It's difficult to pay in crypto in most of the places. That luckily slowly changes. More and more companies accept the payment in Bitcoin or Etherum, Bitcoin recently was even officially classified as the legal currency by the first country in the world - Salvador
⛔ Being dependent on the internet access. While using traditional funds might be made with the cash, using cryptocurrency depends on the access to the internet. In some places around the world it's still an issue

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Thank you for reading,
@papi.mati

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