I’ve always liked the framing of crypto being a “choose your own adventure” game where users can consciously make the choice of how they interact with various crypto products/services. I think Mudit’s tweet perfectly captures how this plays out practically in crypto - users either choose to care about decentralization or not - but that doesn’t take away from how important decentralization is.

Mudit Gupta @Mudit__Gupta

Web3 is not about forced decentralization. Web3 is about the ability to be decentralized. It's about having the choice. Infura/Alchemy are not bad as long as you have the choice to run your own node. Custodians are not evil as long as you can self custody as well.

May 25th 2022

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The truth is that at the end of the day most people don’t care about decentralization whether that’s because they are apathetic to it or don’t understand why it’s important. Regardless of this, what’s most important is that every user has the choice to take advantage of what decentralization can give them. Want to use your own node to relay your transactions? Well you can make that conscious choice instead of using Infura and Alchemy. Want to use a non-custodial wallet instead of a custodial one? Again, a conscious choice that a user makes. There’s plenty more examples I can give

Now, taking the decentralized path is not always easy (and oftentimes it’s quite difficult) so it’s on us as an ecosystem to make it much easier. Instead of requiring users to run their own full nodes, we need to make light clients a reality. Instead of making users jump through hoops to self-custody, we need to create better interfaces for them. Instead of scaring users away with crypto-jargon, we need to use terminology that they can understand. There’s plenty more examples I could give, but I think you get the point!

Lastly, I’ve always thought about decentralization as security and I frame it this way when talking to non-crypto people about it. I simply ask them: do you care about the security of your finances? Of course, the answer is “yes” 100% of the time, so then I say “well decentralization is directly linked to security so you should care about that too!”. So it’s not that users don’t care about decentralization - it’s that they don’t understand why they should care about it - but everyone understands why they should care about security.

I hope that we can keep making it easier for people to choose the decentralized path in their crypto adventures. It’s overall better for users as they get a more secure and trustless experience while inheriting Ethereum’s decentralization properties - a win win for all. On top of this, it allows us to make the entire ecosystem more resilient to those that would do it harm by having tools to defend ourselves - which, in the end, is the entire point of what we’re building!

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.