Mastering Blockchain: Deeper insights into decentralization, cryptography, Bitcoin, and popular Blockchain frameworks

by Imran Bashir

Centralized systems are conventional (client--server) IT systems whereby there is a single authority that controls the system and is solely in-charge of all operations on the system. All users of a central system are dependent on a single source of service. Online service providers, such as eBay, Google, Amazon, Apple's App Store, and the majority of other providers, use this common model of delivering services. On the other hand, in a distributed system, the data and computation are spread across multiple nodes in the network. Sometimes, this term is confused with parallel computing. While there is an overlap in the definition, the main difference between both these systems is that in a parallel system, computation is performed by all nodes simultaneously in order to achieve a result, whereas in a distributed system, computation may not happen in parallel and data is only replicated on multiple nodes that users view as a single coherent system. Both of these models are used with variations in order to achieve failure tolerance and speed. In this model, there is still a central authority that has control over all nodes and governs processing. This means that the system is still centralized in nature.