When people learn about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency for the first time, Blockchain technology always comes up. In addition, the term decentralized always comes up. The example that is often given is the we don’t need a “bank” with bitcoin as it is decentralized. But is decentralization just an illusion?
When I first researched about Bitcoin and Blockchain I thought how cool is that! “The world” controls the ledgers and it is therefore immutable . However, the reality is that these miners are not really independent (it may be what Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned) because miners now have to work in large pools to solve the cryptographic problems and it is nearly impossible for a single miner to do this on their own.
From the https://blockchain.info/ website we see that the top 4 BTC miner pools (BTC.com, AntPool, BTC.TOP, and ViaBTC) control the majority of the Blockchain capacity. Could the double spending problem be at risk if these 4 companies colluded to corrupt the system? Furthermore, the pools with the most computing power are located in China giving a single country control over the future of Bitcoin and has potential for deception.
In the same vain, I argue that Steem and its Blockchain are not decentralized. The developers and a few other people have a lot of influence on what happens to the future of Steem. The highest single account (please correct me if I am wrong) 
As a plankton (I know not even a minnow lol) in the Steemit ecosystem my votes have very little influence. My understanding was that the Steemit social media site would have a self governance within the community but this seems to breakdown when you have members that have so much more influence to set policy.
Don’t get me wrong, Steem is great and Blockchain technology is a game changer and I am trying to learn as much as I can about it. Blockchain has been described as the “Trust Machine” because of the decentralized nature of it, but my question to my fellow Steemians: Is the Blockchain really decentralized when we put our trust in a few, rather the entire community?
Thank you for reading.
Please comment, correct, and educate me.
Cheers!
Ian