What are "decentralized" platforms?

“centralized” means that a platform is owned/managed by a single entity—one place. “decentralized”, on the other hand simply means that the platform is owned/managed by multiple entities—multiple places. These entities are in a distributed network.

Control by multiple entities in this distributed network means one single person cannot make a decision. One single person cannot change how things work. Decision making are distributed among these entities. And this is the beauty of the increase in adoption rate for decentralized platforms.

Decentralization is an important concept that helps to aid provision of fairer services. Users in a blockchain do not need to trust one person for things to work. Trust and fairness is improved as it involves multiple entities.

Asides many other cons (which could be up for argument), the more the entities involved in the network, transactions get slower. Many mechanisms are put in place to improve this though, but it doesn’t change the fact that it exist.

Here’s how the network works

These connected entities are made up of you and me. Well not you and me in that sense but any electronic device could literally be an entity. As an entity, you have a copy of the same data every entity has. When one copy is updated, the other copies have to agree on the change (there are mechanisms like consensus and hasing methods) before it is updated in the network.

So with this, a change (like a fraudulent activity) which affects the consistency of the data, can be detected and fixed.

What are Distributed ledgers?

A ledger is similar to a database in which transactions carried out are recorded. A distributed ledger is a ledger that is shared across multiple entities, and is updated between these entities acordingly. This distribution serves as an “evidence” that the ledger is consistent and helps to avoid one point of failure. Failure (like fraud for example) in one entity, will not affect others.