Comment by hackinthebochs

I don't see a substantive criticism here. I agree that the term decentralized is a misnomer, if only because the term is so vague. Democratization is the term I use to describe crypto. The question is whether powerful entities can interfere with the expected behavior of the network against the will of users. I don't see that this is the case. Sure, miners are in a position to ignore transactions, but doing so would require a high level of coordination that doesn't go against the ideal of "democratization". Yes, if everyone is against you, you're screwed either way. But crypto raises the level of coordination required for such an act to the point of implausibility. Besides, if such a coordinated attack against an individual was in progress, we would likely see hashrate reorganize to short-circuit the attack. This is democratization.