Why is Hedera Hashgraph not fully decentralized from the start?
Published: 2021-04-20 03:19:13

In short: 
Same reason why we have had so many Bitcoin Forks, developers, miners, and regulators just can't come to an agreement. 

Like in any big project you need a very competent group of leaders or a diverse committee with a lot of knowledge and experience in the subject to evaluate and consider possibilities and take the big decisions. 

>**Mike Orcutt** "*In cryptocurrency circles, calling something “centralized” is an insult. The epithet stems from Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s revelation: a monetary system doesn’t need a central authority, like a government, to work. That’s such a potent idea that it’s morphed into a battle among crypto-enthusiasts between good—that is, “decentralized”— currencies and evil ones, or anything with a whiff of “centralization,” that are assumed to threaten the utopian view of cryptocurrencies as the vehicle for a new financial world order*."

Source: [Bitcoin and Ethereum have a hidden power structure, and it’s just been revealed](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2018/01/18/146141/bitcoin-and-ethereum-have-a-hidden-power-structure-and-its-just-been-revealed/amp/)

It's not fully decentralized yet for an excellent reason. You see bitcoin and Ethereum started out decentralized because anyone could join and contribute to the network with mining,  but with time there were pools that got together or in case of Ethereum whales and made up way too much of the majority making the network centralized exposing it to attacks and giving those people leverage over the network.

Hashgraph wanted to avoid this very outcome by starting out centralized and veting each node to make sure they don't have malicious intent and establishing a governance council of competing international entities to keep each other in check and replacing them from time to time.

[The ‘Hidden Forces’ podcast has a great episode on this - episode 100](https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/hedera-hashgraph-goes-public-leemon-baird-mance-harmon/)

>**Leemon Baird 1:26:37** “*...Kabal implies some very close buddies that are very closely aligned. That’s why we have the decentralized council. They’re on different continents in different industries with different interests. So, they can collude with various things but to a large degree they are balancing each other with checks and balances. Plus we have the transparency. Even the meeting minutes get published. Total transparency, the code can be seen, you can see what they’re doing with the code base. If they do something truly nefarious like inflate the money supply, the backlash to them will hurt substantially.*”

The whole point of decentralized systems is to be more secured by having them spread out and avoiding a middle man by democratizing the consensus among each other. We have the opposite occurring with both bitcoin and Ethereum.

Hedera Hashgraph aims to be fully decentralized, but it's not that easy to get. They will start centralized and slowly be opening it up to the public becoming more decentralized over time. Here is a video that explains this path way better than I can by Dr. Leemon himself I highly recommend you to watch it:

[Hedera Hashgraph Webinar: Our path to decentralization by Dr. Leemon Baird](https://youtu.be/QTNNYeSks-s)

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>**Mike Orcutt** "*...the process of verifying transactions and securing a blockchain ledger against attack, called mining, is not actually that decentralized in either system. Bitcoin and Ethereum are open blockchain systems, meaning that in principle anyone can be a miner (see “What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters”). But organizations have formed to pool mining resources. The researchers found that the top four Bitcoin-mining operations had more than 53 percent of the system’s average mining capacity, measured on a weekly basis. Mining for Ethereum was even more consolidated: three miners accounted for 61 percent of the system’s average weekly capacity*."  
>  
>**Mike Orcutt** "*They also found that 56 percent of Bitcoin’s “nodes,” the computers around the world running its software (not all of them engage in mining), are located in data centers, versus 28 percent for Ethereum. That might indicate that Bitcoin is more corporatized, Sirer says. Overall, the group concluded that neither network “has strictly better properties than the other*"

For more info on the bitcoin and Ethereum being centralized check this article. [Bitcoin and Ethereum have a hidden power structure, and it’s just been revealed](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.technologyreview.com/2018/01/18/146141/bitcoin-and-ethereum-have-a-hidden-power-structure-and-its-just-been-revealed/amp/)