Decentralization maximalism is dead. Long live permissionless maxis.

Here’s my confession: I was a decentralization maxi for the first half-decade of my time in crypto.

The market has however shifted to a slightly different bent, taking me along with it. Permissionless maximalism is now the prevailing alignment.

Decentralization does tend to feed into permissionless-ness. The latter implies there is no central authority granting or denying permission to join the network — thereby making it decentralized — but permissionless systems can be centralized in nature.

Image boards like 4chan, for instance, don’t ask users to create accounts to post or view content. Setting aside the extensive moderation, there’s effectively no initial permission beyond accepting basic terms and conditions. The underlying site still runs on Cloudflare and could technically be seized at any moment.

Read more from our opinion section: Without decentralization, our data will never be safe

Within the blockchain context, think of smaller protocols that allow anyone to validate transactions, but due to a lack of interest, the team itself ends up running almost all of the full nodes. Permissionless, but centralized.

I identified with the hardline Bitcoiner. The tangibility of metal machines running proof-of-work is what uniquely ties blockchains to the North Star of censorship-resistance.

As long as mining rigs hum along in a data center in some remote corner of the world, the blockchain is alive, resistant to police raids, war and other types of physical interference.

Monero was okay, too. At least it was mineable. Same with Ethereum — until it switched to proof-of-stake.

If the seizure of bitcoin mining farms was a concern, then the potential for one machine to act as thousands — or even tens of thousands — of validators at the same time must centralize that risk.

Throughput, by that logic, is secondary. Yes, Bitcoin and Ethereum can only handle single-to-low-double-digit transactions per second. Too slow for mass appeal that comes with use cases broader than sending BTC or USDT back and forth, like breeding digital cats.

That’s just the cost of decentralization, I would say.

Besides, it’s not clear whether NFTs and memecoins really need to be onchain and forever cryptographically-verified at the expense of people managing the servers.

We could simply inspire all that less-important compute to move to more centralized networks. (And therein lies Vitalik’s pitch for Ethereum’s scaling roadmap.)

Doing so would free up the actual censorship-resistant blockspace for folks with unquestionable claims to it — those living under authoritarian regimes and hyperinflationary economies.