Rather than thinking of decentralisation as being against centralisation, or bitcoin and crypto being against our global institutions, it may be helpful to think of them as a counterbalance. Not many people would argue that as we have moved so much of our daily lives into the online world, we’ve also given a tremendous amount of power to a small number of companies. This is true of our data, and it is becoming increasingly true of our money.

All crypto is, when you look at it dispassionately, is an attempt to prevent power finding its way into fewer and fewer hands, often in the form of unaccountable (and unelected) organisations that have come to hold an incredible amount of power and influence.

The network is entirely permissionless. Which means that you don’t need an invitation to join, you don’t have to fill in an application and wait to be approved. Anybody can participate, either as a miner, or as an account holder, without needing to ask, undergo a credit check, or even reveal their identity. The complex sets of rules that govern how bitcoins are mined and distributed ensures that it’s incredibly costly (some would say impossible) to cheat the system because the cost of cheating is far greater than the cost of playing fair.

The point of a permissionless network is that in a world where you can have your accounts frozen, nobody can prevent you from accessing it. On a global scale, this means that bitcoin can fill the role of a truly global asset, that no single country has the ability to control.