Decentralization is a spectrum.

Bitcoin « Ethereum « [Solana, Polygon, Optimistic rollups]

How can we talk about decentralization better? Maybe we can port a pattern from the infosec world - and always refer to the adversary (ie. threat model)

ie. ethereum is decentralized wrt nation state actors
ie. solana is decentralized wrt public cloud providers

Solana is decentralized, with respect to running your database on a centralized cloud provider like AWS. Admittedly, Solana might just be running on 3 public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) - but this is still distributing trust among 3 entities instead of just 1. Ethereum is much more decentralized - Ethereum is decentralized with respect to the nation state actor - like USA, UK, etc. It is very hard to censor or capture Ethereum, since it runs all over the world - and there is much data that Ethereum stakers are indeed, run on home computers worldwide (although execution nodes are a different matter).

Up until 2022, decentralized infrastructure and verifiable infrastructure have tended to refer to the same thing, but that table is about to be flipped. “Who cares where your node is running if you give me a [ZK] proof and I can verify it?” is something Mike from Lyra said when I was telling him about this - previously, in order to trust a blockchain, you have to run a full node, and basically pay the cost. Trust, but verify. But what if you could verify it without running a node? Is that even possible?