What Is a Cryptocurrency? We Need Clearer Definitions

This post is part of CoinDesk’s 2019 Year in Review, a collection of 100 op-eds, interviews and takes on the state of blockchain and the world. Dr Gina C Pieters is an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, and a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge. She has been researching cryptocurrencies since 2015.

There is an unresolved debate over how to define decentralization in a distributed ledger system, even though decentralization of peer-to-peer payments was the motivating factor for bitcoin. Personally I like an approach that defines it as the absence of a named party participants must engage with. Think of it this way: “Can someone in North Korea use it if they wanted to” (that is, a permisson-less system, like bitcoin) and: “Could China prevent me from using it?” (a permissioned system, like Libra). 

Libra’s Calibra wallet will only allow users who provide…