Is Internet Computer (ICP) really decentralized?

Overview

Internet Computer (ICP) describes itself as:

The Internet Computer is the fastest and most scalable general-purpose blockchain. It extends the Internet with computation: dapps (smart contracts) can run 100% on the Internet Computer as it can serve web contents directly into browsers.

You can learn more in Dfinity Website.

Is it trully decentralized?

The team behind Dfinity made this nice ICP Explorer that shows the current state of the ICP blockchain, consensus and nodes, among other things.

If we go to the Nodes tab and look at the bottom-right corner we see there are 443 nodes in the network. We can also see this number in ICP website.

For comparison, Bitcoin has 8148 according to blockhair.com, Ethereum 4844 according to ethernodes, and Solana 1713 according to Solana Beach. Obviously, these 3 blockchain-based networks work really different. You might think that 443 nodes is not that bad, maybe, but it gets worse once you realise these are not 443 independent nodes, they are in fact, just 53 entities (also called Node Providers) according to the ICP explorer.

Of course the other blockhains nodes aren't all independent neither, but by looking at the number of total nodes, it's clear that they are higher decentralized, and you are free to run your own node, wherever you want, however you want, anonymously.

There is also this funny detail: if we hover over one of the blue circles in the map of the ICP explorer, it displays some information about that particular provider, we can see in what Datacenter it's nodes are located, yes, Datacenter. All the nodes run in Datacenters, all of them.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot one thing, you cannot run your own ICP Node either, Indeed, you can't. Don't believe me? Go again to ICP Website and click on the menu "Run a Node", that will lead you to this form... and the first you see is this message:

Wow.

If you are still curious, you can press on "Continue". Now they ask for your email... then your first name.... and finally your last name.....

Conclusion

How can the people of Dfinity call Internet Computer decentralized, when a centralized organization decides who is allowed to run a node?

• 53 node providers
• Centralized node elegibility
• Nodes are not anonymous

Let's not even talk about their ICO

The author of this post does not own any ICP.