*2.1. Decentralisation*

Decentralisation ensures that transactions are verified and confirmed by a community of nodes and not by a central authority or a select committee, as in conventional systems. In other words, decisions are made by a distributed consensus, so any transaction does not require the trust of a third party. Consequently, the decisions made by network members are democratic, and any changes made to the protocol will be approved if more than 50% of the participants agree. An example is the fork in Bitcoin Cash that occurred on 1 August 2017 [37], where the maximum size of a block was increased to 8 MB to allow more transactions to be accepted. Given that multiple nodes verify the decision, decentralisation leads to higher-quality decisions than centralised authorities. The trade-off is the speed of confirmation; if a transaction requires the confirmation of multiple participants, the speed is less than that of a decision made by a central authority [38].
