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 ... (full story)