Title: Proponents of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum argue that we need to have fully decentralized systems. While these systems are operational and decentralized, they have an abysmally low performance. At the moment Bitcoin can only process 3 transactions per second, and Ethereum can only handle 15 transactions per second globally for all applications.<p>At the same time, we already have less decentralized systems like Ripple (for payments) and NEO (for decentralized applications and smart contracts). The performance of these protocols is orders of magnitude higher than the performance of fully decentralized systems. For example, NEO at its current state can process around 10,000 transactions per second.<p>It is hard to speculate if Ethereum and similar systems will ever outperform other blockchains, but it can be reasonable to assume that fully decentralized systems will always have lower performance since they need to provide stronger guarantees. In this case, if less decentralized systems will have higher performance, are there any practical reasons to strive for full decentralization?
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