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Is Bitcoin Cash decentralised?

Yes.

Bitcoin Cash is decentralised, meaning it is a system with no one in charge or able to force action from anyone else. If this is unintuitive, consider it like the Internet itself - no one is "in charge" of the Internet, no one "owns" the Internet & no web page is the "center" of the Internet. There is no "official Internet office building" or customer support line. The Internet is an open system maintained by a wide variety of loosely coordinated amateur & professional individuals & groups in an organic (and sometimes messy) way. BCH is the exact same.

It's also worth noting that decentralisation is not a binary, it's a spectrum, but for the purposes of having sufficient technincal redundancy, censorship resistance & resilience to attack - Bitcoin Cash is decentralised.

Why decentralisation matters​

Although often thrown around as a buzzword in cryptocurrency conversation and/or held up as a supreme ideal, very few people understand ~~.

Fake decentralisation​

Many cryptocurrencies claim to be "decentralised" (like BCH or the Internet), but the reality is often very different. Power is frequently concentrated on any/all of an "official" foundation, organising body, founder, developer team, media promulgation channel, insider group or other central or network-critical entity of some kind.

Bitcoin Cash has no such thing. BCH was founded by Satoshi Nakamoto, who remained entirely anonymous, vanished in 2011 & never profited by selling his coins. The project has:

  • No official or "recognised" spokesperson
  • No "central" website
  • No verified Twitter account
  • No foundation or controlling body
  • No premine-receiving venture capital investors
  • No "official" or "main" code repository, development team or "endorsed" node implementation or wallet. Note that Bitcoin Cash is the only cryptocurrency in existence where an influential development team has been forcibly ejected from the project into a minority chain split by organic dispute from the community (only BCH & ETC have done so without retaining the brand).
  • No roadmap
  • No central/official anything

Any coin with any of these aspects is to some degree centralised.

Assessing decentralisation​

Decentralisation is not an easy thing to measure.

Roadmap​

Note that Bitcoin Cash does not have a roadmap, and any cryptocurrency which has any kind of "official" roadmap is centralised (for only a central party could have the authority to decide what is and isn't included on a roadmap in the first place).

~~

Every part of the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem - from miners to nodes to developers to businesses to consumers - operates 100% voluntarily. Nobody can force anyone else to do or not do anything, ~~. This operates in complete contrast to fiat currency systems, which persist by enslaving populations through involuntary taxation enforced at gunpoint.

Bitcoin Cash is decentralised, so there is no central party who could create a roadmap that had any authority. If anyone did create a roadmap, its authority would be limited to the willingness of the rest of the ecosystem to adhere to it.

Instead, the CHIP process, helps to co-ordinate network upgrades in the upcoming yearly cycle.

There is nothing preventing individual community members from trying to aggregate or clarify the state of BCH development in their own non-authoritative roadmap, as per The Bitcoin Cash Podcast Roadmap. However such efforts seem to stagnate because they are high effort to maintain and produce little value. This isn't a problem, just an organic discovery of the best process for Bitcoin Cash to develop.

See also: Should (or will) Bitcoin Cash rebrand?

See also: Why Bitcoin Cash instead of another cryptocurrency?