if you’re building on ETH you have at least one, if not many, single points of failure and therefore not interesting to me - Jack Dorsey, Cofounder of Twitter
Imagine a football team that depends only on a single star player to win matches; and that player gets an injury, what happens to the team?
Or a business owner that needs $2500 per month to keep her business running, but has only a single client that pay $2500 per month. And after few months the client decide to stop doing business with her, what happens to the business?
Or a surguical lab that only depends on one source of power to perform surgery on patients and during an operation power went off.
This is a common problem in our world. There are businesses, networks, system that depend on a single source to stay afloat.
A single point of failure is any part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.
Popular websites today usually have more than one independent servers, if a single server encounters an error, the service automatically switches to another server, there will be no service interuption for the end users.
A solid business, network, or system should not have a single point of failure. The optimal solution is to reject depending on a single point entirely and has many decentralized points.
Decentralization of data is one of the core characteristic of a Blockchain: Rather than risk having a central database, let's have a distributed database.
Single point failure is impossible in Bitcoin. This is because Bitcoin blockchain is a decentralized network where transactions are stored and distributed across multiple nodes(servers). If a single node fails, the network will still be running smoothly.
PS: The idea that Ethereum is not fully decentralized and has many single points of failure may be true at the early days of ETH. However, at the time of this wirtting, it is almost impossible for ETH to experience a single point failure. The reason why I qouted Jack is to indicate that not every "blockchain" platform out there is fully decentralized, and choosing the right blockchain platform for your project is important.
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