After going through the journey of understanding decentralization in detail, we now have reached the end of this section. In this section, we will look at some of the most important pros and cons of decentralization. Over the past few decades, the technology advancements and innovations have helped mankind and this world make good progress and growth. However, at the same time, any such innovations in technology have also exposed the dark side of the internet and has shown us the misuse of the technology itself.

The internet, for example, has its benefits but also has its disadvantages as well. People misuse the internet for hacking online systems and various other scams. It is not primarily the pitfall of the technology, but the usage of it with wrong intentions. The coin always has two sides and we are talking about the crypto coin here. Similar to the internet, even decentralization and blockchain have their own pros and cons. So, let's look at some of those at a broad level.

Firstly, one of the most significant benefits of blockchain is that it is a distributed network rather than being a centralized one. Transactions can be verified by a widely spread P2P global network of nodes. This means if someone wants to manipulate the data present on the blockchain, they will need to get access to all the computers in the distributed network, at the same time.

The computing power needed to conduct such a hack can be compared to something equivalent of the hashing for money. In this example, you really do not bother about any customer who power of a nation or state and all the technology companies therein to overcome more than 51% computational power of the entire network, which is next to impossible. This eliminates the single point of failure.

But looking at the cons part of it, there are still possibilities of hacking and manipulation of data. There are several types of hacks that are possible if the decentralized blockchain platform is not devised to safeguard from them. Let us discuss the hacks:

• Miner: For example, a 51% attack is considered as an inherent setback of public blockchains. One who has reputed the maximum to the network's mining hash rate has the ability to manipulate the ledger as per desire. In simple words, if you are a miner and are mining more than 51% of the blocks on a blockchain, then you can potentially change the ledger contents in all the blocks that are being written hereafter.
• Eclipse: Another type of hacking called an Eclipse attack involves crippling of one of the nodes in such a way that it fails to interact with all other nodes. This way, the percentage of mining hash rate does not pose as a restricting attribute and the remaining nodes probably may take the highest side of mining, dictating the rest of the blocks.
• Money making scams: The decentralized public blockchain can be used as a medium to ask for money from the public, for example, the Ransomware virus attack.
• Bank vulnerability: Even banks are vulnerable to fraud and robbery. A recent example would be when a group of hackers took control of all online and ATM operations of a large bank in Brazil. They got access to passwords, credit cards, and all other personal information of the individuals. This attack provided them with money and additional private information which can be used for future attacks as well.

We will now discuss the pros of decentralization in a detailed manner:

• Decentralization primarily eliminates intermediaries such as banks due ti which such information of value would not have had a central point of access. Due to its tamper-evident structure and immutability, the decentralized blockchain technology can help detect corruption and fraud in the government organizations as well. For example, the Silk Road online case which was shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation a few years ago. It was a darknet marketplace and consisted of a nexus of unlawful elements, which even the federal agencies were not able to trace. It was the decentralized blockchain ledger that helped the federal to uncover the real culprits who were covering up the evidence. The people who were actually the federal agents were the culprits and were part of the investigation team itself. This was only uncovered because of the decentralized, immutable, no single owner ledger of the blockchain platform.
• On the flip side of it, while decentralization eliminates the need for an intermediary or a middleman, over decades the whole world has been operating and is being driven by intermediary agencies only. Such intermediary agencies have been making money year on year. Besides this, due to its underlying complexities, blockchain and decentralization are not that easy for people to understand. The cryptography, the blockchain, the decentralization, and all the jargon are tough for them to understand. So, there will be a lot of resistance to accepting decentralization, especially in government organizations and some of the key agencies in the society.
• On the decentralized blockchain, anything that is worth the value can be transferred between entities and saved safely and confidentially. This restricts our attempt to alter with the wrong intention because the person has to find specific data for a particular individuals transaction. The anonymity on a decentralized platform can act as a two-edged sword: while it maintains confidentiality, it also helps the scammers and unlawful people who use it for their own advantages, to carry out illegal trades and transactions while remaining anonymous.
•  The security provided by the decentralized blockchain is achieved using cryptography and restricting the changes to the data written on the blockchain. This immutability keeps the data safeguarded lifelong. However, since transactions or data return on the platform is irreversible, any data that was mistakenly written and has to be corrected needs to be rewritten as a new record. One can only add corrected data as the new transaction. This, of course, needs to undergo additional computation, verification by the nodes, network sharing, and so on.