re: People buying these Crypto Currencies

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I was saying that if it is centralized somewhere, is that verifiable?

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A centralized ledger is only verifiable if you trust the holding party not to modify the ledger to their advantage. The point of decentralization is to have tons of people look at the ledger and say, "yup, checks out. We good."

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Isn’t that centralization via Etherscan?

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Etherscan is just a website that reads the Ethereum blockchain. There are many services, private and public, that do this, be it for bitcoin, ethereum, cardona, etc. I only used it as an example as to how a normal person like you and me can read the blockchain and see what went where.

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Isn’t that centralization via Etherscan?

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Yes. Ethereum the blockchain is very well decentralized, but the tools surrounding it are lacking decentralization. It's difficult & expensive for those tools to scale, so the centralized services came online first with bigger funding. Decentralized options are starting to pop up; for example, for an RPC provider there's now Pocket Network that competes with Infura, Alchemy, and others. For block explorers, there's one in development: Librescan


It is an expensive and difficult endeavor to keep track of and store every block transaction over the last year or so. So far, no decentralized options for block exploration have succeeded. There are multiple centralized block explorers, however, so data can be validated by a service through multiple explorers. A list of block explorers

In addition, node operators (most large projects will want to run nodes for efficiency) can look up data directly on the blockchain if they have things like transaction IDs and addresses.


All this is to say: The block explorers are not decentralized (yet), but there's enough competition and people watching that it'd take a really large coordinated effort to have all of these options show the same bad data. The data is very trustable.