In our modern, decentralized world, the issue of trust has become more and more important. We need to know that our secrets will not be stolen or lost if we want to protect our money, assets, information, and even identity online. The current digital age has made this increasingly urgent, but it has also provided a great tool for helping with this issue: decentralization. This means that instead of risking the management of your secrets by yourself, or entrusting everything to a single party, you instead use the power of a group of unrelated parties to protect you.

As evidence of our own fallibility when it comes to managing secrets, most of us have lost or forgotten a password at least once. If you have a secret, such as a key that controls blockchain tokens you own (cryptocurrencies, NFTs, etc), you have many options. You could attempt to manage it yourself. But similar to how many of us have lost or forgotten a password, if you lose it, you lose your tokens. There is no safety net.

Or you could give that key to a single custodian who will manage it for you. But if they lose it, or decide to steal it, or have their computer hacked by someone who steals it, then you lose everything. A better approach is decentralization. Give pieces of it to many different people or companies, such that any half of them can help you recover it. That way, if the majority of them are honest, then it won’t be stolen. And if a majority of them don’t lose it, then you won’t lose it. Decentralization like this can be much safer.

This is the core idea in the world of blockchain and Web3. To be secure, you don’t have to trust yourself to never lose things. You don’t have to trust a single manager to be both honest and effective. You only have to trust that out of a large group, a large fraction are honest and effective. And if you achieve that, then you are secure.

Web3 proponents sometimes call decentralization a “trustless” system. That’s something of a misnomer. You still have to trust that the majority of mining power is owned by honest people, or the majority of stake, or the majority of computers on a blockchain. So there is still trust involved. But it is a lower bar that is easier to achieve than putting all your eggs in one basket, and giving a single individual or organization the ability to steal everything. Even if that single entity were honest, it can still be dangerous if they are hacked.

Of course, a decentralized system will also be insecure if all the computers are hacked. But at least it’s resilient if just one or a few computers are hacked. And that is why decentralization is the key to greater security. You don’t have to trust that there are no bad apples. You only have to trust that most of the apples are good.

Decentralization is the key to Web3 and blockchain, and it is the key to the Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) Protocol. That is why DeRec is desperately needed: to protect us. The DeRec Protocol is a 100% royalty-free, open protocol that can be supported in any application or service. The DeRec Alliance makes this standard and all of its developer libraries available for free under the Apache 2 Open Source License.