Samsung NEXT Technical Director Values Decentralization Above Blockchain

Decentralization is a more important phenomenon than blockchain, a senior executive at South Korean tech giant Samsung said in an interview with computing magazine JAX Jan. 10.  

Speaking about the future of blockchain, Ricardo J. Méndez, Technical Director at the firm’s innovative technology arm Samsung NEXT, forecast a consolidation of the space in the coming year, but underscored the importance of reshaping centralized structures.

Asked whether he thought decentralization was more important than blockchain, Mendez replied:

“Without question. Blockchain is just one more tool, and one that can help in decentralized contexts, but a tool is always less important than the goal.”

The perspective places Samsung in a somewhat smaller group of tech businesses championing the more ideological aspects of the blockchain phenomenon.

As Cointelegraph has reported, the majority of big players continue to look to blockchain as a method of streamlining operations such as supply chains, costs and paperwork, but rarely mention the benefits of a decentralized system akin to that of the Bitcoin (BTC) network.

On the topic of cryptocurrency, however, Méndez appeared keen to highlight the flipside of many assets’ method of transacting.

“You need only look at most cryptocurrencies, which are completely decentralized but also 100% public – their pseudonymity only needs to be broken once,” he continued.

“Peer-to-peer approaches require you to broadcast your activity to peers, so they need an extra privacy layer (like a VPN or mix network). This is why, as an industry, we need to get better at explaining to users the trade-offs of different approaches.”

Samsung itself maintains a vested interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency-based experimentation, last month revealing it was seeking a U.K. patent for a cryptocurrency wallet.