Are you possibly limiting the term decentralized to blockchain DBs? That would be a stretch. Decentralized DBs existed for a long time before blockchains.
I did read the entire paper and it was interesting.
You're more specific meaning of the word should have been spelled out before the claim. The meaning that I read was perfectly valid and shared by many others.
I apologize. I have a serious problem in forum discussions of not paying attention to who writes each post. I absorb all replies and then reply to the group. My bad. (Edit: And I thought you were the author).
>dismissing a paper on such pedantic terms as you originally did
I never dismissed the paper. Read my first post carefully. I enjoyed it and did read it before commenting. I was just pointing out my shock at the claim, which seemed ridiculous given my understanding.
> you keep escalating this
I thought I was participating in an argument about the meaning of the term "decentralized". I was defending my understanding to multiple people telling me I didn't know what I was talking about.
> Having taken advanced distributed computing courses
I have been working with databases for over 45 years. Most of that time decentralized meant lack of a centralized (single point of failure) computer, not a person or organization. It is only recently (10 to 15 yrs?) that the user meaning has appeared. Please forgive my classic interpretation.
The tagline at the github repo at https://github.com/basho/riak is "Riak is a decentralized datastore from Basho Technologies". I don't think they would lie.