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RE: World Economic Forum Says...You Might 'Question the Hype Around Blockchain'
The decentralization means that we can remove the inefficient intermediaries (banks, lawyers, notaries, clerks, courts...) and replace them with computer hardware.
So ether can only do one instruction a second, try buying a house and see how much beurecracy is involved. Try buying one on the other side of the globe and you will be burried by documents. That is inefficient, not ether.
If that house was listed on a public blockchain you could make the exchange in minutes and pay next to nothing in comission and you could trade that house globally.
You're essentially saying that blockchains are more efficient because they let you dodge regulations? I'll grant you that, and it does make it harder to analyze.
But it's really tricky to disentangle these things, and I'd argue that it's not so much decentralization that enables these things as much as it is automation. A centralized entity could just run a blockchain themselves, right? Why don't they? Because other database structures are better if you have access to the advantages of centralization.
If you're saying that it's the blockchain itself that gives efficiency, then you need to come to grips with the fact that a blockchain is just a very inefficiently-designed database. That's all it is. It's designed inefficiently to allow for decentralization; its inefficiencies are necessary because when you decentralize you lose all kinds of robustness.
And admit it - your example of the house is a straw man. What does "list a house on a blockchain" even mean?
I don't mean dodging regulations. It's possible to keep all standard regulations on the blockchain but without all the paper work using smart contracts.
That way you avoid all the corrupt middle-men like the lawyers and government clerks.
Why do you need it public? So it can be audited.
Why do you need it distributed? So a copy can be obtained and kept on every computer giving it credibility and robustness.
Why do you need decentralisation? To avoid corruption. The little computers doing PoW are securing the network from corrupt humans.
Why is it efficient? Because having offices in downtown, employing tens of thousands of humans that audit, test, check, read, sign documents is not efficient and makes no sense when computers can do it better, faster and a lot more secure.
It's not a strawman example, read about colored coins, they allow listing any asset right on the Bitcoin blockchain. It's possible, problem is that it has no meaning nowadays but if governments decide to list assets on the blockchain than turning all that paper records (or sql databases) to a public record listed right there on the bitcoin blockchain and secured by PoW is easy and each owner will have a private key or a P2SH address proving his ownership with no doubt.
Suggested reading:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.il/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html