[censoredforlife]

Having one or more clients doesn't mean much. Eth is organizationally centralized because of the eth foundation. It literally has a dear leader (vitalik), and no different from crypto issued by, say, the fed.

The entire point of crypto is that it tries to solve the problem with existing currency (fiat), which is too tightly controlled by a few individuals.

[vzcx]

Is this actually solved by bitcoin? Is this actually solvable? I feel we're butting up against the Iron Law of Oligarchy, here.

What I mean is, Ethereum Foundation or not, only some small set of people will have commit access to the upstream bitcoin repository. Additionally, because of economies of scale, it makes more sense to pool resources under one central roof to solve the proof-of-work.

There might be a convoluted and informal political process involved before merging changes to the protocol. Mining companies might choose to limit their size in order to protect the network and thus their income streams. But ultimately, the number of core developers and miners, i.e., those with real power, is much, much less than the number of merchants and users.

[slashrsm]

This! Everyone seems to be forgetting about this aspect, which is very important IMO.