[shanusmagnus]

While there's a lot that could be written about what decentralization even means, or how to measure it, no reasonable definition would require a decentralized system to be entirely outside of the influence of everyone all the time.

For instance, Satoshi told people something that all participants considered reasonable, and so the participants reacted accordingly. Systemic reasonable behavior is not inconsistent with the principle of decentralization, it's a consequence of it.

The origin of systemically-reasonable policy is orthogonal to the idea of decentralization, unless that origin is structurally mandated.

[hudon]

In 2013 literally the system could not find consensus until the central party told people what to do. If you're still calling that "decentralized" then I'm afraid the word has lost any useful meaning...

But I'm with you man, if we as a decentralized group come up with a reasonable hierarchy of trust supported by free speech and democracy, then we can create a systemically-reasonable Money that we can all agree is good.

[shanusmagnus]

I'm not trying to nitpick, but I don't think there has ever in the history of man been a system that was fundamentally social and about shared consensus (which is about the most literal definition of money that there is) that would work any other way.

Having some Eminence say "This is what we should do" and then having a wide network of people go and do that is _not_ a problem. What _is_ a problem is if some eminence says "This is what we should do" and having a bunch of other people say "I don't want to do that" or "That doesn't make sense" or "This will be bad for me" and then _having to do it anyway_. That's the issue. Having to get permission for the US Govt before you change how nodes work, that's an issue. Having some dev frown and say "I can't get the majority to adopt my pull request because of stupid Greg Maxwell" is not an issue.

No complex system involving humans will ever get around the importance of human communication and coordination and agreement, and that is not a technological problem to be solved. A system that artificially mandates who those humans should be, or what kinds of solutions they can offer, that _is_ a problem to be solved, and Bitcoin does a nice job of solving it as well as it can reasonably be solved.

Of course, this is an empirical question. I could be wrong, and the data will demonstrate that in time. But so far there is no such demonstration of wrongness, and the chaos and arguing between various factions (e.g., Segwit2x, Bitcoin Cash) are not evidence in favor of that hypothesis.