[kerkeslager]

This is literally the first comment on Hacker News I've seen that seems to actually understand the implications of decentralization. It's apparent to me that many people who are trying to profit on it don't actually understand why decentralization is desirable for some people. It's a foreign concept to many that there are motivations other than financial gain. Many attempts to "innovate" with Bitcoin are constantly trying to do things that are already solved with centralized systems, and end up working around decentralization.

> Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do.

I'd go further with this and say that decentralization is an active impediment to startups trying to create monopolies in the crypto space.

I think there's still room for development, but it will be hard for it to be motivated by profit. Particularly, a better-executed namecoin could be revolutionary if people started building infrastructure around it (i.e. as usernames, or a DNS replacement).