[dohko]

And then these banks get together to form a banking system, and then this banking system decides it needs a central governing authority to be able to make important collective decisions efficient and implement them effectively and seamlessly.

And then they decide to call it the Federal Reserve Bitcoin Bank

[Torgo]

Periodically there are proposed protocol changes. A while back I saw a proposal on creating a set of rules that allowed for crowdsourcing-style transactions. (You could send bitcoin to an address, but the transaction did not become valid until the amount at the address reached a certain amount.) I didn't hang around long enough to see the outcome of this proposal, but what I did notice was that only the major bitcoin mining pools got to vote on it.

This is a factor of bitcoin being "decentralized" that I don't think many people fully internalize. Anybody could change the protocol, and all that will count toward acceptance is the number of nodes acknowledging their transactions. If a change is unpopular or made without widespread consensus, the blockchains split and now you've got two mutually incompatible currencies. In practice this will probably just mean that you're always under threat of a split unless everybody accedes to the changes that mining pools propose, since they control so many transactions. Alternately, new mining pools could be created that let members vote proportionally to the work they've done for the pool. It's both scary and interesting.

[paulhauggis]

Bitcoin shows you why we need the banking system (and lessons learned many many years ago).

It's why we don't store all of our money in a mattress underneath our bed.