[betterunix]

As opposed to the power Bitcoin exchanges, Bitcoin mining pools, and Bitcoin developers have over Bitcoin? The supposed decentralization in Bitcoin is theoretical at best; in practice, power is concentrated in a few key places.

So really, we could make a better system, one that uses far less power, by just accepting that some things cannot be decentralized and designing a system accordingly.

[dasil003]

Right, so because there are emergent power structures of some sort, it's all equivalent and there's nothing actually decentralized about it. I mean, Linux might be "open source", but really Linus is calling the shots, so it's really no different than Windows at the end of the day.

[betterunix]

You had said that we should criticize decentralization at our own peril because power in the current finance system is being concentrated on a small set of corporations. The only difference between that and Bitcoin is the scale -- the amount of money involved with Bitcoin is nowhere close to the amount of money that multinational banks are dealing with.

The difference is that with Bitcoin, we are also pouring otherwise useful energy down the drain as part of the security model. The is purely because of a fantasy about an ideal kind of money that requires no central authority. If we were to drop that fantasy and accept the existence of authorities in the system, we could create a digital cash system that:

* Has the same kind of payment security properties as Bitcoin

* Actually allows for anonymous payments

* Supports offline transactions

* Requires many orders of magnitude less power than Bitcoin

Of course, as soon as you say "central authority," the Bitcoin crowd dismisses the idea entirely, regardless of its merits and regardless of the existence of concentrated authority in Bitcoin.