I have notified Bytemaster that you have made some serious comments on his article and I am sure that he will study them closely, and if necessary correct the referenced article.
Thank you.
I think we have adequately dealt with the more reckless postings in these threads, but there is an interesting recurring debate (when you remove all the clutter) about the meaning of the word "decentralized".
I noticed this too. People often confuse "decentralized" and "distributed" and sometimes they set the threshold for "this is decentralized" too high.
Signing authority is uniformly distributed among the 101 most respected members of the community without regard to the size of their stakes. This can change every 10 seconds and everybody has a chance to participate based on merit, not chance. Signers have strictly limited power. They can either faithfully do their job or be detected and immediately fired.
It's hard to do something immediately in a decentralized system. It's like trying to fly faster than light.
A recent article I wrote with Bytemaster attempts to clarify this distinction by clearly highlighting the roles of decentralization, scalability, and fault tolerance in designing robust, profitible, and incorruptible systems. We would value you feedback on it.
Decentralization, Scalability, and Fault Tolerance of BitcoinThis part is not clear to me:
The total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization red herring! Thats not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured or replaced by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds.
How the system of nodes can do it in a coordinated manner if the only reliable comunication channel is controlled by the delegates (and some of them are rogue ones)? A very similar problem is explained here -
http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf (second half of part 3).