I've seen many people lately criticising bitcoin's lack of authority as a possible weakness. From what it seems, users have to put (at least some) trust to miners and pools and rely on them for things like generating blocks with updated clients, including transactions etc. Wouldn't such an issue scale up as bitcoin grows? Could it be addressed somehow?
On the assumption that this is an earnest inquiry and not just concern-trolling...
Where is the "weakness" in a lack of authority?
According to the designer it is intended as the lack of a weakness.
http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/4/Re: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper 2008-11-07 12:30:36 UTC
>[Lengthy exposition of vulnerability of a systm to use-of-force
>monopolies ellided.]
>
>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.
Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of
freedom for several years.
Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled
networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be
holding their own.
Satoshi
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Protocol engineering inevitably requires many trade-offs where one strength may traded for another or balanced based on other characteristics and the environment in which it operates.
If someone questions the lack of authority as a weakness, May I suggest you ask them to explain how this is so in the face of open-sourced software, and p2p architecture.