The problem with analogies is category error. Your laptop doesn't fail for everyone. It fails only for you, then you reboot it and learn not to overload its systems. That is decentralization. Whereas when a block chain fails, up to millions of people are impacted.

I have seen many speculators in this forum use this line of reasoning, which basically is "nothing is perfect, pragmatism is how business gets done in the real world".

I am all for pragmatism, but that reasoning does not apply in this case of comparing say Ethereum to for example Monero or Bitcoin, because when a project fails on its fundamentals then it crashes and burns, e.g. the fork of Stellar's consensus algorithm (which was copied from Ripple) before SCP was invented nearly destroyed the Stellar project. That argument about pragmatism does apply in other contexts obviously. I used pragmaticism when I created CoolPage. It in fact never did import HTML but yet it was very popular as an HTML editor because people liked the easy-to-use pixel perfect WYSIWYG placement of photos and text.

Bitcoin's promised Nash equilibrium has never failed (well there was a bug once or twice that required centralized intervention). It was always specified that the 51% attack is a threat. We can say that the 65% of the hashrate that the Chinese miners allegedly control has enabled them to veto the adoption of any block size increase and they effectively have 51% attacked Bitcoin presumably so they can drive transaction fees higher so they can increase profits for the oligarchy they have controlling Bitcoin (and I read yesterday they are also blocking Classic's doubling to 2MB).

So therefor and also including the scalecopalyse ongoing, that Bitcoin is not perfect. However the salient distinction is that Bitcoin has performed exactly as the white paper said it would. Even Satoshi had admitted that Bitcoin would likely become centralized over time in order to scale.

So Bitcoin has been basically perfect to its specification. Bitcoin has been reliable to the specification and I for one have been working on how to solve the issues that Satoshi did not attempt to solve w.r.t. to scaling and centralization. I think I have that solution and I am working on specifying it formally and implementing it (if I can stop foruming!).

Whereas, so many of the alt-coins have either no or insufficient specification (e.g. VanillaCoin, Ethereum, MaidSafe) or their specification is flawed and can't every work at all (e.g. Ethereum, Storj, Filecoin, etc). There is another class of specifications that is very thorough and will work but only with centralization that they do not fully admit in the specifications (e.g. Ripple, Iota, Stellar's SCP).

Click the links in the prior paragraph for the gory details.

In my next post in this thread, I will try to further explain why Ethereum can't adhere to its implied specification (and I write 'implied' because afaik there is no coherent specification for Casper, one has to piece together the puzzle from presentations by the developers).