Quote from: gollum on September 17, 2013, 12:11:35 PM

Bitcoin was a nice experiment of a decentralized currency,
but now it is becoming more and more like the traditional banking system,
less decentralized and more in the control of a few entities.

We see already that the blockchain is to huge for most users so they won't bother with using the bitcoin-client.
Instead most people will use bitcoin wallets in the cloud, and the real bitcoin clients will be run mostly by corporations, not by consumers.
The same goes with mining, it is not profitable anymore for you to mine coins at home, it must be done with ASIC and in a large scale to be profitable over time.

So the bitcoin infrastructure will become like fiat:
-The currency is issued by the banks ( bitcoins mined by a few mining corporations)
-The SWIFT backbone is run by the banks (bitcoin clients and mining run by a few corporations)

The only advantage of bitcoin is that everyone has the RIGHT to mine the currency or run the backbone (bitcoin client), but most users wont care about those rights.

In terms of a more "equalitarian" crypto-currency it turns out that LiteCoin is better than Bitcoin. I realized right away when I learned that you have to have specialized expensive ASIC hardware for SHA-256 mining. This keeps the "Rich get Richer" scheme going.

At least the hardware (AMD, NVidia GPU) is within reach of most people that want to mine Litecoin.