Although last few posts were interesting, I think the issue with SegWit and @anunymint's "Satoshi fork" proposal/speculation against SegWit is off-topic.
Forks are happening and will happen but the topic's question about PoW being doomed to centralization or not has remained open.
Actually, @anunymint and I debated this subject indirectly in discussing
my proposal for fixing mining variance and proximity premium flaws in PoW.
Talking about centralization of bitcoin and cryptos is deceptively simple. A naive perception based on common sense can lead us to where OP has started this topic with:
It is as Karl Marx described it, that in a national economy the big established players all tend to grow in power and size into a monopoly, and it is as we know it from the equally named board game "Monopoly" (picture) the player that owns a big share, of the total size early over time grows automaticallly bigger and bigger, creating ultimately a plutocratic society that creates not as many winners as possible but that seeks to create as many loosers as possible for the benefit and power of monopolistic and plutocratic or oligarchic few. That society might then be vastly influenced by those big players, media, legislation, elections etc. nothing published really matters anymore as the strings are pulled by forces that grew with the system and are now ruling it.
Can this also happen for cryptocurrencies or more specific POW systems?Yes it is likely to happen and it is already observable, lets start:
Tendencies to manipulate the media:I wrote an article about the systematic pump and dump schemes and the "bull calls" that are being issued now in the
american cryptomediaUntil now we have the same naive story about Capitalism and its tendency toward forming oligarchies and monopolies, and nothing yet about PoW specifically.
But suddenly, without any preliminary steps, OP continues
but it also reveals of a tendency to create vast and big influencing associations. Thinking that to the end, it is logically to understand that associations regarding hashpower in the worlds total POW system will be created out of interests to achieve certain economic goals, similar like caribbean pirates the worlds pow system might get its miner associations, which could hide their secretive coordinating core somewhere unknown and far away from legislation and police in an offshore sector. Such a secretive hashpower coordinating association will then for their reasons behave like a cancer, trying to feast on the smaller POW coins first, then grow in size so it can attack later the bigger ones. The profits from 51% attacks might even be a secondary goal, that delivers the profit, but the true goal being the destruction of trust which that particular POW system had in the first place. Take Verge as an example which lost a lot of trust and confidence after a 51% attack.
According to OP (and his paw, @anunymint), PoW encourages/pushes for a tendency towards creating such 'associations' and no longer deserves to be understood and propagated as a decentralized post-capitalistic whatever alternative (monetary system).
Instead
It would mean that a honorable POS system would get a chance to regain popularity again
Op continues:
Our Fazit: The POW concept will get its huge pool shark that will haunt it, that's unavoidable and Bitcoin marketed as decentral will become central, but a quite low quality unpopular cryptocurrency that will stand for its unpopular ressource waste, caused by its core association of miners, bitcoin isn't made for the longterm, and its even more not made to enrich the collective. It is a zero sum game of its miner cartel against everyone else, using the mass media, and the illusion of decentrality.
This is why I call this perception naive. It suffers from a shallow understanding of PoW that confuses the core idea with implementation.
Bitcoin is nothing more than a variant of PoW, it is what OP, @anunymint and many people don't understand thoroughly and become disappointed and terrified when they experience the situation with pools, nicehash, ASICs, ...
PoW as a consensus algorithm is based on objectivism, it requires people to consume energy and resources to vote on the state of the ledger proportionally.
First of all, accusing PoW of having an 'unpopular resource waste' weakness is like accusing a car or an airplane of consuming energy and trying to invent a magical vehicle which is capable of doing work without consuming fuel.
Bitcoin and its successors are commonly using Nakamoto's variant of PoW based on a
winner-takes-all principal that makes them vulnerable to pooling attack ("creating hashpower associations" as Op calls it) because of their known flaws being
mining variance and
proximity premium.
Although Satoshi Nakamoto has the privilege to be known as the first person who proposed PoW and the fist person who implemented it, he is not and shouldn't be considered as the last one who did it!
PoW is not another simple technological breakthrough, it deserves to be understood as an evolutionary project and to be improved. Bitcoin is nothing more than a beta version. It is just an unfortunate that releasing a true operational version of bitcoin has been postponed so long and instead we have these Core guys who have neither the vision nor the courage necessary to do so. Instead they are ruining the code as much as possible by complicating it adding useless features and hacks and focusing on off-chain solutions ironically: you got no balls to improve the chain? go off-chain development baby, it is safe!
I'm not here to discuss my proposal, but it is a real fact, it exists out there. Proof of Collaborative Work, PoCW is an example of how problems in Nakamoto's implementation of PoW can be approached and probably solved and how it is possible to de-incentivize people for 'creating associations'.
Without
pulling pressure, IOW without
mining variance and
proximity premium there is no mining centralization threat and the only thing OP and @anunymint will be left with is nothing more than general political economics theories about inevitability of cartels and trusts in modern capitalism which could be used everywhere and whenever by whoever in a bad mood and pessimistic approach to any technological or socio-economical phenomenon.