Quote from: Augusto Croppo on January 16, 2014, 12:52:32 PM

Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 15, 2014, 06:25:35 PM

It's not just mining. The general trend over time is centralisation of everything. That's because professionalism is important but takes a lot of work, and the most obvious way to fund it is through offering services and charging a fee. Right now for a lot of Bitcoin users, their experience is like:

- Buy some coins on coinbase (essentially a bitcoin bank)
- Send them to a friend who uses blockchain.info
- Mine on a big pool like BTC Guild or GHash.io
- From time to time, buy things from a merchant who is using BitPay

It varies by region of course. Here in Europe I see a lot of people using the Android SPV wallet, so that's at least fairly decentralised. But it takes huge and constant effort to keep the decentralised solutions competitive with the more centralised forms. Cracking that problem is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

Agreed.

Some people just fail to observe the universe and verify that centralization of forces is a natural phenomenon.

The idea was to have solo "mining" (decentralized), but it became pooled "mining" (centralized).

The idea was to every end user have a client (decentralized), but in reality it is more feasible use blockchain.info (centralized).

The idea was to each user trade directly with another user (decentralized), but it turn out that exchange platforms are more reliable (centralized).

I have to disagree.

The Exchange of Bitcoins is becoming more and more decentralised. From the all powerful MTGox, to 4/5+ main exchanges in just 12 months. Last year saw the introduction of the first Bitcoin ATM's and this year mobile bitcoin vending machines costing less than $1000 will erupt onto the scene, all of this in less than 12 months too.This year we will also see 'decentralised exchanges' for the first time ever. It is literally an EXPLOSION OF DECENTRALISATION.

Bitpay exists not because of centralisation but because of slow bitcoin confirmation times and volatility. Both of which will ultimately be addressed in this or another crypto-currency making those centralised intermediaries obsolete.

The internet itself is a manifestation of the decentralisation evolution of man. After information the next steps are money and power.

The fact that BC was even an idea, was created and has rapidly grown shows that the decentralisation of money is taking place.
Furthermore the most valuable crypto-currencies after Bitcoin are the ones that have evolved the decentralisation model even further.
(LC and faster confirm times and more ASIC resistant mining and other coins have POW etc.)

In fact the easiest thing to do would be to create a coin that was more centralised and had all the features the current centralised bases of power would like. But why out of the hundreds of crypto-currencies that have been made since Bitcoin has none been created yet? Generation Y would never use it.

No doubt the current institiutions of power made up of Gen X and Baby-Boomers will try to bring crypto-currencies into their centralised model, but they will fail. I only wish the community could effectively pre-emptively respond to the centralisation of mining threat rather than waiting for it to be attacked and set Bitcoin back a few years or have it replaced by something more centralised mining resistant.

The future is decentralised.