Then you end up with DASH which is just another cartel (developers) muscling in on the mining cartel because they weren't getting any of the pie.

What I want to express is that bitcoin isn't designed to be decentralized. It was foreseen that centralization was inevitable and the reason that it will centralize is because it has miners. It's a bit like Nazcar racing. Sure anyone can take part but it's dominated by specialist teams with huge amounts of resources and they will laugh at you when you enter your Chevrolet Impala.

There are 3 components of the bitcoin network (although Users and Full Nodes are not really different from a protocol perspective).

• The Miners
• Full nodes
• Users.

Miners can do all three, if they so desire, at no real extra cost because for a User you only need a no-cost, open source client. For a Full node you only need 64GB of storage (a few dollars) but mining is the only one that can make coins and police the protocol.

To make money in mining, you now need 10s of thousands of dollars of specialist hardware, industrial levels of electricity and a lot of ventilated space. These things all get cheaper with centralization and the double whammy is centralization increases your probability of getting the next block first.

The end result is that miners will utilize economies of scale and be bought out, forced out and assimilated until there is a cartel of data centers containing  full nodes and mining rigs, while everyone else has a client paying whatever fees the cartels dictate. Sound familiar?

The only way to prevent this is to remove miners as a group so there is no miner, full node or users - just users. And mining is a by-product of using the system. More users, more bitcoin mining occurs.That's not bitcoin, though.

This is my opinion.......

Miners as a distinct group need to be removed from the equation. Mining needs to become a by-product of using of the Bitcoin system rather than the Bitcoin system being a by-product of mining, as it is now.

The three generals are still the only generals and they are now all sat in the same room. So who needs the messengers? (or the other two of the three generals?)

No. Its a problem with people thinking every solution to software is to install Linux and Linux tools where they don't belong.

Compile it for Windows or run Linux in a VM but don't poison Windows with Linux hacks.

Any system that relies on specialist groups to supply a fundamental feature or infrastructure will always yield centralization coalescing around them.

To fix the centralization you need to remove miners as a group. Mining has to be a by-product of using the system - users are the miners. The more users there are, the more mining takes place, transaction throughput increases and security strengthens. Not as it is now - the more money you have, the more mining you can do and users are just an advertizing strategy for their service.

Unfortunately Satoshi designed the Bitcoin system to be centralized. He/she even spoke of centralization in countries where electricity was cheapest or could have been offset against the heat generated. Bitcoin as it stands is destined to be purely data-center driven and owned probably by government backed corporate interests (aka banks).

I don't have any answers to this. The system as it stands was not designed to resist centralization and economists will drive the design towards centralization so it can be monetized just as the internet has been.