On 06/02/2015 04:03 AM, Mike Hearn wrote:

1,000 *people* in control vs. 10 is two orders of

magnitude more decentralized.

Yet Bitcoin has got worse by all these metrics: there was a time before mining pools when there were ~thousands of people mining with their local CPUs and GPUs. Now the number of full nodes that matter for block selection number in the dozens, and all the other miners just follow their blocks blindly.

A mining pool is not a person, a full node is not a miner, and cooperation is not control.

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/number-of-bitcoin-miners-far-higher-than-popular-estimates/

The entire Bitcoin ecosystem cooperates, that is what consensus means. Establishing proof of that cooperation is the purpose of Bitcoin.

Decentralization is about keeping control out of the hands of the state (any entity that would substitute violence for consensus). Nobody has the power to compel the cooperation of individual miners in a pool. When state power is applied to a pool operator the miners (people) retain their vote.

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