On 08/31/2015 03:06 PM, Monarch via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> What is Bitcoin if not decentralized?
> 
> Bitcoin the most awkward, unprivate and damaging currencies ever
> created.  It is terribly slow for general use, and it is very
> difficult for users to get over the technical hurdles required to use
> it safety.  It is simultaneously the least private payment system ever
> conceived for general use, yet still manages to consistently help
> terrorists and pedophiles.  Over half a gigawatt of power is used to
> power the miners which timestamp the network, causing hundreds of
> millions of tonnes of CO2 and radioactive particles to be spewed into
> the atmosphere.
> 
> Perhaps we can justify these damages as the cost of decentralization,
> similar to one justifying the tor anonymity network as having
> significant positive effects outweighing the negative.  However if you
> are truly willing to give the goal of absolute decentralization up as
> unachievable or unrealistic, it would be much more sensible to replace
> the entire Bitcoin network with a couple of geographically distributed
> SQL servers and call it a day.
> 
> Without decentralization as an ultimate goal, Bitcoin is an
> abomination that is best dismantled.

You don't understand what value proof of work provides, or what features
differentiate good money from poor money, and you can't make a
defensible statement of Bitcoin's value proposition.

Because you can't do these things, you assume nobody else can do them
either and therefore the only way for Bitcoin to survive is to sweep the
problem under the rug and distract users with a word that means nothing
(and therefore means whatever the observer wants it to mean).

This is not a strategy that can be successful in the long term.

-- 
Justus Ranvier
Open Bitcoin Privacy Project
http://www.openbitcoinprivacyproject.org/
justus@openbitcoinprivacyproject.org
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