Bitcoin Forum

One of the central tenets of cryptocurrency is the principle of decentralization. It seems, however, that more and more people are willing to trade the principle of decentralization for profits. Is it just me, or is the crypto culture shifting? Or are principles like decentralization that important to begin with?

Indeed Crypto culture is shifting and I couldn't agree more with you.
It's seem like people don't really care anymore about their privacy and now using exchange that need ID & passport , same goes for low fees now people are using Debit cards which is the worst for what comes to fees (monthly or yearly or withraw on ATM) . Sooner or later govermeents will control 100% Cryptoo currencies and there is nothing we can do about it . because it's all about the "profit" and "money" right now .

I think people need to eat and keep shelter over their heads, so profit seeking is never going away. And yes, for many it's probably more important than decentralization because "people can't eat decentralization." But like with all things, there must be balance.

The principle of decentralization is still a theory, since no one has managed to create a decentralized coin. Bitcoin was close, but in truth, the person that controls bitcoin.org (this person also owns an alert key) is the central authority and controller of Bitcoin, since he can not only announce updates inside the client but also make them available on the official Bitcoin website. The Federal Reserve is much more decentralized by comparison.

If someone where able to invent a decentralized coin, I think it would have a good chance of eventually surpassing Bitcoin in market share.

I have to agree that even Bitcoin isn't fully decentralized. Even Erik Voorhees admits that in some ways, Bitcoin has an element of centralization (market-based centralization) https://bitcoinmagazine.com/19133/bitcoin-truly-decentralized-yes-important/

Profits are nice, but decentralisation is essential.

Or at least as little centralisation as possible: Erik V makes a good point that coercive centralisation (when users are given no choice) is a very bad thing, but that market based centralisation (because users choose the best service/platform) is almost unavoidable.

Tagging this for a future post because I am very passionate about this particular subject.


I will say in short terms, yes it seems 95% of the people out there say to hell with decentralization and cryptos.....as long as they can get their money out of it.


Also I believe this belongs in the general section not here.

Those who would give up essential Decentralization, to purchase a little temporary Profit, deserve neither Decentralization nor Profit.

Almost every single demand of the community and indeed many BTC 'requirements' to go 'mainstream' (and make everyone billionaires am I right?) requires some form of centralization or placement of power/trust in an individual/group. Business, assets, insurance, protection, backing, accountability, leadership, responsibility, the list goes on.

History repeating itself.

Well said.

I have been following Bitshares since it started and every three or four months they keep taking a step towards centralization. The last change they made/are making is licensing the actual code so the Developers can sell it to competitors and charge Bitshares holders for upgrades and third party plugins and on/off ramps. They have admitted all this and the Koolaid drinkers accept it, claiming it's better than someone taking the code and doing something better with it. Well if it's better, then it is deserving.

I used to be a fanboy and still hold a few shares, but man they went the opposite direction from when they sold to the investors back in November 2013.

I just wrote a post on their forum about their departure from a decentralized blockchain to a single point of failure in Cryptonomex, the company they created to own the code license.

Here is the path they took all in the name of profit. Apparently I am the only one screaming about the central control everyone is bought into. Some over there are even saying decentralization is over rated and will only alienate the crypto community which they say they don't need.

Bitshares was to be POW with a 10% premine sold to early investors and 10% to protoshares miners.

They decided to change to POS and sell 50% to investors and drop the other 50% on Protoshares. It was also established that they would take protoshares as a payment from investors thus giving them a free premine so to speak. Since every PTS would be worth 100's of BTS.

They then decided they should merge the multiple chains they were going to create so no other chain would do it and render the multi Bitshares chains weak on their own. They also decided to buy out PTS holders who were still mining and who donated for other chains that had been killed off for the merger. They decided to expand the supply by giving 100BTS for every PTS out there. Guess who owned 25% of the PTS at this point?

Then they decided to change from a deflationary model where BTS was getting destroyed, to an inflationary model creating more supply so the Developers could profit off the chain. In essence getting paid by the chain and BTS holders. They have 30 or so people sucking 4227 BTS per day each and only about 4 full time developers. The rest are large stake holders using the stake voting system to profit off the chain without having to buy any mining equipment. The rest are just liars and scammers selling snake oil and promising delivery dates on wallets and exchanges that come and go and nobody actually uses.

All this is repeatedly justified by profits. The only problem with profits is it's been hurting the average BTS holder who has no say because the 100 delegates have amassed huge control.

They have justified one entity to control the Bitshares code. A single point of failure and greed, and they still consider the project decentralized.

Sorry for the rant.

Go to bitsharestalk, see for yourself the mental gymnastics.

@newmine: I've been there.  ;D
I've lost a lot of faith in BTS over the last few months. (not that I ever had enough faith to actually give Dan+Stan my hard earned cash, but still...)
My impression is of a good community/project that is being slowly pulled off the rails. 

The only reason to invest in, mine, and trade various altcoins is to turn a profit. If anyone cares about the core principles of cryptocurrency, then they stick to Bitcoin.

That statement couldn't be any more incorrect.

what's more important ... a woman's body, or her mind?

tits get old and sag eventually .. an older woman's mind can still be very sexy ...

decentralization all the way!!!!

Why do you think that Bitcoin is for those who believe in the core principles and altcoins aren't? There is some cutting edge development going on in with some altcoins, and there are some blatant scams happening in the world of Bitcoin. Just check out the scam accusation thread and see for yourself.

A Ferengi bit/altcoiner without profit is no Ferengi bit/altcoiner at all :).

I like when everybody talking about the importance of true decentralization and then most of the very same people are flocking to the most centralized, SEC/Fincen/whatever_ regulatory_body compatible exchanges and mining farms because of the better trading conditions :).

That's why I'm asking the question. Decentralization is talked about, but when it comes to action, so many people take the centralized route.

Money is certainly above decentralisation, money has been above anything, even human lives.

that statement is probably true I bet.. but
we have no choice, there is no decentralized coin/system made we can switch to.

decentralization is critical to us moving forward with the technology of digital currencies.
problem being is we need a Satoshi to come along and marry the Problem with a viable Solution.
his work was genius.. few people can come up with such a lofty ambitious goal/idea then work out the logistics to make it happen.
and that is what we need.. someone(s) to figure out how it should be done (code wise)

Agreed.

However isn't there a satoshi quote out there where he explains that bitcoin wasnt meant to be decentralized, but rather distributed.  Give me a sec, ill go find it.

The key to real decentralisation is proof of human. If you can find a way to prove that one node = one human, you can have excellent decentralisation. The problem comes when you try to combine anonymity with this kind of proof. That's the real challenge.

Here's a humane answer that explains why. Many of us grew up in centralized systems; some of us not only grew up in them but also lived a lot of our lives in them. Our education, the way we normally think, and our habits all reflect this.

Right now, decentralization is largely an ideal. Sure, it's moved many mountains in the cutting-edge parts of the world,. but as yet the mainstream is unmoved. This is normal for any truly transformative ideal. Even in science: as Paul Samelson quipped, "Scientific progress advances funeral by funeral." And that's because we're human: our wetware is designed to carry us through our lives - all of our lives. From this angle, being largely creatures of habit is an evolutionary advantage.

An idea so transformative as decentralization, to become a new norm, will require a lot of still-useful habits to be broken. Do you know of any Ayn Rand admirer who has literally gone Galt - off-grid and scraping by on earning from unskilled labour? With regard to decentralization, it's a similar habit-shift. Decentralization is sometimes as messy as a dirt-farm. As of now, the only ones who live in a truly decentralized environment are outliers: people who, for whatever reason, don't have the advantageous habituation to centralized systems that the mainstream have.

That's not an indictment of us humans: if anything, it's the opposite. Radical changes need to be assimilated slowly by general society because all of them are partially pigs in pokes. Think of all the enthusiastic libertarians who greeted this unregulated jungle with delight, only to see the scams that have proliferated in the entire crytocurrency scene. Proof evident that transformative idea need a lot of field-testing.

I dont believe it is possible to live 100% decentralized. Id imagine there are some good things that can come from centralizing.

However the longest running decentralized human movement is the the rainbow gatherings. They have no leaders and no members yet continually meet since the 70's. It's a mix of educated people and those who have been shit out the buthole of society and everyone inbetween. Its both good and bad. And its international.

But they still have to rely on centralized systems for movement and food, etc

Growing your own food- decentralized

Not being able to grow everything and get what you need, centralized.

Centralization can be a good thing if the central agent is benevolent and competent. The problem, however, is that so many people around the world have had bad experiences with centralization. I really don't know what's best, but I agree that 100% decentralization in our lives is neither possible nor desirable.

I have started recently a topic "True Decentralization is in Diversity" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1120300.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1120300.0).
No comments yet.

Profits? People buy a coin if it has a high market cap and if price is rising. The higher is price, the more will buy it. Very often the local maximum of price is a point where the largest volume is, that's why buying high is common and doesn't refer to bad luck only.

Why is Bitcoin not rising? Probably elite is selling coins to crowd.
And USD billionaires don't buy "cheap" (in comparison with Google or Facebook market cap) Bitcoin just like BTC millionaires don't buy "cheap" (in comparison with BTC) altcoins. Probably both don't want "to waste money" how they understand it.

In my opinion, small investors will be fans of decentralized economy and in future we will see wide adoption of more than one or two coins.  

But full decentralization essentially encourages P&D and the same bad behavior that allowed the bankers in America to cause the Recession, imo. Because lack of regulation and controls to prevent said bad behavior and greedy speculators.

Decentralization is like insurance.
You pay for it in cases where there are risks you want to mitigate.

In other cases, where those risks are acceptable, you may choose the convenience or savings of using a more centralized solution.

I don't mind using a centralized bank to pay my utility bill or daily credit card expenses.
I'm much less comfortable trusting them with my retirement account or private business transactions.

Thus, not all financial products and services have the same need for decentralization purity.


People should be free to choose how much decentralization they want to trade off against other desirable features like convenience or cost.
Entrepreneurs should be free to earn a living offering services with a mix that meets the needs of their intended customers.

If I'm designing a new car, I only use enough steel in it to keep the passengers reasonably safe.
Adding more steel after that hurts performance and affordability more than it increases safety.

Decentralization is like steel. 

Entrepreneurs need to ask how much is enough to offer an affordable product that will sell well at a reasonable profit.

:)

Centralization is what allowed the bankers to rob the people via taxpayer bailouts.


Nice rationalization of your motives for copying NXT's decentralized PoS and centralizing it creating Bitshares' DPoS.

Right here folks is how they take away your rights and freedoms.  Take away a little here, give away a little there, and pretty soon you're left with nothing but shackles.

Actually, no. Canada has bank regulation. Weathered the Recession fine. America LACKED regulation; Recession was triggered due to a LACK of regulation.

I'm not sure if you ever can have a truly decentralized Cryptocurrency because you need to be able to trust whoever managing the codebase and people naturally want someone to make the decisions for them and provide updates so in any system you will have some kind of centralized authority that would have the final say but that doesn't mean that people do not have a say or have no opinion because you can still have cohesion of ideas. I think you can have a profitable system that is largely decentralized because people want to trade, Stake and sell Coins for profit and you want to have people to continually sell and distribute the Coins because that creates greater decentralization. The problem is not inflation because people will continue to buy Coins as long as the code is advancing, the problem is when inflation grows at a faster rate than investment can ever come in (compounding interest with no cap and interest more than 1000%).

I am quite interested in the subject of decentralization and profitability because it is the main reason why everyone is here.

Good luck preventing "recessions".  That's called the business cycle.  The bailouts were possible because of centralization.

If I wanted to change the world via a decentralized currency, I would participate in Bitcoin, not Nxt or any other altcoin. This is the case of the vast majority. If it wasn't Nxt would be the big crypto, which it isn't. Just because altcoins offer revolutionary ideas, they don't have the tools Bitcoin has.

What makes you think Bitcoin is still decentralized?

Most important are promises. If dev makes good promises for coming geek hype tech it's easy to attract investors and dump on them.

One of the most important reasons we are here because we want to make some profit.
So profits are more important than decentralization
                                                                               

jtb : you're not looking hard enough, certainly not at Nxt.
Bitcoin has almost no native functionality: the only feature it offers is the storage and transfer of secure tokens over its blockchain.
All other tools/features are built by 3rd parties on top of BTC, often using very breakable code.
Take a look at what happened to Counterparty as a result of the recent BTC 'stress test'

Nxt, on the other hand, has been designed from the ground up to offer a wide range of functions integrated into the core, running on Nxts own native blockchain.
The philosophy behind Nxt is pretty much the same as Satoshis original vision for BTC, and does not exclude the use of Bitcoin.
My vision for the future of crypto still has BTC as 'the gold standard', with NXT providing a range of 2nd generation functions, that BTC ítself simply can't.

Decentralization is nice, decentralization sounds great, but everybody cares more about their own wallets.
If they cashed in, then decentralization can also come, no problem.

If you want an altcoin with a real developer who's trying to solve all the problems of bitcoin with decentralized solutions, look into Vanillacoin

-Can be compiled on any platform, including Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, game consoles, etc.  No other cryptocurrency can do this.
-Full, staking mobile wallets with transferable wallet.dat
-Only other coin besides BTC to require only 1 confirmation on Poloniex.
-Unlike Bitcoin, Vanillacoin's global transaction pool is highly synchronized, which makes malicious block reorganizations nearly impossible.
-Active dev, most talented I've seen in the altcoin space.

Also, look into upcoming features.

I'm not sure it would be any more painless when it comes to Bitcoin, I imagine you would still have people complaining about the voting and how it is unfair.

for me i want decentralization in the coin that i am passionate about and planning to use. which is bitcoin. but at the same time, profit has a high priority too.

i think when people stop considering cryptocurrencies as an investment and a way to make a quick buck and start considering it as a currency then the decentralization becomes an important part.

Yes and that is what I was referring to because then people would complain because large Bitcoin holders can outvote them. I think this is a good idea though and could be refined a bit, I think this is the first time I've heard someone suggest a solution instead of a problem regarding the Block size debate.

Yes, I think lot of new investors come get attracted to crypto because of profit and there are some people who truly interested in value but until we remove these investors who are in it for profit I think it'll be very hard to focus on value.

We must've lost around 100,000 people because of scams and p&d schemes yet one would wonder why they still exist...people don't learn and greed is a bitch.

Yes we need maney buy rice for famili.

I'd add altcoins. I think no posessions here are being criticized more than altcoins.

I've posted recently "True Decentralization is in Diversity" where have described the way of true decentralization and have got no answers, no arguments. Thus I yet don't know whether people fully agree (Qui tacet consentit) or just ignore these ideas.

Unfortunately there is often a lack of real arguments here on Bitcointalk.

Well...in the outside First World, it's quite trendy to objectify money and surprisingly easy to judge people through using it - i.e., using it as a standard of judgement. When you think about it, it's historically shocking to see how much of our charitable impulses are channelled through using the Almighty Dollar as a measuring stick.

If you have a taste for satire....

"All hail the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and its Gift to the World: the mighty Socio-Economic Scale! Through it, with it, in it: such is our charity."

"As a man with a cash-register heart, who see things only in dollars and cents, I can say that my heart absolutely bleeds when I see folks with neither dollars nor cents. How can anyone say that the poor are not victims?"

and so on...

Actually, Canadian bankers have a tradition of prudence. When times are better, this tradition shows indirectly through all those complaints about "stingy banks" from a lot of Canadians. :)

In the worst of the Great Depression, when American banks were falling like ninepins, no Canadian bank went under. Even though there was no such thing as a central bank in Canada until 1935, not a single Canadian bank failed in the 1930s.

At the time, this glaring lack of failure was chalked up to size: Canadian banks were big, spread all through Canada, diversified through the Canadians economy, etc.

Nowadays, of course, that same tradition of relative prudence is ascribed to "better regulation" - even through Canada's answer to the Glass-Steagall Act went void as of 1988.

So...us Canucks escaping "The Big One" provides a kind of Rorschach test of the times. Either that, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster has commanded us to give thanks and praise to Regulation...I think it's in the Gospel According to Max Weber. ;)