John Nash created bitcoin

[Dorky]

This is a naive vision of money.  The fiat system isn't as stupid and cheating as you think.  But it took me some time to understand that too.

The fiat system is indeed a CHEAT as I know (not think) it. Cheating through persistent devaluation of around 6% per year, every year, whereby it lost over 90% of its original value since almost 100 years ago. Please don't compare your understanding with mine. I am not an average joe when it comes to financial matter.

You would be totally out of your mind to kill the system on which your wealth has been based for so long, wouldn't you ?

If you see the rothschilds' wealth is tied to the fiat currency, that shows how ignorant you are about money matters. I sincerely don't think you understand finance.

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[dinofelis]

This is a naive vision of money.  The fiat system isn't as stupid and cheating as you think.  But it took me some time to understand that too.

The fiat system is indeed a CHEAT as I know (not think) it. Cheating through persistent devaluation of around 6% per year, every year, whereby it lost over 90% of its original value since almost 100 years ago. Please don't compare your understanding with mine. I am not an average joe when it comes to financial matter.

It is not a cheat to debase money.  Money is not a value holder.  It is a promise fluidifier, and the debasement serves for it to be spend.  The 6% inflation tax is nothing compared to all other taxes by the state.  The whole idea is that money is not a long-term value holder, because otherwise it would be hoarded, which is explicitly NOT the idea.  Money should go around quickly, between being earned, and being spend.  Any amount of money should lose value in the long term, and be a motivation to spend it.  Money is not a store of value.

The whole sound money doctrine doesn't take into account the fact that money then becomes an investment asset, with all the volatility that comes with it, and renders is essentially useless as a (constantly decreasing) unit of account.  If the devaluation rate (inflation rate) is known, there's nothing wrong with it, because it is taken into account when considering exchanges at different times.  It is just an exponential correction factor.  But at least, devaluating money cannot be used as a long term store of value, and will not be hoarded, because that's not the function of money.

It is true that the resulting seigniorage is lucrative for the privileged in the money business, but it is less so, than states taxing people around 50%, and it serves a purpose, namely getting money go around, and not being hoarded.

If you see the rothschilds' wealth is tied to the fiat currency, that shows how ignorant you are about money matters. I sincerely don't think you understand finance.

Because the Rothschilds are not in (fiat) banking and are not on the receiving end of the seigniorage flux ?

[cjmoles]

This is a naive vision of money.  The fiat system isn't as stupid and cheating as you think.  But it took me some time to understand that too.

The fiat system is indeed a CHEAT as I know (not think) it. Cheating through persistent devaluation of around 6% per year, every year, whereby it lost over 90% of its original value since almost 100 years ago. Please don't compare your understanding with mine. I am not an average joe when it comes to financial matter.

It is not a cheat to debase money.  Money is not a value holder.  It is a promise fluidifier, and the debasement serves for it to be spend.  The 6% inflation tax is nothing compared to all other taxes by the state.  The whole idea is that money is not a long-term value holder, because otherwise it would be hoarded, which is explicitly NOT the idea.  Money should go around quickly, between being earned, and being spend.  Any amount of money should lose value in the long term, and be a motivation to spend it.  Money is not a store of value.

The whole sound money doctrine doesn't take into account the fact that money then becomes an investment asset, with all the volatility that comes with it, and renders is essentially useless as a (constantly decreasing) unit of account.  If the devaluation rate (inflation rate) is known, there's nothing wrong with it, because it is taken into account when considering exchanges at different times.  It is just an exponential correction factor.  But at least, devaluating money cannot be used as a long term store of value, and will not be hoarded, because that's not the function of money.

It is true that the resulting seigniorage is lucrative for the privileged in the money business, but it is less so, than states taxing people around 50%, and it serves a purpose, namely getting money go around, and not being hoarded.

If you see the rothschilds' wealth is tied to the fiat currency, that shows how ignorant you are about money matters. I sincerely don't think you understand finance.

Because the Rothschilds are not in (fiat) banking and are not on the receiving end of the seigniorage flux ?

seigniorage <---- Key concept here....that's the cheat! 

[Dorky]

It is not a cheat to debase money.  Money is not a value holder.  It is a promise fluidifier, and the debasement serves for it to be spend.  The 6% inflation tax is nothing compared to all other taxes by the state.  The whole idea is that money is not a long-term value holder, because otherwise it would be hoarded, which is explicitly NOT the idea.  Money should go around quickly, between being earned, and being spend.  Any amount of money should lose value in the long term, and be a motivation to spend it.  Money is not a store of value.

The whole sound money doctrine doesn't take into account the fact that money then becomes an investment asset, with all the volatility that comes with it, and renders is essentially useless as a (constantly decreasing) unit of account.  If the devaluation rate (inflation rate) is known, there's nothing wrong with it, because it is taken into account when considering exchanges at different times.  It is just an exponential correction factor.  But at least, devaluating money cannot be used as a long term store of value, and will not be hoarded, because that's not the function of money.

It is true that the resulting seigniorage is lucrative for the privileged in the money business, but it is less so, than states taxing people around 50%, and it serves a purpose, namely getting money go around, and not being hoarded.

Money is a CHEAT if its rate of issuance (never mind the state taxation, it is not due to money but due to government debt that needs taxation to service the debt, not because of money itself directly speaking) exceeds your rate of income growth. Anything more than that, i.e. borrowing at interest to spend is the result of financial mismanagement. Spending money increases the money velocity, thus increasing credit growth, thus increasing debt and interest burden, thus hastening the devaluation of fiat value. To say money is made to be spent is like saying we are supposed to be cheated.

Because the Rothschilds are not in (fiat) banking and are not on the receiving end of the seigniorage flux ?

The rothschilds use fiat to control the people's labor, and with credit + interest slowly shifts away the people's property (house, land, car, public infrastructures, public utilities, etc) into their own. I print lots of monopoly money --> I tempt you to take loan with interest payable with my monopoly money --> you fail to pay --> I take your property away. I don't care about my monopoly money (it's fake anyway). I only care about your property. I don't care if my fiat fails because I can create new currency. But the properties I get from you, I keep.

[Dorky]

seigniorage <---- Key concept here....that's the cheat! 

That's bs.

[dinofelis]

seigniorage <---- Key concept here....that's the cheat!  

But all bitcoin early holders are also profiting from delayed seigniorage.  They obtained coins which were easy to mine (money that was easy to print) and it is now worth much more.  All deflationary currencies bring delayed seigniorage to their early holders.  In fact, almost all of bitcoin, and almost all of crypto, is living off the speculative effects of delayed seigniorage (cheaper printing than later market price).

There would have been a way in bitcoin to make seigniorage disappear: namely NOT INCREASE THE DIFFICULTY more than Moore's law, and keeping the block reward constant (tail emission).  You would then have a coin of which the value would remain constant, and equal to the (economic) work spent on it.  That is, if on average it would cost, say, 10 cents to mine a bitcoin in cost of proof of work, that would be about its market value, and would remain so, because if it increased, people would simply mine more of them, instead of paying more for them.  All of its seigniorage would be burned by PoW.  This is not the case in bitcoin, because as bitcoin's value is appreciating, the early mined coins were made with much less mining costs than their value, being similar to printed money in a way.

But bitcoin was not designed as an ideal money keeping its value almost constant, it was designed as a deflationary speculative asset, with delayed seigniorage, to profit early adopters, and blow a greater-fool bubble that way.

[Dorky]

But all bitcoin early holders are also profiting from delayed seigniorage.  They obtained coins which were easy to mine (money that was easy to print) and it is now worth much more.  All deflationary currencies bring delayed seigniorage to their early holders.  In fact, almost all of bitcoin, and almost all of crypto, is living off the speculative effects of delayed seigniorage (cheaper printing than later market price).

There would have been a way in bitcoin to make seigniorage disappear: namely NOT INCREASE THE DIFFICULTY more than Moore's law, and keeping the block reward constant (tail emission).  You would then have a coin of which the value would remain constant, and equal to the (economic) work spent on it.  That is, if on average it would cost, say, 10 cents to mine a bitcoin in cost of proof of work, that would be about its market value, and would remain so, because if it increased, people would simply mine more of them, instead of paying more for them.  All of its seigniorage would be burned by PoW.  This is not the case in bitcoin, because as bitcoin's value is appreciating, the early mined coins were made with much less mining costs than their value, being similar to printed money in a way.

But bitcoin was not designed as an ideal money keeping its value almost constant, it was designed as a deflationary speculative asset, with delayed seigniorage, to profit early adopters, and blow a greater-fool bubble that way.

You have totally lost sight of the original purpose of money.
Money does not derive its value from its cost of production, or else it is not money but commodity.

[Dorky]

I am doubtful of most people that claim to know money, can actually visualize a prosperous + advancing world without money as a possibility.

[dinofelis]

You have totally lost sight of the original purpose of money.
Money does not derive its value from its cost of production, or else it is not money but commodity.

That is not what I'm saying.  Of course money doesn't DERIVE its value from its cost of production.  It derives its value from the monetary belief system that it carries, the recursive belief that you can accept money against value, because others believe that they can accept money against value, because they believe that others believe that....

But if you want to avoid SEIGNIORAGE, there are only two solutions: use money that "always existed" (like gold) ; or make new money, and do that in such a way that the maker of it, needs to destroy/deliver the amount of value that it represents.

There are two ways of doing that:  
1) the fiat system way: create money against a backing (like a mortgage).
2) destroying as much value of the money you create (PoW).

If you don't do that, you get seigniorage (direct seigniorage, or delayed seigniorage, that is to say, you can fabricate money and obtain directly more value than you needed to spend/back for it (counterfeiting for instance) ; or you can fabricate money now, and obtain more value than you needed to spend/back for it LATER --> bitcoin).

The reason why, in my earlier example, the coin wouldn't gain any value beyond the PoW needed to make it, is that obviously, nobody would provide more value to obtain it though exchange, than the value needed to sacrifice to make new coins.  What I forgot to specify, however, and which may have (correctly) triggered your remark, is that most probably, that coin would simply be worthless.

But that is because there's no real demand for "internet money" apart from some niche applications like dark markets, and that  crypto is mainly a greater-fool token, not a monetary token (it is, but to much lesser extend).  As such a coin would of course not promise to get rich, nobody would "invest" in it.

If there were a demand for "internet money" then such a system would be near ideal money (in the Nash sense).

[IadixDev]

I still wanted to bounce also on dorky post, and the relation between occultism and money emission that is also hard to completely brush out

Even all the way back down to egypt, gold was associated with god(s) and ruler, same with roman empire, and in middle age most banks were either templar or vatican, with islam it's same and money is always related to a form of empire, after with revolution and the protestant the money was made by colonial powers and empire, and usually, money is always 'stamped' with something, either it's a pyramid, or great thinker of the light revolution in europe, all the modern money is related with certain society, and it's always like this since the beginning =)

It's not so illegitimate to wonder who is printing the bitcoin all together, as it's not stamped with anything, and there is no obvious connection to a corporation or government or group with known ideology or goal, so it's hard to know for sure if there is such objective behind, but it's not so easy to brush out either =)

Funny thing is, again not to scream to conspiracy, but i just saw few post from reptilia who is as far as i understand one of the big whale of bitcoin, i saw a post he made in the crypto kindgom thread, speaking about the key and the lock, remind me of something lol with the most serene republic and all this as i said it's not to scream conspiracy, it just make me laugth, and i can't say anything for sure, and i don't really care, but there are still always the same pattern lol

There are some video of mark passio on youtube, some of them are interesting, and from what i understand, originally he is an IT guy, and also was involved with occult group and more or less defected and he is making conferences talking about occult but he is very interesting on certain things =) he know his topic very well =)

Well it's very long to watch because it's 3 part of 2h, but he explain many things about the deep relation between money and the occult =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r8nEx3L3Vg

As parenthesis, it's also funny how nowday neurology is potentially completely changing the deal on how we can study the mind, and historically the mind as always been considered as separated from the material world, and are two different field of study, and even in neurology they start to acknowledge this, but i'm pretty sure it will soon bridge many cap between occult knowledge and science, when it come to predicting or controlling, or influencing people behavior, either it's with marketting, or propaganda.

And must not also underestimate the amount of people who really turned paranoiac in the past 20 year in various kind of activist scene, like assage for example, but it's also symptomatic of things at bigger scale, like "anonymous" group, and many group started to organize in very underground manner in various areas, specially with internet and dark net, and there are lot of people who also study the mechanism of power, and money, and many movie has been made like zeitgeist or other by various activist motion who are also found as reference f or "anonymous" groups, or all kind of theory on banking and money and secret societies, lot of theory like this came up, and many activist group in the world hacking really went paranoiac, especially since the escalation of trouble since 9/11, arab spring, all the wars and stuff, and this kind of person start to know how to make plan and how to anticipate certain reaction, even assange it's know they blocked his paypal account, they blocked his banking, in certain environment it's things that they can see coming too.

Assange also wrote very well about the necessity of secrecy if you want a plan to succeed, because keeping a plan secret take power away from people who don't know about it, and it remove many variable from the equation , and it's also a pattern always seen in the military and secret service to compartimentalize information and keep certain things secret, this culture of secrecy is found also more and more in many different groups, either they are occult or not.

Historically the control of money always been related to knowledge of the occult, and culture of being able to improve on nature by certain skill or craft, either it's to build castle, or temple, or trading, or politics it's always the product of practicing a certain craft or skill, and money is printed as a form of recognition of capacity to improve nature by the practice of a certain craft or work, in exchange of currency who give access to things produced by the same network of persons.

I don't think it ever happened in history that a currency would be printed by someone in his basement and gain international level and super high price, without being backed by any kind of group with an agenda, nothing get anywhere if there are not people who are mobilized to make it happen.

Either the original plan is lost now, and it's just become locked in some kind of unsolvable game theory, or it just got 'bought back' along the way, or it's just following the plan as foresaw since the beginning it's hard to say, it's hard to say if the agenda of the whale for which they invest into bitcoin is the same than the original idea of "satoshi", or if it was something out of secret socities , or shadow banking, or italian mafia, or even a government like china or russia, or just a guy in his basement, maybe at the beginning, but then it's becoming something else, and it's not easy to rule out that there are still a plan with it even if it's not what was intented since the beginning

In a way i see this thread as a way to bring back a bit of idealism into the bitcoin paradigm after all the issues that happened with either mt gox, dao, and all the totally unethical moves that become more and more common, with shady plan and conspiracy everywhere lol

It's not so easy to tell lol

[dinofelis]

I still wanted to bounce also on dorky post, and the relation between occultism and money emission that is also hard to completely brush out

Even all the way back down to egypt, gold was associated with god(s) and ruler, same with roman empire, and in middle age most banks were either templar or vatican, with islam it's same and money is always related to a form of empire, after with revolution and the protestant the money was made by colonial powers and empire, and usually, money is always 'stamped' with something, either it's a pyramid, or great thinker of the light revolution in europe, all the modern money is related with certain society, and it's always like this since the beginning =)

There's a very interesting read on that in "Debt, the first 5000 years", by Graeber.   In times of prosperity and peace, money is mainly a form of debt ; in times of empires and wars, gold and other hard commodity types of money become dominant because there's no trust to be had.  And in almost all cases, "authorities" (religious and/or state) have their heavy hand in monetary affairs.

[IadixDev]

It's interesting to see the history of uk with this, and god know they love their currency lol even John nash lived and studied there, half of the royal family are bankster  from nederland, who changed their name to get nobility title within royal familles, and lead to protestant revolution, and all the free market ideology come from there.

with the euro maybe they tried to make currency more rational or based on economic theory supposed to be neutral, but it's bit tanking currently, and many people study the impact of currency change, and free market ideology, and speak about such agenda behind euro, it's hard to untangle from economic and political interest.

But most other money have political / religious agenda, or are part of some kind of "civilisation plan", including also improving natural state, being part of something bigger, like uss entreprise lol

There was a guru India who wanted to make his own money to help developping country, but he got réputation of cult leader, but he had some kind of agenda with also politics and economics and religion.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Country_of_World_Peace#Currency

Raam is a bearer bond and local currency issued by Global Country of World Peace.[10][11] It was designed for the development of agricultural projects and to combat poverty in third world countries.[10] As of 2003, it had limited acceptance in some European and U.S. cities. The currency has been used in Iowa and has been also given approval in The Netherlands where more than 100 Dutch shops, department store chains, in 30 villages and cities, are using the notes at a fixed rate of 10 euros per raam.[11]

It's always like this, bitcoin would be the first, and it doesnt look like it's out of some kind of academicians comitee in government or Europe or financial institutions with clear economic theory behind.

[dinofelis]

It's always like this, bitcoin would be the first, and it doesnt look like it's out of some kind of academicians comitee in government or Europe or financial institutions with clear economic theory behind.

I think the economic theory behind bitcoin is extremely clear: it is the "sound money doctrine".  The gold bugs ideology in other words, but with that difference (which, in my opinion, will kill it) that there are a few extremely rich gold bugs from the start, which get their wealth on paper by the influx of newcomers.  The difference with real gold is that the system itself is a money hog with an increasing amount of friction.    Bitcoin's whales are "new riches" made in 2 or 3 years time, contrary to the long (and half-religious) history  of gold.  This is not going to be socially accepted, the seigniorage is too large.    The "inverse emission model" with a lot of cheap mining in the beginning, when the circle of those that knew was ridiculously small, and the diminishing emission when its price was increasing, gives a socially unacceptable seigniorage distribution, which has all the aspects that are needed for a huge greater-fool speculative bubble, giving rise to hoarding, and a market liquidity which is rather small.  This looks more like black tulips than money.  In the mean time, however, the influx of fresh blood ("adoption") is financing all this.  Until it won't.

[dongajow]

Only a few we know about bitcoin this. The truth is in satoshi nakamoto. Something like it would probably references to a wreath

[IadixDev]

It's always like this, bitcoin would be the first, and it doesnt look like it's out of some kind of academicians comitee in government or Europe or financial institutions with clear economic theory behind.

I think the economic theory behind bitcoin is extremely clear: it is the "sound money doctrine".  The gold bugs ideology in other words, but with that difference (which, in my opinion, will kill it) that there are a few extremely rich gold bugs from the start, which get their wealth on paper by the influx of newcomers.  The difference with real gold is that the system itself is a money hog with an increasing amount of friction.    Bitcoin's whales are "new riches" made in 2 or 3 years time, contrary to the long (and half-religious) history  of gold.  This is not going to be socially accepted, the seigniorage is too large.    The "inverse emission model" with a lot of cheap mining in the beginning, when the circle of those that knew was ridiculously small, and the diminishing emission when its price was increasing, gives a socially unacceptable seigniorage distribution, which has all the aspects that are needed for a huge greater-fool speculative bubble, giving rise to hoarding, and a market liquidity which is rather small.  This looks more like black tulips than money.  In the mean time, however, the influx of fresh blood ("adoption") is financing all this.  Until it won't.

Some would say currency is always a form of religion, if religion are taken in the sense of a binding between different persons based on common belief in how each other should behave, there is always a religious thinking behind monetary system, and even regarding the amount of pseudo fanatism around bitcoin, it can still be sign there is something going on, and i doubt this fanatism is created by this idea of bitcoin

[AGD]

Only a few we know about bitcoin this. The truth is in satoshi nakamoto. Something like it would probably references to a wreath

Comments like yours are a good example of how sig spammers are using sensless posts to get up in ranking. Mind if I quote this crap once in a while for educational purpose?

(edit: I might not be able to read your answer, because the "Ignore" feature makes it difficult.)

[dinofelis]

@dinofelis' lies, insults, and erroneous arrogance in this thread have been refuted here.

It is not because I won't explain 20 more times where most of your arguments are not rebuttals of what I write, that you must qualify my points as lies.  BTW, I'm perfectly capable of recognizing when you are right:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1884292.0

I told you many times my way of using this forum: posting my understanding at a certain point of things in a rather strongly affirmative way, and see if this can provoke sensible arguments made against it, that may improve my understanding of things. That's your and all other forum participant's only use for me. Your replies, apart from the thread I quote above, didn't reach the level of pertinence needed for me to learn from it, this is why I stop discussing those points, which were running in circles.  I wasn't winning anything from them.  And as I believe in free speech, I don't like self-moderated threads, even though I may inadvertently post in some by mistake.  Until recently, I didn't pay attention to that, but since Lauda censored me, I now do.

PS: as to "insults and arrogance" I don't think I will ever reach your level of mastership and its utility escapes me.  I don't remember often insulting people, because that is not going to increase their productivity of answers for me in most cases, so why would I do that ?  Can you show me a lot of insults on my part, because I don't really want to do that.

[cjmoles]

seigniorage <---- Key concept here....that's the cheat!  

But all bitcoin early holders are also profiting from delayed seigniorage.  They obtained coins which were easy to mine (money that was easy to print) and it is now worth much more.  All deflationary currencies bring delayed seigniorage to their early holders.  In fact, almost all of bitcoin, and almost all of crypto, is living off the speculative effects of delayed seigniorage (cheaper printing than later market price).

There would have been a way in bitcoin to make seigniorage disappear: namely NOT INCREASE THE DIFFICULTY more than Moore's law, and keeping the block reward constant (tail emission).  You would then have a coin of which the value would remain constant, and equal to the (economic) work spent on it.  That is, if on average it would cost, say, 10 cents to mine a bitcoin in cost of proof of work, that would be about its market value, and would remain so, because if it increased, people would simply mine more of them, instead of paying more for them.  All of its seigniorage would be burned by PoW.  This is not the case in bitcoin, because as bitcoin's value is appreciating, the early mined coins were made with much less mining costs than their value, being similar to printed money in a way.

But bitcoin was not designed as an ideal money keeping its value almost constant, it was designed as a deflationary speculative asset, with delayed seigniorage, to profit early adopters, and blow a greater-fool bubble that way.

I follow what you are saying....However, I think that there is an underestimated, not well defined, and often overlooked value that is inherent in the decentralized distributed economies that is not being considered adequately.  Specifically, the potential of networking and the innovations that monetizing its creation motivates are only recently being considered....After all, aren't the goods and services which a currency attracts what make that currency confidently revolve?  Aren't some object's value greater then the sum of the value of their parts?  Shouldn't some form of harmonic mean be applied, if so, what progression?  Those are only a few of the many questions that are being evaluated while considering the potentials of big data and advanced analytics....Isn't the question much larger?  Are the true potentials of the decentralized distributed economies understood well enough to make quantitative judgments based on antiquated understandings?

[IadixDev]

seigniorage <---- Key concept here....that's the cheat!  

But all bitcoin early holders are also profiting from delayed seigniorage.  They obtained coins which were easy to mine (money that was easy to print) and it is now worth much more.  All deflationary currencies bring delayed seigniorage to their early holders.  In fact, almost all of bitcoin, and almost all of crypto, is living off the speculative effects of delayed seigniorage (cheaper printing than later market price).

There would have been a way in bitcoin to make seigniorage disappear: namely NOT INCREASE THE DIFFICULTY more than Moore's law, and keeping the block reward constant (tail emission).  You would then have a coin of which the value would remain constant, and equal to the (economic) work spent on it.  That is, if on average it would cost, say, 10 cents to mine a bitcoin in cost of proof of work, that would be about its market value, and would remain so, because if it increased, people would simply mine more of them, instead of paying more for them.  All of its seigniorage would be burned by PoW.  This is not the case in bitcoin, because as bitcoin's value is appreciating, the early mined coins were made with much less mining costs than their value, being similar to printed money in a way.

But bitcoin was not designed as an ideal money keeping its value almost constant, it was designed as a deflationary speculative asset, with delayed seigniorage, to profit early adopters, and blow a greater-fool bubble that way.

I follow what you are saying....However, I think that there is an underestimated, not well defined, and often overlooked value that is inherent in the decentralized distributed economies that is not being considered adequately.  Specifically, the potential of networking and the innovations that monetizing its creation motivates are only recently being considered....After all, aren't the goods and services which a currency attracts what make that currency confidently revolve?  Aren't some object's value greater then the sum of the value of their parts?  Shouldn't some form of harmonic mean be applied, if so, what progression?  Those are only a few of the many questions that are being evaluated while considering the potentials of big data and advanced analytics....Isn't the question much bigger?  Are the true potentials of the decentralized distributed economies understood well enough to make quantitative judgements based on antiquated understandings?

It's exactly the kind of problematics i'm working on, and i wanted to answer also something along side this line

The problem in the bottom is confusion between decentralized authority and decentralized computational power / task.

The two are a very different problem.

The pow thing is supposed to distribute authority through a distributed proof of work, but most of the computational work done by node is actually very poorly decentralized / distributed ( aka scalable).

But the whole issue is obfuscated by this whole debate with block size who are supposed 'scale' the network, but it won't scale anything, most of the computational power is in fact centralized, and only the work of one node will actually be used in the actual blockchain.

But decentralized work aka distributed application can work also with centralized authority, but the two problematics are often confused and put together, ethereum also added to this confusion.

But it's exactly the kind of problematic i'm working on, to have decentralized system able to provide services via html5 application and http API.

But the way bitcoin node are programmed is not that good to really get to the next step, because it's very monolithic, and though as some sort of swiss army knife to solve everything in once, both the server 'full node' aspect, the rpc server aspect for web apps, and the wallet for standalone app, plus mining software etc, the economic interest switched weirdly not in favor of developping more the decentralized economy aspect, but more centralizing risk and profits on mining pools and via trading logic.

But there are clearly good things to be done with decentralized economy, with distribued application / services who can work with blockchain as a paiment system, or system to store distributed ledger of public data / reccord, which can be useful for many things, and can probbably create new economies

But i don't think bitcoin development is very oriented toward this for the moment, more on the debate with the block size and segwit and speculative market on alt coin etc =)

[dinofelis]

The problem in the bottom is confusion between decentralized authority and decentralized computational power / task.

The two are a very different problem.

Absolutely !  "decentralisation" is about politics and decision power ; "distributed" is about the practical organisation of having geographically/topologically spread processing/storage locations.

Amazon's data centres are distributed ; but they are entirely centralized under Amazon's CEO's decision power.

You could, on the other hand, have a lot of mining of a crypto done in the same data centre, but under the decision power of many different people, independent of one another in their decisions: that would be a decentralized, but non-distributed, system.

But the whole issue is obfuscated by this whole debate with block size who are supposed 'scale' the network, but it won't scale anything, most of the computational power is in fact centralized, and only the work of one node will actually be used in the actual blockchain.

I think that bitcoin's idea was an extremely bright attempt, but simply "didn't cut it".  There were very good ideas in bitcoin, but some fundamental issues, pointed out from the start, were not addressed.

The very idea that every user would need a copy of the list of all transactions everywhere, ever done, world wide, is not thinkable for quite some while, technologically speaking.  As such, a compromise needs to be found, where only *some* users keep this copy, and others (most) are at their mercy.  The other idea, that a kind of rewarded lottery is going to organize a competition to who will be the next one that at the same time can collect a reward, and decide upon the to-be-generalized consensus on past transactions, and in doing so is also going to cryptographically secure the list, was automatically going to lead, through economies of scale, to a small oligarchy of miners, to be compared to the board of governors of the central bank.
Finally, the "sound money doctrine", and the consequences of a lot of coin printing in the beginning when it was cheap, with reduced printing of coins when it becomes more expensive, is fuelling a mega-deflationary spiral better known under the name of "HODLING", which will give the mother of all seigniorage to some early adopters possessing significant fractions of the total stash.  Finally, bitcoin's transparent transaction scheme is a privacy's worst night mare.

So in the end, bitcoin is naturally heading to the entire opposite of its announced purpose: it will be a totally centralized financial entity, more tightly controlled than any central bank, by an obscure oligarchy of people without any kind of political mandate or democratic control ; its deflationary spiral will make it essentially useless as a currency an a day-to-day usage, but will be a boon for financial speculators ; it will have created, through immense seigniorage, a small and obscure financial elite of doubtful intend of a kind that ridicules even the Bill Gates' type of fortune, and it will be a tool for total control on the slightest of your financial activities through the analysis of a transparent block chain and a full control of everything you ever do.

Whether this was on purpose or because of a bright but not good enough design, I leave in the middle.