It's not my concern what you think of my own opinion, and this does not come from self-interests. It is factual observation.
Centralization in terms of information security also means introducing a point of failure. Too big to fail is the result of centralized banking. That is a factual observation as well.
Centralization happens for many good reasons, including, convenience, trust, and profitability for all parties. Decentralization doesn't compensate for those values, it merely breaks them into smaller pieces.
Why not put your money in Bank of America? It's a nice centralized bank. Sometimes you're correct that centralization has some security advantages when trying to protect the gold in Fort Knox but even that is debatable because centralized storage only presents an easy target for bankers. At the end of the day the more centralized it is the bigger the target it becomes for those who want control of it. This is as much of a factual and historical statement as it is a technological design observation. Bitcoin and Bittorrent are designed to be decentralized because there isn't anyone who should be trusted (not the same as saying there isn't anyone who can be trusted). And to rely on trust when you don't have to is to introduce a point of failure into a system which doesn't have to have one.
On centralized exchanges, if we don't have to rely on Burnside, on Ukyo, on anybody like that, then we reduce our level of risk in participating in the system should we choose to put our Bitcoins at stake. There is no reason why you should choose a trust based system when you can choose a trustless system to do the same thing. Human beings are the main weakness in any system.
Look at the hip-hop music industry. The centralized powers have the attention, power, and efficiency to make money distributing entertainment in various forms. However, the abilities for independent artists to produce and create professional music, book their own tours, print their own merchandise, etc, are all there.
A lot of people want to do away with that centralized power system as well. Not everyone supports the star system, centralized RIAA distributed system. That system is basically obsolete and only exists because of lawsuits, political lobbyists having dinner with politicians and the President to protect the jobs of middlemen who don't really make the art or go on tour. It should be obvious that I'm on the side of the independent artist and while there may be room for centralized systems, those systems should compete with decentralized systems to prove their worth. They should not rely on politics and legalese to try to protect their obsolete jobs.
This feels like decentralization, yet now they are competing with the entire amateur industry. Those artists buy there hardware from known reputable (centralized) sources, they use centralized website services to get the word out, etc. Without centralized power and convenience none of it would be possible.
I agree that competition is a good thing. If anyone would like to make a centralized regulated exchange such as SecondMarket I'd definitely use it for the reason that it is regulated and it is in some ways considered more legitimate at this point in time. But the current exchanges dealing with Bitcoin are all illegitimate, unregulated, and if that is the case there is no moral argument that can be made for a person to choose to use Bitfunder over Mastercoin, Colored coin or whatever other technological solution that can come along and reduce the risk of nationalist lock-out policies, politics, and emotions of whoever is in the center of the centralized market. The attitude should be that we should not design any centralized markets in the first place as that is the main source of the problem with Paypal.
Look at what happens with Paypal or with banks when they decide for political reasons to block certain transactions and not allow certain people to do certain things without explaining their actions. That is the same situation we see with BTCT and Bitfunder. It is part of the reason many people switched out of the big banks and into Bitcoin in the first place.
Decentralization will always tend toward centralization of powers. Always. It's the only way to get anything done, and have any confidence it will get done sufficiently.
And I'm not disputing that disorder tends toward order. The difference is in scales.
Decentralized systems can remain compartmentalized, can remain isolated, can trend toward centralization of information and services without trending toward centralization of control. What I mean is the Bitcoin blockchain is transparent and transparency means centralization of the transaction information such that anyone can access it. This is a good thing because we need that kind of centralization. We also need Bitcointalk to provide a central forum where everyone can access certain information, we need charts, we need indexes, we need information to be accessible from a single point but we do not need that information to originate from a single point.
Distributed sources can combine data into a single point for convenience and I completely agree with you here. But I believe the sources should stay decentralized and I don't think that should become centralized because if all mining and all information comes from one source then according to the math of things you would have to trust that source absolutely. We don't want to trust any source absolutely in any system.
I'm not saying a decentralized exchange method won't be created, I'm just saying it will simply produce new centralized forces around facilitating its existence, which will eventually lead us back to where we started. The pursuit is admirable, and maybe even one worth constantly attempting, but I simply do not believe it can compete with the natural forces of reality.
I don't think it's inevitable. For instance if you look at Bittorrent it is less centralized than Napster. But we also accept that Pirate Bay was a popular central website where people could find the torrents. Google is a central website where people can search for stuff. This isn't going to change. What can change is that power can be decentralized to such a degree that the risk landscape and opportunity landscape changes.
In Bitcoin there will be some players who will have perhaps too much power and money. In a democratic decentralized landscape then we are free to use Litecoins instead as a way to hedge our bets against that. The point here is that the technology can produce an optimal environment, and that means an environment where the user benefits the most, where the system attempts to remain trustless, where it at least starts off decentralized, and always with the ability to shake it up again should centralization become too great.
In the case of Bitcoin if any entity within Bitcoin starts to centralize things to the detriment of Bitcoin then the community should have the capability to decentralize itself or if it cannot then there is Litecoin and that is why so many altcoins exist.
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