Most amount to moving trust from one place to another, or breaking trust into a few parts. Trust is always required, efficiency is always required, resources are always required. These things all converge as order in chaos. That order is centralization.
Forgive me, but this is alphabet soup disguised as philosophy.
I'm not a part of the "decentralize everything!" parade, but I do believe in the concept of "empires to ashes". Eventually a thing becomes so central and powerful it collapses, whether it be by its own lack of agility, or by a paradigm shift. For many people, Bitcoin is the first time they experienced a paradigm shift in a very long time. It's exciting to have your world rocked, but Bitcoin is not a casting call for paradigm-shifters. Way too many people think we now have the power to break apart anything we can get our hands on, and turn into little pieces that somehow work better. Decentralization is not your hammer, and stock exchanges are not your nail.
I humbly reject the notion that people's intellectual depth is at the level of "Bitcoin is good, it decentralize, decentralize good, everything decentralize".
I'm pretty sure there are people here who have been anticipating Bitcoin for a long time. It's not a "decentralize everything" "parade"! It's about generating solutions to problems that exist. Centralized stock exchanges in the Bitcoin realm have been problematic from the very beginning. And that was a given before any of them even existed in the first place.
I can appreciate people trying new things, but an economy is more than protocol, sorry. I'm not saying the theory of a Colored Coin exchange is impossible, I'm saying the usefulness of it is. Any fruits of Colored Coin, Master Coin, etc, will do nothing more than appear decentralized in concept, and behave centralized in practice.
Isn't this all a straw man argument? No, it's not a "decentralize everything parade". With a decentralized exchange, you have a lower number of single points of failure. No other explanation should be necessary.
Having to trust 3 people instead of 1 is not decentralization. Having to trust that system instead of this one, is not decentralization.
Yes it is.
You are basically saying that, since graphs have nodes, and nodes are central points, we can't call any graph a decentralized graph. I hope you don't get offended if I call it childish.
Is every random business truly qualified to run its own security? So what if you can trust the decentralized exchange, none of the issuers will be easy to trust, now will they? How do you trust what you are buying and whom you buy it from?
Sorry but we both know that the vetting and auditing process has nothing to do with on what system the shares are traded. People can still use institutions for this.
If you really want to mitigate trust issues in this world, why aren't you all fighting to get people to use a/the Web of Trust (
http://bitcoin-otc.com/trust.php)? Why are people finding ways to pervert bitcoin with burns, when they should be making a decentralized web of trust that is more friendly and easy to use? Doesn't anyone realize how big "digital identity" will be going forward?
Maybe because we still don't know how to efficiently implement WoT in a decentralized manner? It has to be done, but it will be a long while before we get there.
We don't need more tinkering with reinventing Bitcoin, we need an agile identity/trust service. Think about it. Sure we have the current WoT, sure we have +Trust in this forum. But the WoT is not easy to use for beginners, nor is it a convenient means of auth/trust for online services. And, the forum's +Trust feature is much too centralized, weak, and narrow in focus.
Agreed, though in my experience, people seem to be having some difficulty with the concept. Maybe it needs to be integrated in a system that minimally exposes the intricacies of how it functions, rather than a generic WoT tool. I think a central place for trading "everything" will help solve most of our issues, and this place necessarily needs to be decentralized. All of the current attempts are baby steps, but they need to be developed in order for progress to happen. We need to use decentralized solutions, discover their weaknesses and build better ones until we have a sufficiently good one.
