Centralized systems are, in general, very fast and quick to upgrade and so on. Unfortunately, they also introduce a single point of failure which is ripe for abuse both inside and outside the system. From the outside, government regulators can add onerous rules to hurt the entire system. From the inside, the controllers of a centralized system can embezzle or abuse the resources that are entrusted to them.
The more you interact with Bitcoin the more obvious these centralized weaknesses become. Hopefully as more users are onboarded to Bitcoin, decentralization's virtues are well known and we can begin decentralizing more things - things less valuable than money but valuable nonetheless.
I obviously think about centralization quite a bit in the context of this website and social media generally. You can decentralize these systems but not easily - yet. If any audience would appreciate the effort though, it'd be bitcoiners.
Great stuff, as always.
Curious by comparison how many true full nodes are running for ETH these days and how much it takes in terms of space and bandwidth requirements. With Balaji et al wanting to put everything on a blockchain and decentralize the universe I always wonder who would be running these nodes and where the incentives lie.
Curious by comparison how many true full nodes are running for ETH these days and how much it takes in terms of space and bandwidth requirements. With Balaji et al wanting to put everything on a blockchain and decentralize the universe I always wonder who would be running these nodes and where the incentives lie.