
Bitcoin's decentralised nature is not a feature, its a bug - lordofuniverse
http://www.viswanath.xyz/2018/01/bitcoins-decentralised-nature-is-not.html
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lend000
Do people who didn't make any money off of crypto just upvote any crap Bitcoin
article that has a negative connotation in the title?

Fact: There are pros and cons to decentralizing a system. Some alleged pros to
the centralized system were not described in any technical detail in this
article.

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laci27
No. I just agreed 100% with "Decentralised magically doesn't mean it's better.
There are scenarios it fits, and there are scenarios it doesn't fit."

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laci27
At last someone smarter than me, agrees with me. I've been telling people the
same thing since {I didn't invest in BTC when it was $8}. :)

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laci27
The main thing about BTC, the one that I, as a technical person, didn't
understand until recently, is NOT it's tech, bugs or features... It's the
value it has for people (albeit until recently mostly criminals and paranoid
people). Value that is just as tangible as FIAT currency.

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clarents
This seems to be a rather short-sighted view of the 2008 financial crisis.
Even conceding that the bailout of the too-big-to-fail banks was a good thing
and saved the economy, and that this was possible only because of the
centralization that this article supports, it was this same centralization
that did things such as repeal the Glass-Steagall Act that allowed for such
zany behavior that led up to the crisis in the first place. So yeah, at one
moment in time centralization was very beneficial. At many other moments in
time before and after that, maybe it wasn't so great.

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viswanathk
Repeal of Glass-Steagall act actually allowed the government to somewhat step
away. Some of the well capitalised commercial banks were able to absorb the
losses of the investment banks by buying them out when the price was low, and
then making more money once the panic ended.

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Psilidae
I was intrigued when I started reading this article, but then it just ended
without really delivering anything. I think this could be summarized as: "I
once heard about how having a centralized currency helped prevent bad things.
Bitcoin is decentralized."

I was actually interested to hear a perspective of how a hypothetical
centralized cryptocurrency might be superior, but the author just kind of
offered an allusion and nothing else.

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QAPereo
It’s a feature, in the same way that the decentralized nature of white collar
crime is a feature. The bug is in the people who naively believe that
technology changes human nature, rather than empowering it.

Those people need to be locked in a small room with an excellent library to
study history for at least a year.

~~~
TokyoKid
You start out with a good point, but the idea that there is one default human
nature isn't right.

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QAPereo
Individuals don’t really matter in the calculus of billions of people. The
dominant trends are frankly old, and persistent.

~~~
colordrops
The bandwidth, latency, and fidelity with which information is transferred
between individuals has changed the calculus of billions of people
dramatically.

