Right. The miners rule Bitcoin. That's the way it was set up. The big miners are[1]:
F2pool 28%
AntPool 22%
BitFury 16%
BTCCpool 12%
all others 22%
What bugs Gavin and the "core Bitcoin developers" is that they're not in charge. The "Bitcoin Foundation" is broke and irrelevant.[3]
The original idea of Bitcoin was that mining would be something done as an idle activity on user's PCs. Today, Bitcoin mining is done in big sheds holding thousands of racks of special-purpose machines, located in cold climates and near power stations.
[1] https://blockchain.info/pools [2] http://imgur.com/JUnQcue [3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-30/the-final-...
Anyone is free to set up a larger mining operation if they are so inclined. Until then, the bitcoin community can't be anything but extremely pleased with how much processing power the Chinese miners are contributing to the system.
> The original idea of Bitcoin was that mining would be something done as an idle activity on user's PCs.
I don't have a quote handy, but as far as I know that is not true. Satoshi expected mining to eventually be run out of large data centers.
Sure, all they need are the tens of millions necessary not only to buy the equipment but also to develop their own competitive custom ASICs.
The biggest problem with btc mining is that it's no longer feasible to make an impact with commodity hardware. I think to the extent that Satoshi may or may not have foreseen that, he assumed that the specialized hardware would become commoditized and that users would still have the power to make a meaningful vote. This didn't happen because the Bitcoin network punishes a faster network with increased difficulty, so as soon as you release your ASIC to the masses, the network raises the difficulty to neuter the effects. However, if you keep your hardware private, you can profit from the hardware without making such a large impact that the network edges you out. This allows the biggest miners to find several blocks per day (which is 25 "new" bitcoins + any attached as fees).
Given those incentives, it's only logical that the best hardware would be used privately and that the vote of the everyday bitcoin user (who was also supposed to be a miner) is irrelevant.
Additionally, none of the zero knowledge proof systems on the market are fast/flexible enough to do it well. Perhaps if SGX were to be one day liberalised, it could work better. So it's not easily implementable today.
However, given that PoW definitely hasn't worked, people should have open minds to alternatives.
Even with the best protocol in the world though, you would still encounter this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/02/12/chinas-role...
(the last sentence is especially telling)
Votes can change a lot of the parameters in the system, and you can vote on where the "profit" goes. So you can vote on how many positions get a share in that profit and who should hold these positions.
"It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow"
Link: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour...
Ah, no we are not. The last part, about "the masses", was tacked on later by the people who fear democracy. That was never a part of the original vision. Quoting the white paper:
"The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making."
Indeed, it'd have been a nonsensical goal to try and stop "the masses" changing Bitcoin, because "the masses" are the only thing that give a currency its value and attempting to produce a currency that literally nobody can change, even if the vast majority of people decide to change it, is simply not possible to do with software. That's why we call it soft-ware.
Unfortunately, the Bitcoin community has been completely wrecked by people who truly, deeply believe that "decentralised" money means "money controlled by a tiny cabal of developers" rather than the more obvious interpretation of "money controlled by its users".