Wow was I surprised to see this on Hacker News! It's my view that decentralized systems will almost always be less efficient than centralized systems. This is because centralized systems can organize information in a more efficient manner and use specialized hardware. Decentralized systems give you privacy, redundancy, anonymity and other benefits at a significant additional cost.

Bitcoin has the potential to provide a mechanism for decentralized systems to set prices and allocate resources. We'll see how this plays out over time.