BTC is only good as a deflationary pseudo-commodity, like gold. And like gold a good holding amount is probably below 10%, I'd say below 5% of the portfolio.
Cryptokitties can manipulate their contract, so in that case it is true a central authority is in control. Even though Bitcoin has been around 10 years there is still a lot of development and people are still figuring out how to approach this type of thing. The obvious answer is to start with a central contract and have a mechanism to slowly decentralize or remove ownership. It’s going to take time to get it right but it will happen (and even cryptokitties can upgrade their contract to include this logic).
I disagree, they have plenty of pinch points which allow de facto control.
The small group of core developers control the laws of the currency and directly tied to that its value. They can perform hard forks and change all the rules. The users have very little influence there.
Exchanges control which currencies are popular, along with huge amounts of the money in circulation, and change things like deposit/withdraw rules arbitrarily.
The miners can attack the currency to rewrite history (has been done), refuse to use new rules, or switch to a new currency.
Many of the fundamental tenets of bitcoin as it started out (that most users will mine, that most users will take care of their own wallets) have been proven too optimistic when in widespread use. People just don't want decentralised things given the massive tradeoffs and the rewards of centralisation for companies are too great.
I think blockchains like bitcoin are a very interesting experiment, and currencies will escape state control as nation states continue to wither away, but none of the current currencies is fit to take that role, nor was the pivot of startups to 'blockchains for...x' a good idea - it's a solution in search of a problem in most cases. We are unfortunately more likely to see a corporate currency or one from a superstate take that role than a decentralised one.
Anyone running a node can indeed decide what software they run. That’s exactly my point. There’s no such thing as “they” performing hard forks. Developers make decisions, sometimes they disagree and fork. Miners make decisions on which fork they want to run. Users are free to run a node.
Generalizing “blockchains for x” doesn’t do much good. Sure there are terrible blockchain projects as there are terrible app ideas, but there are quite a few good projects out there. I’m a fan of Keep.network for example.
> Miners make decisions on which fork they want to run.
Miners are surprisingly consolidated, so this mostly determines which version "wins". And the economic value of which fork wins is determined by the markets. If you keep running the "wrong" version of a fork you find out that it's worthless and only the coins on the "right" one retain value.
(I know this is a high standard for any new technology; I'm not saying I expect it on the front page of their website.)
"This has to be on the blockchain. But! don't look behind the curtain to everything else in our company that relies (and thrives) on a single point of trust.