Thanks for this, I wasn't aware of these quotes that definitely provide important context for my comment.

I think my broader point stands, though: despite engineering efforts towards decentralization, market forces push Bitcoin towards centralization (due to mining pools and due to consolidation amongst manufacturers of mining hardware).

The most important counterbalance to this is not in the Bitcoin protocol, but also an economic one: large mining operations have an interest in keeping up (at least the perception of) decentralization, because that's why people like Bitcoin.

At that point however, you're back to a system where the safeguards are not of a technical nature at all. Maybe Satoshi foresaw that to some degree, but apparently he wasn't able to engineer around it.

You will notice how all those giant servers are all located in first world countries where the infrastructure and political stability is good.

Is this sarcasm or you're calling China "where the infrastructure and political stability is good"?

I mean, no-one’s denting the technical accomplishment of bitcoin, but if the envisaged final scenario was power in the hands of the rich what the heck was the point?

The purpose of Bitcoin is a digital currency where no central authority can debase the currency. Bitcoin stands in contrast to bank currency like the dollar, where central banks inflate the money supply to prop up the insolvency of their government and its banking cartel.

The fact that mining is a capital intensive operation has little to do with Bitcoin’s decentralization. Nodes cannot change the supply. When I wake up tomorrow I’m reasonably certain there will still be ~21,000,000 bitcoins, while the central bank will have further inflated the money supply https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Co...

There’s nothing wrong with what you’re saying, but I find it hard to see why that matters. I mean, 1) bitcoin still isn’t a currency and there’s no signs of it becoming one 2) the banks and governments seem fine. It’s definitely gaining in value, but so is Apple stock and gold.

But more generally, I don’t see the point. We’ve established that the people who end up with lots of bitcoin are people with lots of fiat money (and some early investors), so all you’re doing here is perpetuating the current economic distribution, and frankly fiat currency and the corresponding banking system is very effective at that already.

Someone else having a lot of capital doesn’t prevent me in any way from acquiring or creating wealth. That somebody has more money than me doesn’t concern me.

You’re right, gold and stocks can also preserve capital against the constant depreciation of fiat currencies. I prefer bitcoin to gold because I can more easily hold my own bitcoin and transfer it globally. I don’t own stocks because I don’t care to tie my savings to the performance of various businesses.

Has there been an attempt to create an "one-IP-address-one-vote" cryptocurrency?

Huge advantage, no electricity waste.

Should allow for much larger transaction volume as well. IP-address vote flows naturally since well we are still using IPv4 to communicate.

The only downside would be that there would be some big winners in Apple,MIT,US Postal Service that is anyone else with 8/block.

Countries like Chad with 4096 addresses for population of 10M would benefit much less but they would still be in the game.

The opportunity cost of electricity, what you call waste, is the most apolitical and ungameable resource available. Every other example to "vote" I've seen quickly devolves into another political game.