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A comment on Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices. Parent comment

Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices by nly on Saturday December 06, 2014 @07:28AM (#8709085)
Decentralisation is overrated. Email is decentralised, but there are still powerful actors (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, DNSBLs). In Bitcoin they're the miner pools, which, while currently diverse and seemingly quite good at self-regulation[0], have ultimate say over who gets to transact what.

In many ways a centralised, but highly anonymous, digital cash system puts stronger practical limits on the power of a single individual. In such a system the the only way the central authority (bank etc) to doctor history, once money has moved out of their hands, is to drive the entire currency in to the ground and start over.

[0] http://www.coindesk.com/ghash-commits-40-hashrate-cap-bitcoi...

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Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices by drcode on Saturday December 06, 2014 @08:23AM (#8709172)
Decentralization is not overrated, just misunderstood. The primary concern should be whether a central entity can change the agreed-upon communication protocol at will (i.e. arbitrarily change the "rules" of the money)

With Bitcoin, such a change is very difficult. With stellar, it is easy for the central Corp to change the rules at it's whim.

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Re:Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices by joosters on Saturday December 06, 2014 @09:16AM (#8709238)
What?

Without decentralisation, Bitcoin has nothing to offer over everyone trusting some random entity offering to keep a ledger of account balances. And we already have plenty of those around.

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