I think it would benefit everybody in the crypto community if we stopped talking about how bitcoin is decentralized and because of that it can’t be influenced and all the other things that are often mentioned.
How distributed is it when wast majority of hashing power is in the hands of 10 or so miners (pools really, and one could argue these pools are collection of people donating their computing resources, but in reality it’s still the people who control the pool who control the hashing power). Now one could argue that miners and their hash rate is not the only thing that makes bitcoin decentralized. And I welcome such arguments, because segwit2x actually showed how decentralized bitcoin really is, in very concrete way.
One only needs to look at the scaling agreement to see what it took to push this thru: https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consensus-2017-133521fe9a77
it only took 58 companies to make this happen. And I don’t think anyone believes all of those 58 companies were equal, I don’t think anyone thinks this wouldn’t been the result if select half of those would have not signed the agreement, or the other way to say this would be, I bet it only took handful of companies to want it and the majority of signees followed them and would have followed even if they weren’t part of the agreement. One might also see some irony in the fact that this meeting was so decentralized that it was held in privacy, nothing was discussed in public and the decission was merely released after the fact. I don’t think people would call any other industy decentralized if it only takes 58 companies to meet and decide what will happen. You could almost say that compared to this, the old fashioned global banking industry is the gold standard of decentralization.
It seems that the reference implementation of bitcoin will be BTC1 (instead of Core) in the future and if that’s the case, it’s pretty much guaranteed that in the future these companies can make what ever changes they wan’t with great haste if need be.
