> > 1,000 *people* in control vs. 10 is two orders of magnitude more decentralized.
Yet Bitcoin has got worse by all these metrics: there was a time before mining pools when there were ~thousands of people mining with their local CPUs and GPUs. Now the number of full nodes that matter for block selection number in the dozens, and all the other miners just follow their blocks blindly. If you really believe that decentralisation is, itself, the end, then why not go use an "ASIC resistant" alt coin with no SPV or web wallets which resembles Bitcoin at the end of 2009? That'd be a whole lot more decentralised than what you have now. The *percentage* of the community that mines is totally irrelevant, it's > the absolute number of (independent) people that matters. > So usage does matter, then? You'd rather have a coin that has power concentrated in a far smaller elite, proportionally, but has overall more usage? If there are say, 5000 full nodes today, and in ten years there are 6000, and they all run in vast datacenters and are owned by large companies, you'll feel like Bitcoin is more decentralised than ever? (n.b. I do not think this situation will ever happen, it's just an example). That's not the vibe I'm getting from most people on this list. What I'm seeing is complaints about how in the good old days back when Core was the only wallet and ASICs hadn't been made, there were lots of nodes and lots of people mining solo and since then it's all been downhill and woe is us ... and let's throw on the brakes in case it gets worse. Not for the first time, these discussions remind me very strongly of the old desktop Linux/free software debates.
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