My first encounter with bitcoin was attending a user-group meeting in 2013. At the time I was skeptical. Not simply because 21 million seemed like the kind of arbitrary number that central planners, in Stalin's regime, would come up with - "hey Ivan, how many tractors do we need in 1932?" But more so, because when I asked deeper questions, questions concerning complexity, I received blank stares and ire - very few of the people I met there had any background in the mathematics behind algorithms. They were simply swapping bitcoins, like swapping "magic cards". Talking about the miner-devices they were buying, and my questions made them uncomfortable and angry.
For a brief time, in 2017, I allowed myself to suspend disbelief, only to see Satoshi level transactions - real world "coffee shop" transactions - behave, at best, non-deterministically and at worst simply fail.
If I went to a garage sale, and handed someone five bucks for something - but immediately upon pulling the money out of my pocket, the money blinked out of existence, and instead a note was left saying "this should end up in the other guy's hands, sometime, in the next week or so ..." Who would accept a transaction like that?
I don't doubt that bitcoin scale transactions mostly work - mostly, because I've seen no quality control analysis on BTC transactions. But what I do know from experience is that the fractional transactions behave badly - and overall network performance is pitifully less than what credit card companies or paypal can achieve.
One of the arguments in Satoshi's paper is that this is "peer-to-peer" and decentralized - but that's not really the case ...
Every bitcoin transaction depends upon (n) transactional nodes, in a voting scheme, allowing the transaction to be approved. Each node has a full and complete PUBLIC ledger of wallet transactions - sure, there's not just one node, one center, but there are many, and this is by design. A truly decentralized system, truly peer-to-peer, would have no intermediary decision making nodes, and there would be no public ledger - at best, pass through networking nodes with ZERO KNOWLEDGE of the transaction. Whether a truly peer-to-peer currency, that is decentralized and electronic, is possible? - that's an open question. But I do know that when I pull money out of my wallet and hand that money to a seller at a garage sale, there is no magical set of voting nodes, with a constantly building public ledger, required.
Bitcoin is, in fact, poly-centric - which is no better or worse than a centralized mechanism for financial transfer. What makes this worse is that bitcoin is the most public ledger in human history. The process by which these transactions are inevitably associated with other meta-data is well known.
"But Dan, only my wallet's public key is stored in the blockchain?", really? You don't know how corporate and government meta-data collection works? You don't know about IP address tracking?
You trust those that set up nodes? - since there's no real vetting process, this implicit and unjustified trust makes no sense. I don't trust banks or credit card companies - but, in reality, if I do mainly cash transactions, I don't have to. I don't use shopper cards, I don't keep my phone for more than 9 months now - up to 12. I can conduct business, with others, and there is no permanent digital record of what I've done as long as I barter, use cash, or silver or gold coins.
But the bitcoin ledger, and other crypto-ledgers, they live forever. They can be data-mined. They can be correlated. And your entire financial behavior becomes a digital fingerprint of who you are, what you are doing. The IRS is going to LOVE this.
So no - bitcoin is not decentralized. It is more like a digital blob, a set of servers, in a server-to-server network, that manage transactions and records them permanently.
As far as the price goes? - it, at best, means that fiat currencies worldwide are crashing and people are looking for any escape hatch they can find. It makes sense, especially given the criminal manipulation of gold and silver prices - but if I wanted to achieve two goals, as a central banker: a) continue to depress the value of gold and silver AND b) nudge people into a cashless society? - I would sponsor bitcoin, and other cryptos, secretly. I would also talk it down. From a psychology perspective, the more "Jamie Dimon(s)" and "Alan Greenspan(s)" they can push out there, to talk down bitcoin and other cryptos, the more likely the "bleeding edge techno obsessed" are likely to buy in.
Of course most Americans, a huge majority, don't have the money or resources to participate in this game of "magic cards".
It is a subset, those miners, those bitcoin barons, that are buying property and cars and boats with bitcoin.
If I am right, then the "crypto revolution" will be remembered as the biggest and most complex PSYOP in world history - assuming people are still allowed to speak their minds, to express their opinions, in this "techno utopia" to come.
But no - bitcoin is not decentralized, it has many centers, many duplicated points of control.
And this is all by design.