I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is.
Unlike fiat cash or gold, you can't spend it without an internet connection (in order to sync up the public ledger and submit the transaction).
You're subject to miners to approve your transactions, which in theory should be democratized, but isn't really since it's based on computing power, which in turn can be bought or centralized in mining pools.
You're subject to a small cabal of developers' whims in having to use the reference client and hardforks to patch up bugs in the protocol. In theory that should also be democratized, with people free to use whatever forks they want, but in practice it's centralized with everyone fleeing to whichever fork all the mining pools go with.
> I wish Bitcoin was as decentralized as everyone says it is.
I'm trying to cash out some of mine and I've been downloading the blockchain for four days now. I had to buy a new hard drive before I could even start. I've read that it takes over an hour to do a transaction now, although I'm not yet in a position to verify that. If you look on the btc related subreddits nobody recommends using a proper client as Satoshi intended, it's all about accounts on websites offering a service that could reasonably be described as "banking".
Ah cool, I set it to 4000 and it looks to have sped it up a bit (currently saying 16 hours to go, down from "two days"). I'm still not convinced it's a very practical decentralized currency though.
Unlike fiat cash or gold, you can't spend it without an internet connection (in order to sync up the public ledger and submit the transaction).
You're subject to miners to approve your transactions, which in theory should be democratized, but isn't really since it's based on computing power, which in turn can be bought or centralized in mining pools.
You're subject to a small cabal of developers' whims in having to use the reference client and hardforks to patch up bugs in the protocol. In theory that should also be democratized, with people free to use whatever forks they want, but in practice it's centralized with everyone fleeing to whichever fork all the mining pools go with.