Bitcoin has much in common with the Internet.
The internet began as a decentralized communications network with worldwide nodes. The decentralized architecture of the Internet was designed by the US military to withstand nuclear armageddon.
How things have changed.
While the underlying architecture remains pretty much the same, the Internet can hardly be considered 'decentralized' anymore. Mega-monopolies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft dominate what we see and hear online. Each year, the internet becomes more centralized for the average user, as smaller companies are squashed, amalgamated, or gobbled up by the big corporations.
Thanks to Google, entire governments can now censor and control what their citizens read online. Think: China.
Like the internet, Bitcoin began as a decentralized protocol. And while Bitcoin is still fundamentally decentralized in its architecture, in practice - IN REALITY - it is gradually becoming more centralized for the user, just like the internet. How so?
Large companies - pumped full of venture capital cash - are centralizing the user experience. Buying and selling Bitcoin occurs mostly on large, centralized exchanges such as CoinBase, BitStamp and BTC-E. Now Circle has come along with the intention of centralizing Bitcoin even more for the average user. New Bitcoiners who flock to Circle will not even understand the fundamental decentralization of cryptocurrency, just like new internet users hardly understand the decentralized architecture of the internet. New Bitcoiners will experience total centralization - a central Bitcoin bank like Circle and centralized exchanges like CoinBase, just like new internet users experience the centralization of Google and Facebook from the moment they pop online.
So, while the fundamental architecture of Bitcoin is (and always will be) decentralized, the user experience will become more centralized and more controlled over time. Hello Big Brother, goodbye Satoshi Nakamoto.
What began as a free market libertarian currency experiment has now come full CIRCLE ...
Dr. Michael Moriarty
I don't think it's accurate to say that the internet is not decentralized, or that Google, Facebook, or Microsoft dominate the internet. Certainly Facebook and Microsoft don't dominate the internet. Google dominates advertising, but that is only one small aspect of the internet, and even there Facebook gives them some competition. If anyone "controls" the internet, or rather if you were to say it was centralized around one or a few companies, those would have to be the ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. They don't control the content, but they control the physical routers and switches that allow you to connect to the internet. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (and all of their assets) could vanish and they would be quickly replaced by other companies. If all of Comcast/TWC's assets vanished, we would not recover nearly as quickly. Or at least I don't think we would, I guess it's impossible to know for sure.
