I'd characterize him as pragmatic, rather than a pragmatist.
Sure, mining centralization was anticipated, but not inevitable.
It is non-fatal to the extent the BGP solution addresses it, which it does pretty well, but not perfectly.

Well it was up to the Gold referendum mostly but gold was going down for months prior to this.

i'm glad everyone's been talking about Satoshi recently.  that stimulated me to go back thru his whitepaper to see if there were any references to any of the speculative SC's functions that are being proposed by the SC proponents in this thread and elsewhere.  those being listed below.  they claim that SC's are a "natural and logical extension" to Bitcoin and that if Satoshi was able to be asked, he would love SC's.  well, i see no indication that this wild claim is valid.  see that none of these speculative assets were ever mentioned:

0 asset
0 stocks
0 bonds
0 insurance
0 smart
0 contracts
0 sidechain
0 offchain
0 separate
2 gold
5 money

it's clear to me that Satoshi intended for Bitcoin to be a new form of digital money, or currency if you will, that mimicked gold in all respects and improved upon it.  i'm only aware of one isolated forum post where he mentioned the addition of smart contracts, etc but that was in the context of adding them to the MC protocol.  never was there any mention of SC's nor the quack idea of separating the BTC units from the blockchain.  and understandably so.  by breaking the inextricable link btwn the two, you break security and therefore break Bitcoin as Money.  this is so obvious.  the last 200 pages have clearly demonstrated a myriad of ways things can go wrong with the SC proponents morphing their vision of how SC's will play out to satisfy any specific concern while promising us the moon.

Bitcoin should continue to focus on what got us to where we are:  the Money function.  that is where the problem lies today in the world of fiat and central banks.  this is what i saw back in January of 2011, Bitcoin as a poison dart aimed at the heart of central banks.  the problem is not stocks, bonds, insurance, contracts.  those all function reasonably well.  the problems we've had with them in the past, such as in 2001 and 2008, were fiat printing enabled and backed by central banks.  w/o the ability to print at will to bail out bad actors, Bitcoin as Money seeks to clamp down and eliminate this moral hazard.  and the network of money is ripe to be disrupted.  and rightfully so.  THAT is where the money is.  the Forex is the biggest in the world as i've shown.  the gold market is huge as well.  if Bitcoin can crack those markets we will go to the Moon.  Bitcoin should stay simple and non complex.  it has evolved to that of a public good.  no one should be allowed to corrupt its primary function of money.  let alone profit off it. 

leave the source code alone.

Persistingly wrong.

How many times and how many people need to point out the fallacy in your argument for you to finally understand that sidechain DO NOT inherently, "break Bitcoin as Money"?

When are you going to address the fact that any centralized off-chain solution is considerably more dangerous to Bitcoin as Money than sidechains are?

Are you going to admit that SPVP proof is just another verification model by which the allocation of coins to other chains is potentially safer and more decentralized than current solutions that exist?

The Bitcoin money is its ledger. Sidechains are effectively the most secure way to accomodate any transactions that can not be processed on the mainchain while preserving the integrity of the ledger.

If you are honestly worried about corruption of Bitcoin as Money, centralized off-chain solutions should be the biggest of your concerns.

I agree, which goes with my argument that not many SCs will access or even consider using this security model. Though there are certainly use cases that could command and obtain this kind of adoption.

This makes cypherdoc's delusion about SPVP even more irrelevant considering there is a high probability that a good majority of sidechains will use federated models.

i'm against them only in the sense that i think they will die competing with Bitcoin so the sooner everyone comes to that understanding the better.  but i understand that they want to compete head to head and speculators will always try to make a buck so who am i to argue with that as long as they are competing fairly and not trying to alter Bitcoin source code to their advantage.

But many of them are not competing directly with bitcoin as sound money, they are providing other distinct features that bitcoin is unwilling to match, that you do not wish it to match, in it's quest to provide said money. How is it that all those useful features will just "die" when bitcoin is not willing or unable to provide equal features?

the integrity of the ledger depends on the currency unit riding on it.  the greed to obtain the unit is what drives the mining incentive.  w/o the unit, the ledger dies.  which is why allowing the units an offramp to an unrelated speculative SC will kill Bitcoin.

brg444 continues to morph his argument by alternating his cheerleading of these speculative SC's btwn, "we don't need or want them, just utility chains" to "we should want to incorporate speculative assets into SC's to grow the economy and diversify.  decentralize all the things!" 

but i say that the main goal of the spvp is to create speculative SC's; i have $21M in Blockstream investment that says i'm right.

What an hypocrite.

Do I understand that SCs can not benefit also from this "educational" process?

You are really trying to write-off Gox as irrelevant when nearly a year later we still hear about constantly from mainstream media. Are you suggesting this had no impact on Bitcoin's reputation?

What I want you to admit is these offchain solutions are inherently more dangerous to the integrity of the Bitcoin ledger (Sound Money) than any form of sidechains.


And that's exactly what sidechains propose.

Note that when speaking of sidechains I am also referring to federated models.

I am going to repeat this ad nauseam until you get it : Blockstream's business model is not dependent on SPVP and its core integration and neither is this proposition conferring them any advantage whatsoever considering its neutral, open source nature.

You are as stubborn as a mule...