Profits are nice, but decentralisation is essential.
Or at least as little centralisation as possible: Erik V makes a good point that coercive centralisation (when users are given no choice) is a very bad thing, but that market based centralisation (because users choose the best service/platform) is almost unavoidable.
Well said.
I have been following Bitshares since it started and every three or four months they keep taking a step towards centralization. The last change they made/are making is licensing the actual code so the Developers can sell it to competitors and charge Bitshares holders for upgrades and third party plugins and on/off ramps. They have admitted all this and the Koolaid drinkers accept it, claiming it's better than someone taking the code and doing something better with it. Well if it's better, then it is deserving.
I used to be a fanboy and still hold a few shares, but man they went the opposite direction from when they sold to the investors back in November 2013.
I just wrote a post on their forum about their departure from a decentralized blockchain to a single point of failure in Cryptonomex, the company they created to own the code license.
Here is the path they took all in the name of profit. Apparently I am the only one screaming about the central control everyone is bought into. Some over there are even saying decentralization is over rated and will only alienate the crypto community which they say they don't need.
Bitshares was to be POW with a 10% premine sold to early investors and 10% to protoshares miners.
They decided to change to POS and sell 50% to investors and drop the other 50% on Protoshares. It was also established that they would take protoshares as a payment from investors thus giving them a free premine so to speak. Since every PTS would be worth 100's of BTS.
They then decided they should merge the multiple chains they were going to create so no other chain would do it and render the multi Bitshares chains weak on their own. They also decided to buy out PTS holders who were still mining and who donated for other chains that had been killed off for the merger. They decided to expand the supply by giving 100BTS for every PTS out there. Guess who owned 25% of the PTS at this point?
Then they decided to change from a deflationary model where BTS was getting destroyed, to an inflationary model creating more supply so the Developers could profit off the chain. In essence getting paid by the chain and BTS holders. They have 30 or so people sucking 4227 BTS per day each and only about 4 full time developers. The rest are large stake holders using the stake voting system to profit off the chain without having to buy any mining equipment. The rest are just liars and scammers selling snake oil and promising delivery dates on wallets and exchanges that come and go and nobody actually uses.
All this is repeatedly justified by profits. The only problem with profits is it's been hurting the average BTS holder who has no say because the 100 delegates have amassed huge control.
They have justified one entity to control the Bitshares code. A single point of failure and greed, and they still consider the project decentralized.
Sorry for the rant.
Go to bitsharestalk, see for yourself the mental gymnastics.