Both camps have clearly already decided on central planning to dictate or coerce whether it's going to be on-chain or off-chain scaling and we seemingly have a binary choice between the two stupid extremes. Neither wants to let the market choose freely and decide for itself how best to grow. I'd argue that both sides are spineless cowards in this regard.
So, everyone should just make their own personalised Bitcoin, with exactly the rules and limits they want, "because decentralise all the things" ?
Do it. I'm sure everyone will be accepting DooMADCoin and CarltonCoin without question, they'll audit our code themselves, just a quick 5 minute job before they trade with us for the first time ever, and they'll keep their "money" with all the other IndividualCoins thye get from everyone else.
You're not very smart for someone who tries to behave like they're relevant in this debate. The market can choose what it wants, and a good standard, whether it's money or any other economic good, is something the market frequently settles on, however long that standard lasts for. And standards are, wait for it.......... inherently centralised, by definition.
Bitcoin is a paradox, a centralised standard for decentralising money. Cry onto your Ayn Rand pillowcases, why don't ya
As you say, everyone can launch a coin. Bitcoin is not different. A guy calling himself Satoshi on the internet launched it.
The entity that launches a coin is of course a centralized entity. However, once it is launched, if the dynamics of the system is such that it decentralizes (hint: most of them don't, including bitcoin) sufficiently, which means that nobody can find any majority collusion over any agreement that deviates from "sticking to the rules", then these rules should remain in place by the very dynamics of the system. This emergent property has a name: immutability.
Immutability is the fact that game-theoretically, none of the participating entities can find an advantage in deviating from continuing to apply the rules of the system as it stands. In other words, the system started out as a centralized one with a given rule set, other entities joined. These other entities could only join initially if they played by the rules of the central authority. Each new entity that joined, could only join by "playing by the rules". After a while, there were so many different entities, that the original central authority lost its "majority" and couldn't, on his own, change anything any more.
Moreover, the idea is that a well-designed crypto currency is such that the original rule set is a Nash equilibrium. That is, no single entity can deviate from his strategy to continue to follow the rules if all the others keep following the rules. The whole idea of a *decentralized* system is that entities have to take their decisions of strategy alone, and cannot collude. If they can sit together in a room and negociate something, it is centralized. If there is a (moral?) authority that can dictate change (Satoshi ? Core ?), then it is a centralized entity.
A truly decentralized system has a Nash equilibrium on the actual rule set, and *simply cannot deviate from it*. That property is "immutability".Bitcoin, until recently, was centralized on Core's moral authority ; the low number of mining pools is shifting this to another central control: the "cartel of the miners" if ever they can sit in a room and come to agreements. Cartel formation is the only way to leave a Nash equilibrium in a decentralized system, which, by definition, becomes centralized on that cartel then.
If bitcoin is truly decentralized, it cannot change its protocol any more (for instance, the block size).
The *only* way, in that case, to propose a modification, is to make a hard fork and hence, a new coin. That can be done by just any entity.
And the game starts all over: the forker is the central authority fixing the new rules on the new coin. If enough entities join, this new rule set will become immutable too, unless a cartel forms and the thing centralizes again. Or someone else forks off.
