Topic: What if they centralized Bitcoin? (Read 449 times)

And while we're at it, it's worth to mention some Bitcoin Core developers got paid by multiple, but different cryptocurrency company[1]. So i expect some of them would disagree with idea to centralize Bitcoin due to various reason. For example, centralized Bitcoin (which offer fast and cheap TX) would kill Blockstream's Liquid Network.

[1] https://blog.bitmex.com/who-funds-bitcoin-development/

The current state of bitcoin is the centralised one,many people use the non centralised behaviour of the bitcoin to make profit by buying the bitcoin at the dump and selling at the bull run.If all the countries around the world legalised the bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies help the bitcoin traders to make huge profit in the cryptocurrency trading.The reason for aiming to centralised bitcoin is to monitor the flow of bitcoin transactions among the users in their countries.The peer to peer becomes more easy on legalisation of bitcoin countries,easy to convert your bitcoin to fiat for the daily expenses.

Assuming Bitcoin is a centralized currency then you can get exactly the same advantages/disadvantages that you are facing with other centralized currencies if Bitcoin is a centralized currency. Bitcoin is then controlled by a third party and any time the price explodes there will be a possibility of scamming the market.

In the simplest terms, it would mean essentially one logical full-node, and that node not performing proof-of-work, but rather is the authority by virtue of its URL.

Sorry to say, but BTC is already a centralized asset. Whether it's China controlling 60-70% of the mining power or top exchanges manipulating the market, BTC hasn't been truly decentralized for many years.

I’m not sure I still understand what we mean when we say Bitcoin is decentralized, care to remind me? Because I think you probably have a wrong understanding of what it means and hence you think that it can be made to be centralized. Matter of fact, I want to hear how this can be achieved, how Bitcoin can be centralized.

I agree with each and every word you have mentioned about how Bitcoin has been reduced as a mere investment medium as users don't use it for P2P which was it's original purpose and even if they do it's through an centralized exchange as there are various factors like excellent ROI, higher transaction fee and time taken for transaction which has reduced it as an investment asset but it can never be centralized as anything which is based on proof of work cannot be centralized as they cannot own the miners throughout the world hence Bitcoin will never become centralized.

To me, I will no want bitcoin to become centralize either, because anything that will make bitcoin to be come centralize it will affect the smooth running of our cryptocurrency system which is not what we want. However, Bitcoin was program to be decentralize, it will be nice if it continue that and we don’t even talk about centralization because it will no help the currency in any way. Remember, it is because decentralization of bitcoin that is why up till now government haven’t get any hand in Bitcoin.

So, I want you to be aware that if Bitcoin get centralized today, Government will start keeping rules for Bitcoiners in any country that such happen, something like, Bitcoin investors should pay for tax and some other measure that will make some people to even withdraw their funds.

Yes, I get that it's determined by "the community", but in terms of actual power, Bitcoin is completely controlled by the miners. I understand that there's not a single miner, or even a group of miners who control Bitcoin, but anything a majority of miners wanted, no matter what it is, would simply happen if that's what they wanted to happen.

You could argue that the miners could vote to do something others wouldn't like, but that doesn't change the fact that they could (collectively) do anything they wanted.


Since almost all holders of Bitcoin these days do so with a centralized app or broker, you are talking about a very small percentage of people.

Most people like Bitcoin because Bitcoin goes up in value and produces them a profit. I really doubt they care about anything else.

And sovereign currencies aren't digitized, and credit card transactions require an exchange of personal information, so a digital currency, in any form, is a very significant value to the consumer.

I like thought experiments, and since they aren't supposed to be highly detailed or realistic, I'll take the conditions the op proposes without criticism.
If Bitcoin became fully centralized, in the sense of only custodial wallets (and of the same company, I suppose) existing, mining being abandoned, and potentially even some supply regulations, I think tons of people would abandon it very fast and it would die. Bitcoin is a symbol of freedom, and there's no freedom in a centralized digital currency. It's important that there's an option to keep Bitcoin in a non-custodial wallet, and that there's an option of taking part in mining. Take those options away, and you're left with a product that nobody wants because we already have fast custodial transactions with fiat.

You do not still get it, mining plays a huge part in the network, but BTC's fate is not determined by miners, there is no single point of failure and nobody alone determines what happens in the network. In this topic you have failed to understand that no one controls the network and the fate of BTC is determined by all of the community.

The creator of bitcoin made it decentralized and that is how it was designed, so there is no way that anyone can make it centralized, because nobody have power over the network. No matter how many investors keep their funds in exchanges and use bitcoin in a centralized way, bitcoin will still remain decentralized. Can you imagine a man turning himself into a woman because he is gay, that does not change the fact that he is a male,because all his organs will still be that of a male.

I'm proposing here that they change the design, so yes, it can certainly be decentralized if they change the software for Bitcoin.


We've discussed this in many threads here in the past few months: using the government for force Bitcoin down people's throats, as passing a legal tender law would mean, is immoral, impractical and foolish. If you want Bitcoin to be taken over by governments, make them pass a law giving it special privileges first.


Bitcoin has a public ledger, meaning everybody can keep track of all of the transactions, including governments.


Bitcoin is legal to hold and trade is almost every country in the world, including China.



Most investors buy, sell and hold Bitcoin using an app or broker, which is centralized. Investors invest in Bitcoin because they think "Bitcoin"--whatever that even means--will go up in price so they can profit. Most of today's users of the Bitcoin product (e.g. as a speculation instrument) don't know or care what "decentralization" means.

Bitcoins cannot be centralized. It is designed and operated through a decentralised network. Hence the only thing that can be done is to make it as a legal tender by the nations. But all the countries know that, they won’t be able to keep track of all the transactions, hence they not making it legal in many countries also. Bitcoin investors don’t give any attitude to these things. They are happy with the peer to peer transactions and are able to make the Bitcoins into cash in a decentralised manner.

Why would it no longer have community support?

And making Bitcoin viable to be used as a mainstream payment mechanism would introduce the product to hundreds of millions more people on a daily basis. That would arguably increase the price.


Thank you. This is the best answer here so far, and the one that actually has a basis in business/politics rather than mythology and religion.

So in summary, Bitcoin's fate is determined by the miners, who make their money from mining, and they would never cut off their own business no matter what.

No. While Bitcoin Core developer have big continuance, don't forget there are other Bitcoin full node software. Bitcoin mining industry also have become very big, so they'll make sure people know attempt to centralize Bitcoin (which remove miner).


The community will just ignore code change proposed by Satoshi. And i don't expect government would spend money to buy mining hardware or rent hashrate when they have other more important stuff to do.

You are missing the point here. BTC devs can do whatever they like, they can make a change and write a new code, but that does not mean everyone in the community is going to accept the change, and that is why BTC is decentralized and censorship resistant.

The community still has to agree to this new change and run the code in their own device. It can result in a hard fork and the community will decide which of the protocol they want to install and follow, just like what happened with the creation Bitcoin SV. So nobody can centralize BTC or arbitrarily change the code for everyone, the network does not have a single point of failure.

I'm not saying anything against or agreeing here, I'm just saying don't waste time thinking about things that will never happen. Bitcoin has become very popular and received great support from the community because it is decentralized, its decentralized nature makes it different and people love it for that. Do you think it would still be worth it if it became centralized? If it becomes centralized then it will no longer have community support, so how can it increase in price?

Even the government found Satoshi, I don't think he can change anything to make bitcoin centralized. He created bitcoin, it is open source and to change it requires consensus from the bitcoin community,  no one can arbitrarily change bitcoin, not even its creator.

The government could take over the mining hashrate but this would cost a lot of money, time and this would not be commensurate with what they would get in return. So this possibility will not happen either.

Well this is just a normal thing to do and that's why no matter the assurance that Bitcoin gives people still have doubts about it but Bitcoin has really been something else and that's why I trust and believe it and moreover it's because of the way Bitcoin is decentralized that gives it all the attention in the crypto market more than the other coins. Bitcoin is something that no one control and that has been it's core value ever since so am very certain that it will keep on with that first impression by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Almost nobody uses Bitcoin in a decentralized way. The evidence from the market is that almost nobody actually cares about that.

The thing that makes Bitcoin have a higher price than other cryptocurrencies like Ether or Monera is the name, "Bitcoin". It's the same reason a t-shirt with "Fruit of the Loom" written on it cost $3.99 at Walmart and the same exact set of molecules goes for $350.00 if it has the name, "Gucci" on it.


As I've said before in The Anon Paradox, there are two kinds of "privacy" people want: privacy from civilians (including companies and criminals) and privacy from governments. Most people want and need the former, but only a tiny few people need to keep something so secret that even a direct government subpoena cannot discover it. Most people aren't interested in going against their own government.

Don't get me wrong, I started this thread as a thought experiment, but the arguments in favor are stronger than I thought they would be...

Please stop daydreaming. Please do not imagine something that is not going to happen anytime soon. Now if you want to say that Bitcoin is already getting centralized in some way, then yes. I agree with that. Bitcoin is getting centralized daily, and ETF approvals were the biggest step towards making it centralized. Even though ETF is good for investors, it does not fit with Bitcoin's principle.

Even though centralized exchanges and ETFs make it more centralized, the main core of Bitcoin and its chain is decentralized. As long as people care about privacy and most devs support privacy, we will have what we have right now.

Besides the mining, if bitcoin would somehow become completely centralized I would say that it would slowly die. Being completely decentralized is the main factor that makes bitcoin different from all the other altcoins (and shitcoins) out there. That is the reason people believed in bitcoin. If you remove that you're pretty much killing its purpose.

No problem,we will still be with bitcoin and continue the way they want it to be ,but i don't think it will deviate from its original purpose because bitcoin has saved a lot of countries and individuals from financial bondage which their traditional banks or financial institution always have made them go through.

The core devs of Bitcoin could change the code base any time they felt like it.

And yes, people using centralized apps and brokers is "wrong" according to the original religion of Bitcoin, but guess what: most people use Bitcoin that way today.

So maybe the religion is... dead?

And my hypothetical here is not "the government" (which government?) being the central entity that runs Bitcoin's servers, but the central authority that controls the code base now.



Bitcoin doesn't require identity, but it's not very private because there is a public ledger, and you can be subject to chain analysis.

But centralized products can offer privacy, and many people trust them to keep their privacy, like VPN providers, mixers, and so on.

The only thing these centralized entities cannot do is keep things from governments with valid subpoenas, which is not the kind of "privacy" most people need.



Correct. Most users use Bitcoin this way. You know why? Because they don't need to evade the government and they don't even want to try.

Bitcoin's goal was to solve a problem that only a few thousand people in the world actually have. Then millions of people started using it to solve a different problem, which was a meme investment instrument. Now almost all of Bitcoin's users don't care about "decentralization" one way or another--they just want the price of Bitcoin to go up.

I am hypothesizing here that some day, this is going to catch up with the core devs of Bitcoin, and they may well change the network to be a better product for their average user.

That's what is happening now, where more people prefer Bitcoin as an investment asset compared to digital currency. However, just because many people prefer to treat Bitcoin as an investment asset, it does not mean that Bitcoin loses its main purpose of being a decentralized transaction system, because in fact many people still choose to make transactions using Bitcoin since it is much easier, secure, and does not require identity.


Because many Bitcoin holders don't realize that when they store their assets on an exchange, they lose access to control over it. It does seem to make things easier for users, because they can trade and use their crypto assets directly from the application, but without them realizing it, the numbers in the application are only a representation of the assets owned by the user, while the real assets are in the exchange wallet. And because of this, users lose their access to fully control their assets and whenever the exchange wants they can use these assets without the user knowing.[/list]

Maybe the government should hunt down Nakamoto and force him to change some codes in the Bitcoin Network if possible, neutralizing the decentralized part and making it centralized, or the government should take over the whole mining hashrate and start attacking Bitcoin Network? I am just trying to give you what they could do. Unfortunately for them, it is impossible.

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What many people don't know is that Satoshi knew that all these is coming, he is a smart creator, Bitcoin itself is decentralised and untouchable at this point of time, the only way the power entities have left is a centralized exchange, and the Bitcoin investors and traders still can't do without centralized exchanges that's why I keep saying that using centralized exchanges to trade your Bitcoin is a wrong way to use a decentralized digital currency.

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Bitcoin is not perfect, it has its flaws but the decentralized part just work very well, there are other centralized coins out there and people are still investing in those coins, if the government want to take over they should go after centralized coins, Bitcoin is a peer to peer digital currency, if there is a way to make Bitcoin a centralized coin they would have done that already.

Well, I guess it depends on who you mean by, "we".

Based on what we can observe from the current state of Bitcoin holders, probably 90% or more of Bitcoin holders use an app or a broker or the ETF. In that case, they would not be able to tell the difference between centralized and decentralized since their holding is by definition centralized in any case.

Bitcoin is the most popular digital currency right now because it's name is "Bitcoin": people are buying a brand, or a meme.

I agree that for a small number of people, a centralized Bitcoin would be something they would not want, but the market seems to be saying that most people would actually want that very much.


That simply doesn't follow. Banks would do just fine with Bitcoin, and lots of financial institutions are already creating services around Bitcoin just like they do with sovereign currencies.



People already use physical cash to evade tax, as well as all kinds of other things.




Credit card transactions involve an exchange of personal data, which is undesirable for small transactions. (Even though it's actually desirable for large transactions, which is something I call the Anon Paradox).

I actually think consumers really want a payment mechanism that works just like cash, but in the digital realm. This is what many people thought Bitcoin would be, but it never worked because it's not geared to be mainstream. Right now there's no way to pay for things anonymously without resorting to slow/expensive/complicated cryptos.

If you're a president: Will you let people to use Bitcoin instead of fiat? the more people abandon fiat, the more chance banks will fall and it will affect the economy. Will you let your country to bankrupt as people use Bitcoin to evade tax?

If you're a citizen: Will you use Bitcoin for every transactions if it were fast and cheap (Layer 2)? when there are other payment method that offer promotions e.g. credit card, digital fiat etc?

Nobody says that Bitcoin is perfect(maybe with the exception of a bunch of delusional Bitcoin fanatics).
It's a fact that the current state of Bitcoin is different than Satoshi's vision about a peer-to-peer currency. I don't see this as a problem.
There are centralized altcoins with bigger supply and less scarcity. Are they better than Bitcoin? No. Did they achieve mass adoption? No.
A centralized coin with a simplified protocol would be basically "fiat 2.0" disguised as a crypto. Do we really need this?
Bitcoin was never intended to be a competitor of Monero. The transparency of the blockchain is a positive feature, because it creates trust among the newbies.

Well, Bitcoin is... whatever the core devs say it is. If they wanted to move Bitcoin to a centralized model, they could. It doesn't matter what it is today.


Consensus among... whom? I'll confess here that I actually don't know the details about how the Bitcoin core dev team decides what to do.



But if all you care about is the price of Bitcoin going up, and centralizing it could vastly increase it's accessibility, and therefore greatly increase it's price, then why would you be against it?

And if there are billions of dollars to be made in Bitcoin if the price goes up, why would you assume this could never happen?

That is why Bitcoin will remain decentralized forever, because the government don't have the capacity to make it valuable like the way it is now, that is making countries to begin to adopt it for their citizens to have access to it and to use it to boost their economy that is trying to collapse. Assume Bitcoin is a centralized currency, it would have be dead by now, because government officials that will be in charge to control the price of Bitcoin would have use it to grow their family wealth and gather all the wealth that will make them wealthy without considering others people using it in the country. The first country that made Bitcoin legal tender, tested the value of Bitcoin and it has created potential things in their country that is making foreign investors to use the advantage to grow their investment and bring development to the country also.

Nothing will happen to bitcoin because bitcoin will never become centralized, I have never thought of this and believe this will never happen. Don't waste time making assumptions and scenarios that will never happen. Instead, focus on doing your job well, spending your time earning money to accumulate as many bitcoins as possible. Because as the price of bitcoin increases, everyone will enjoy the profits they make, while you continue to needlessly doubt the future of bitcoin.

People have freedom to use their bitcoins in any way they want, investment, store of value, currency, payment method, gambling mean, whatever.

Again, there is freedom for people to choose what they do like where do they store their bitcoins.

Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto with a core idea, to give us private keys that help us to have our own bitcoin banks. With private keys, we actually owns our bitcoins. So if people decide to use centralized exchanges, they don't have private keys, and only have public addresses.

If they accept risk, they have freedom to store their bitcoins on centralized exchanges. We can not ask them to do anything and only can give them advice.

Reminder: do not keep your money in online accounts

Let's get to the point if Bitcoin is centralized, no one will use Bitcoin anymore or invest because they know it is centralized and anyone can easily manipulate the network or even the price.
So for me, it is an easy answer. Bitcoin has value right now because it is decentralized because if not, there are lot of alternative to use it.

It’s a fascinating scenario to ponder, but the likelihood of Bitcoin’s core developers moving towards centralization seems low, given their strong commitment to the principles of decentralization. However, in the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency, never say never.

I think that changing its architecture to a centralized one would not be that easy - both technically and politically - and I'll tell you why: a change like this would require consensus and if consensus is not reached you'll get a hard fork, i.e. an altcoin, losing all the "magic" that comes with being the actual Bitcoin.

Then, I've seen during the history (alt)coins that - in a way or another - gave up PoW. The result was that their price went down the drain.


So no. In this scenario you will obtain an altcoin nobody would use because its price will be small and dropping to smaller and, sadly, most people are in for bitcoin not because it's a currency you can use for payments, but because it's "digital gold".

All you mention are facts, but it still doesn’t stop the major fact that Bitcoin is decentralized. The decentralization isn’t about what platform you hoard, trade, or pay Bitcoin in. It’s about how Bitcoin isn’t controlled or managed (in the way the bank has control) by anyone. I agree that Bitcoin can be slow and very expensive for transactions, but it was designed to be so. It definitely just happened to be so because Satoshi was focused on Decentralization than a direct competition with centralized Banks..

There are no banks in the world that offer instant (viz. sub-millisecond) transactions, and no banks that offer transactions for free, or pay you to transact with them. I don't know where you got that.

Of course, disregarding and ditching one of Bitcoins key features would not end well.

I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase "killing the Goose who lays the Golden eggs"*
making Bitcoin centralised would kill Bitcoin. Having a global network of groups and
independent people mining and hosting nodes gives Bitcoin its security, anyone can
decide to do this if they want, development is carried out through consensus, anyone
can propose a change or upgrade to the network.

all these go with centralisation so why would everyone involved "kill the Goose that lays
the Golden eggs"?



* wikipedia.org

Bitcoin is slower and more expensive to transact than ever before. I think it's very safe to assume that Bitcoin will never be used as a mainstream currency as long as it uses the blockchain architecture in the backend.


I find this rather bizarre, and I didn't think what I had said was particularly controversial. Bitcoin was invented in the context of P2P networks, which are only necessary when you don't want governments able to observe or stop the transactions. Otherwise there is no reason to just use a central server, which is the way almost all of the internet works already. The p2p approach is slower, more expensive, more complicated, harder to use, and can easily be very dangerous for end-users. The only reason you resort to something like that is because you have to, e.g. you could be prosecuted if you don't.


This reminds of me of a famous quote: "640k ought to be enough for anybody" .

Credit card transactions are still pretty slow in computing terms, and are still pretty expensive. But more importantly, they require an exchange of personal information in the transaction, which is a major limitation.


Touché .

But if transactions are fast and cheap enough, you can presumably have processes inside of your wallet to move your store of value to thing(s) that are more stable. Then you could only expose yourself to Bitcoin's volatility when that's what you wanted.


Maybe. Or maybe Bitcoin being used by 100x more people in the world will make the price go way up. Who knows.

First, Core devs so far rejected all the proposed changes that would lead to even small centralization. Does this mean that this will continue in the future? We can't predict what Core devs will be in 100 years from now, but in the observable near future it's safe to assume that they will keep maintaining decentralization.

Next, extreme centralization will simply quickly kill Bitcoin. Many banks around the world already offer instant zero fee transactions without bank maintenance charges and offer cashback on top of it. How can even a highly centralized Bitcoin compete against that? And if Bitcoin will try to keep being the libertarian money, it will suffer the fate of Liberty Reserve.

I tend not to read when I see things that are not clear since the very beginning! That's why!

If you actually read the whole article, you'd understand the context in which is was written, and you'd have the answer to your question (?).

(And it's not like the article is very long...).

Are these hypothetical situations or problems you have highlighted in Bitcoin? If it's the latter, let me argue some of them;

• This is true for most but it is still being used as a currency. When you factor in the number of years since it went life we are still right on track in terms of adoption.
• True and this is problematic to the network.
• False. This was never the original purpose of Bitcoin and it was never private either. Chain analysis is just a fancy word for reading an already public chain and drawing connections base of previous transactions.
• Haven't read the link yet,
• The world is not in need of a fast and cheap means of transacting, they already have a variety of option, Bitcoin will not still finish top if it becomes centralized.
• An even more volatile means of paying for a cup of coffee?

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In essence it will become just like any of the thousand other worthless altcoins.

I just would like to add that the article from media that you (OP) referenced has several incongruencies, in my opinion.

I didn't rea it all but right from the start it goes wrong in my opinion. It says it's slow. This is all relative. It's relative compared to what? I can say it is fast compated with our traditional fiat system where you have to wait for several days to settle an interbank transaction. 10 minutes is quite fast.

In some banks if you go to the agency in person and ask your account manager to give you 5k€/$/whatever, you will pay a high fee just to get your own money out. In Bitcoin, at least before the Ordinals, Incriptions and Runes crap, you would probably pay a network fee 10x smaller that the one from your bank. So, it is cheap.

It all depends on what you consider a standard definition for fast, cheat, whatever!

While you have clearly given it a lot of thought and time, OP, I don't think it will happen. Centralizing bitoin goes against its essence. Its selling points are that it is decentralized, secure, and verified. Centralizing it would defeat its very point and the allure it holds over crypto investors as the original decentralized currency.

Getting rid of PoW would be the whole point.

Bitcoin's software could be changed by the core developers just like any software system could be changed. The process to move Bitcoin to a centralized architecture would be a complicated one, but straight-forward, on the whole.

And the only reason miners are even relevant is because of the software as well. They could be written out of existence with a few lines of code .


There are lots of ways to achieve security besides the way Bitcoin does it. And if Bitcoin was faster and cheaper to transact, that seems like it would only make it more liquid, not less.

Most users of Bitcoin today don't even know what "decentralized" means, and since they use it through an app or a broker, they aren't even exposed to this feature in any way.

We're talking about getting rid of a feature that only perhaps 1% of this product's users even care about, in exchange for broadening it's appeal massively.




If Bitcoin's core devs wanted to centralized Bitcoin, they could centralized Bitcoin. There's nothing stopping them.

Don't just bring in some ideas that are not possible or being realistic about bitcoin, for someone who understand what bitcoin is and how decentralized it has always been, then there is no how we can make an application for the use of this p2p network under a centralized network, we shouldn't bother ourself on anything regarding that, bitcoin network follows the consensus of bitcoin protocols with the blockchain network, which as long as this remain, there i no how we can have it centralized.

If bitcoin is centralized we'll be laid off from most opportunities and important features that we're now enjoying like security,liquidity,and several other negative consequences to all users will likely emerge.
If bitcoin finally becomes centralized,its likable features will gradually diminish and alter its impacts to the financial systems.However,the fact that bitcoin wants to become centralized,this will reduce users trust within this cryptocurreny space.

Bitcoin's foundation is verified,secured and there's no way I think that's happening;there's no room for bitcoin centralization.

satoshi was very intelligent, I highly doubt that he didn't foresee that in the future governments would force bitcoin exchanges to request documents, I highly doubt that he thought that bitcoin regulation would be inevitable. satoshi is not someone from the third world, 10 years ago in third world countries like my country, the government of my country had many limitations in regulating many things, because they did not have people with technical training to carry out inspections and create rules adequate about a lot of things. but in first world countries, 10 years ago governments already regulated everything they saw, so satoshi would not be naive to think that bitcoin would be a currency used in all countries without governments not putting their rules in their countries about how citizens of that country should use bitcoin

he was a genius so he must have thought of it. Today Bitcoin remains decentralized and is doing very well that way. now for people to buy bitcoin, sell bitcoin and buy things using bitcoin, governments have set their rules, laws. As exchanges are owned by private people and need banks, they had to give in, and this was inevitable from the day bitcoin was created. No government would let its citizens deal with a currency without putting in place rules on how that currency should be dealt with in their country. That's why, in my opinion, I don't see any reason for us to complain about anything today. bitcoin is being well regarded by governments, by large investors and this is a very good thing, because it allows bitcoin and fiat to both be used without people fighting and getting into paranoia that fiat should end, when they know that fighting with governments about ending fiat, and useless. That's why in my opinion no one would think of centralizing bitcoin

I don't think that it can be done, it's working on a PoW system, I'm sure that in a centralized network, that's not how you would run things. Making bitcoin centralized means you got to own all of the mining networks or control all of them because the miners serves as a way to validate transactions and they're all moving independently from each other. It's also a big change if we did push for centralization because that's the total opposite of bitcoin and it's core tenets, centralization also means that bitcoin is susceptible to the manipulation of powerful few and that's not something I'd want to see for myself happening.

It seems like you have thought deeply about this and I am pretty sure anyone who wanted to and is skillful enough can actually implement this but I think bitcoin has left such a mark to our world that the financial system will never be the same again.

Even if bitcoin becomes centralized I am pretty sure there would be more altcoins being developed thanks to what we have learned from bitcoin’s network.

Today, I'll offer the forum a thought experiment.

Imagine that one day, the core devs of Bitcoin would come to a consensus that:

• Today, Bitcoin is simply an investment and value store, not a "currency" for most of its users.
• Today, most holders of Bitcoin do so in a centralized way, e.g. with a broker or an app.
• Bitcoin has failed its original purpose of being able to thwart government subpoenas since it is subject to chain analysis (and hence has opened the door to competitors like Monera for this niche need).
• Bitcoin could never become a mainstream currency since it was intentionally designed to be slow and expensive.
• With so much adoption and awareness from its popularity as an investment instrument, Bitcoin could become a mainstream worldwide currency if it were made to be fast and cheap, allowing it to be used for everyday transactions e.g. a parking meter or a cup of coffee.
• Mainstream adoption of Bitcoin like this would probably send the price of Bitcoin into orbit.
  
  

The only way that you could make Bitcoin fast and cheap enough to transact such that it would be superior to (say) ordinary credit card transactions would be to centralize the architecture. In other words, instead of a consensus algorithm among thousands of anonymous servers, Bitcoin would be backed with an architecture controlled by a single legal entity and a trusted set of servers, eliminating the need for proof-of-work and eliminating vast amounts of complexity to the system, immensely streamlining Bitcoin transactions.

In this scenario, Bitcoin could truly take over as a worldwide mainstream currency, with consumers replacing their everyday transactions with Bitcoin transactions.

However, also in this scenario, Bitcoin would lose some of its "mythology" or "religion" since it started as a way to transact without the possibility of a government discovering the parties of its transactions.

But in this scenario, almost all of Bitcoin's current users--and millions (or potentially billions) more--would only notice that Bitcoin is very fast and very cheap to transact with, and that millions of ordinary vendors now accept Bitcoin as retail payments, for instance.

All it would take is for Bitcoin's core devs to change their minds.


Could this happen? If not, why not?