Is Bitcoin Development Centralized?

Centralized

What do you think about centralization tendencies, like commit access to the repository?

I think we have forgotten that Bitcoin has actually become a hell of a lot less centralized in the last 10 years of its existence.

In the beginning, there was one developer that we know of. His name was Satoshi. Not the real name, but still. There was one miner. His name was also Satoshi.

So all of mining and development were centralized under one person. Today, if you look at the Bitcoin Core repository, it grew from about a dozen people 7 years ago, to more than 100 active developers, some of them working continuously and full-time.

if you look at mining… People say it is centralized in China, but even China is a massively decentralized country. So even within China, mining is actually massively decentralized there.

How many miners do we have today, compared to 6-7 years ago? Even though these areas seem more centralized, the trend is towards decentralization and they are now more decentralized.

I am not worried, and the reason why I am not worried is because there is pressure in the opposite direction, to decentralize.

This is a self-correcting system. If we centralize too much, the system will become vulnerable to attack. Then it will be attacked, and Bitcoin will be forced to decentralized, or it will die, and in that case we will build a better one which is more decentralized next time.

This is a very self-correcting thing, so I am not particularly worried about it.

About the author

Sunny King

I invented the proof of work. I created PeerCoin, PrimeCoin, and I am co-creator of Virtual Economy Era (VEE) coin.

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