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And the Exim email-server and "bind" DNS server is "decentralized", except everybody uses gmail.com, or even centralized upon AWS.

There's your theory, and there's the practice of the internet and business. In theory, they should be the same. In practice, they're different.

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Bitcoin doesn’t care about businesses. It doesn’t care about peoples wishes. It doesn’t care that everyone else is using Gmail. It provides a peer to peer, censorship resistant append only ledger for transactions secured by cryptographic signatures and proof of work. That is all. And that is plenty.

I agree. I think you two are talking past each other to a degree - Bitcoin the protocol is decentralized, Bitcoin the ecosystem in 2022 is moderately centralized in various ways.

Without an on-ramp and off-ramp for converting into dollars/euros, Bitcoin is entirely useless, even for the hardcore idealists like yourself. And those can quite easily be made illegal.

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