what? centralization doesn't need to come first, it was first! First banks had private ledgers with no use of cryptography, then banks started using protocols and cryptography to prove events among each other and from users, then the current crop of primitive and inefficient blockchains proved we could scale the number of independent verifiers to much larger numbers intead of just a couple of banks (each client of users who can afford to download and verify the complete blockchain), and the next steps will be devising a system that is more enerrgy efficient and scales the number of economic participants (not just the number of verifiers) see Algorand for example.<p>this is written by somebody who doesn't seem aware banks were using ledgers (~ block chain, or timestamped transactions) and cryptography way before bitcoin.<p>Bitcoin merely substantially improved a subset of certain undeniably important aspects, while neglecting some of the others...