> Recent advancements in Bitcoin/Blockchain have the potential to take us back to the promised land of a truly decentralized, free, and open Internet.<p>I keep hearing this, but really, how? The only useful thing on this front to fall out of the blockchain is Namecoin and, despite being a really good idea, nobody knows how to stop name hoarding. There will also never be a mechanism for name dispute resolution... and who wants to register a name that could cost $5 this year and $1000 to renew next?<p>Bitcoin itself has and likely will continue to trend toward centralization because of the tendency for people want want lightweight clients and instant transactions. Services like Bitpay already consolidate merchant interaction, and too many people already accept the Gmailification of wallets by holding web wallets. This is probably for the best because people can't be trusted to guard their own keys. It's also debatable whether total blockchain decentralization is a good thing, given that currently the hash power is all held by a bunch of very dodgy unknown Chinese ASIC mining shops instead of a bunch of very dodgy but well-known multinational banks.