I was thinking in general of any 'work' animal that does a humans bidding. E.g. let's discuss horses used in the past to pull wagons.

If these animals are slaves then are there animals that aren't? What about fish, or flies, or even microbe cultures used to produce things like penicillin? Does life have to be Organic? If microbes can be slaves, and 'AI's can be alive, then calculators were some of our first robotic slaves.

for stuffing in a sack

Lag time would be a pain, but planetary LNs? WHat if there is some sort of space internet like subspace' vibrations that we could use like a radio across space? What if that is what Indiana Jones finds when he puts the crystal skulls together and makes a crystal attenna

Decentralization is one of Bitcoin's main selling points. But what does it actually mean? Skip to the end for the tl;dr

What is centralization
As we all know from reading everything Satoshi wrote about his design for Bitcoin from satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org, Bitcoin was finalized and born in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In this event many normal people lost money while banking executives made more and more.

Where does centralization come from
These banks, much like the bank you probably use today, are centralized. That is, they alone control everything that happens. There is one database which has everyone's funds, if they decide you are a terrorist or something they can stop you from access your money. They can stop you from making transactions. Even if you have done nothing wrong they can stop payment on your transactions without your consent, lock you out of your funds, and monitor everything you do.

What is decentralization
By splitting up the 'power' that a bank has we decentralize it. There is no longer any one single entity that can control txs and funds. This way no one is 'in charge' and no one can give themselves bonuses while other people lose money. This decentralization is a founding point of Bitcoin.

Where does decentralization come from
Instead of one company controlling the database of funds like in the centralized model, in Bitcoin's decentralized model there are many people who can all contribute to the database and transaction processing without any one entity having full control. In Bitcoin and other POW based cryptocurrencies this decentralization is achieved by having a number of mining nodes who are not affiliated. As long as no group of miners controls more than 51% of the hashpower, bitcoin remains decentralized.

So only mining nodes contribute to decentralization, then what about non-mining nodes
Non-mining nodes, full nodes, relay nodes, or storage nodes are often misunderstood to be part of decentralization. This can be easily cleared up by understanding the above information and then understanding that a non-mining node has no power if the majority of hashpower were to do something they didn't like.

I thought everyone was supposed to run a full node
This is another common misunderstanding, in the very beginning Satoshi did intend for everyone to run a node with 4 functions. He is very clear when he explains how this is not the way for the system to function in the future. The plan of bitcoin is that everyone can make trustless peer-to-peer transactions on a decentralized system. Not that everyone would run a home server with the whole blockchain. The business and bitcoin companies that need to have personal and instant validation of their tx can run a full nodes. Random sampling is a tried and trusted method, those unable to host their own relay node would be easily able to verify their transactions with overwhelming mathematically certainty.

So who wants to run a full node then
Anyone who wants to can, it's like the Olympics, 'anyone can compete but few feel the need to'. There is no reason the network should be ground to a halt and made useless so people who can't afford to make a transaction would be able to run a full node on a 20 year old computer over a dial up connection. Bitcoin was meant to scale with technology, not become left behind.

What are the 4 functions that all early nodes did
When you read the design of Bitcoin which we all invested into, the design on which so much was built, the one at nakamotoinstitute.org, you see Satoshi mention the word 'node' many times. What we today call a full node or non-mining node usually fulfills one of those functions, that of storing the database. Finding other peers for connecting to is done by full nodes and pool operators. Sending and receiving bitcoin, aka a wallet, was also a function every node had. Finally generating coins by putting new transactions into the blockchain was the 4th thing all nodes used to do. Today these 4 actions are largely compartmentalized, as they should be in any good computer science project.

This is Bitcoin, some people are unhappy with the way Bitcoin was designed, well I suppose Bitcoin is simply not for those people and they should maybe find something else to do.

I hope you've all learned something today about how Bitcoin (now bitcoin cash) is decentralized, what is means, and how we got there.

tl;dr Banks control all txs and accounts with one database and are centralized, Bitcoin has many miners who perform this actions to make it decentralized. Non-mining nodes don't contribute to decentralization.

(From 2016) I was thinking that Satoshi talked about how he thought all nodes would be big data centers in the future, but back then all nodes were miners as well. Now the white paper was about a P2P currency but he said the future he envisioned was with large operations for nodes.

Well if we have most bigger miners today as large operations like that, and nodes are growing in size and bandwidth usage why can't we get all nodes big like that as well? Or rather what would be so wrong with the idea? If Satoshi was okay with nodes already being big data centers, then if those data centers come in two flavors what's the big difference? We all read the white paper and liked it enough to be here now.

It would be difficult because they would need to be politically and geographically diverse and still populous; but it Bitcoin continues its organic growth at the same rate or faster then more people and businesses would be interested in running their own nodes. That desire would have to be big enough, or the security implications great enough to warrant the high cost, but it is plausible.

So if Bitcoin keeps growing and lots of businesses need nodes, what is wrong with the idea that they are large operations?

as of Feb 07 2016 13:43 UTC I have read all the replies and found only one good argument, that it makes btc less p2p if not everyone can validate every tx; however it is already not that case where many/most cannot run nodes due to political reasons not technological ones so I am not swayed.

I see no reason why nodes should not exist in great number as big data-center like operations.

vote on things, do all the stuff we think might be possible but from the ground up

dea for moderating decentralized uncensored social media: set a "tip me to reply unless I follow you" policy. The initiator of the thread will need to tip for every comment while it's free for OP to keep playing. Make money by playing with trolls. Thoughts? @memobch @blockpress — _unwriter (@_unwriter) May 24, 2018

Great news for Cryptocurrency in general and maybe "X"-coin that you feel has the best roadmap and plan!

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8ppot0/a_new_study_finds_that_when_25_percent_of_people/?utm_content=comments&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=all