One of the more thoughtful essays from someone who calls himself a "bitcoin believer".

The general argument for decentralization has a different set of practical problems than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin and almost all other PoW crypto is now centralized. Chinese miners account directly for 66% of hashes/block creations and 90% of the technical and operational stacks. Crypto is illegal in China. And, China is a totalitarian society. When forseeing the future of PoW crypto, you have to consider what it would mean if enough of it lands in accounts of western investors and investment companies.

Decentralization itself is inherently nonsense. For any digital platform to operate anywhere, it requires electricity, devices, networking (ISP, telecom) and endpoint skills. These are almost always 100% centralized from the perspective of governmental control.

But decentralization also requires an incentive to run a node. PoW/PoS crypto is the only workable model currently. Any other would be hard to imagine, since it requires money to "contribute" and be motivated to contribute to the model. No gas, no go.

In the most innocuous of possible eventualities, the whole project slowly goes away when enough people grasp the silliness or threat of it or both. In the least innocuous, the democratic governments that are the takers will end up with much bigger problems than even the wildest dreams of wildest Libertarian/Austrian inflation scaremongerers could ever imagine.