Criticisms are valid but has there been anything more decentralized that exists today. The participants should have some incentive to participate and not mostly volunteers like Wikipedia. Genuine question.
wikipedia is probably the single best thing that the internet has produced and it is insane, despite its flaws, how accurate it is and how much knowledge it brings to the public.
I don't think there need to be financial incentives at all, in fact i'm absolutely tired of the crypto logic that tries to impose 20th century economic scarcity on the digital sphere.
Under a system of fiat currency, new currency is created when a bank makes a loan, typically under restrictions set by a central bank and within a price band that is loosely set by that central bank. There are 212 countries and hundreds of thousands of banks, each making individual decisions about when to make a loan. There are more such banks than there are miners of Bitcoin, so the fiat system is more decentralized than Bitcoin.
Are you suggesting that every nation on Earth follows the same business cycle? That is not even remotely correct. East Asia followed a counter-Western-cyclical cycle for most of the last 60 years. Even if you narrow the conversation to just the West, it is extremely rare to have all 7 of the G7 in recession at the same time (other than 2009, I don't think it ever happened).
Banks have less transparency and therefore less accountability with how they manage funds. Another thing to note is that the miners are not the only decentralized aspect of Bitcoin, the nodes are. Nodes can be run from any computer with an external terabyte HD for the ledger and it takes a trivial amount of electricity to participate. Additionally, there’s no restrictions on running one and the ledger can be requested by anyone who wants to see it. The history of the ledger (a commonly ignored aspect) is also secured by all the work that has already gone into the chain which would make it infeasible for a majority of miners to rewrite significant portions of the chains history (51% attacks are mostly concerned with the future integrity of a chain).
With Bitcoin, anyone can create new coins via mining - but it takes a lot of work and is difficult. With fiat, only central banks can print new money but it is cheap and easy for them to do so. Claiming traditional fiat is decentralized is like saying Central Banks are decentralized. It is simply not true.
