I particularly enjoy this quote from http://adamierymenko.com/decentralization-i-want-to-believe/:
A centralized alternative to Bitcoin would be a simple SQL database with a schema representing standard double-entry accounting and some meta-data fields. The entire transaction volume of the Bitcoin network could be handled by a Raspberry Pi in a shoebox.
Instead, we have a transaction volume of a few hundred thousand database entries a day being handled by a compute cluster comparable to those used to simulate atomic bomb blasts with physically realistic voxel models or probabilistically describe a complete relationship graph for the human proteome.
EDIT:
To those pointing out the 2013 Bitcoin fork, good point.
However, in cryptocurrency land, 2013 is ancient history, and I'd argue standards are higher already.
If you want a centralized system, just use your bank, Paypal or whatever. Nobody was claiming that Bitcoin, a distributed system, was more efficient computing than other systems. The whole point of Bitcoin is that nobody controls it. Finding something that is more efficient than Bitcoin, without the decentralization, is plain stupid. I don't need an "expert" telling me that "hurr I could have done that faster with a SQL database".
Any voting system will fail if someone can cheaply and easily create new voting identities. Email spam, web spam, and social networking spam all suffer from that problem - email addresses, web sites, and social networking accounts are cheap and easy to create. Bitcoin beats this by giving voting power to whomever spends the most on mining hardware. That works, but at high cost and only because there's a big financial reward for being a big miner.
How to limit fake online identity creation? Facebook tried "real names", which semi-worked until they ran into the gay agenda. Google tries to make you tie your whole life into one account, and they can tell if your account doesn't have enough of your life tied in. The credit industry tries to do this by chasing down people who don't pay up, and is reasonably successful, but at high cost.
ID by phone number has been tried, as "phone verification". That created a small industry in phony phone numbers. (http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf) ID by postal address was tried, but there are too many mailbox services.
There's no really good solution to this known.
Also, the benefits of decentralized consensus has benefits the are so vast, the resources it takes to achieve it are miniscule by comparison.
(Stellar was, of course, founded by a couple of the Ripple founders using exactly the same technology they used for Ripple. Also, we're talking about the new "decentralized" Ripple here; there was an older version of Ripple that was centralized but didn't have the same problem, and that's the version that predated Bitcoin.)
My nomination: Dogecoin.
It's fairly obvious we currently have no way to do perfect identity management. It's also fairly obvious you are using it as one-of-your-many ad hominem arguments.
Trust is the original currency and was the basis for the very first monies ever invented; monies based on trust are much more empowering than "hard" currencies which always have the effect of disproportionately empowering those who already have money.
>That is also how the fiat money system works.
The difference is that now, for the first time in history, you get control over your obligations, not banks. BTW your bias is showing.
This is a patently false statement.