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Another property that Bitcoin derives from its decentralization is its open-access. Often exclaimed as one of the most interesting properties of Bitcoin by silicon valley investors, many like to refer to Bitcoin as "permissionless". The ability of anyone, anywhere in the world, with little more than an internet connection, to accept Bitcoin for goods and services and use Bitcoin to purchase goods and services without significant hassle is exciting. Again, this property hinges on Bitcoin's decentralization. While many centralized financial service providers exist, many of which tout their availability to anyone, their very presence as a centralized authority which may deny service arbitrarily makes them susceptible to future policy changes for any number of reasons. PayPal, for example, was founded on the ideals of universal access to ecash. However, due to its position as a central authority, it quickly changed its policies in order to comply with the pressure placed on them both by regulators and the policies of the existing financial system, on which PayPal relied. These days, PayPal is widely known to freeze accounts and seize assets with little or no warning. Fundamentally, reliance on centralized parties for service is incompatible with universal open-access in the financial world.\r
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-You'll note that all of the critical features above, the ones that make Bitcoin so exciting to all of us, can be effectively implemented, for some time, by a centralized system. And, in fact, this has been done before, in much more efficient systems than Bitcoin. Of course they've never lasted, losing critical properties after tweaks to fix one thing or another, implementing regulatory censorship systems directly into the base layers, limiting access to grow profits and shutting down entirely. Really, decentralization in Bitcoin is not itself a feature, but is instead the only way we know of to obtain the features we want in human-operated systems (with a single class of exceptions, but that's for the next post :p).\r
+You'll note that all of the critical features above, the ones that make Bitcoin so exciting to all of us, can be effectively implemented, for some time, by a centralized system. And, in fact, this has been done before, in much more efficient systems than Bitcoin. Of course they've never lasted, losing critical properties after tweaks to fix one thing or another, implementing regulatory censorship systems directly into the base layers, limiting access to grow profits and shutting down entirely. Really, decentralization in Bitcoin is not itself a feature, but is instead the only way we know of to obtain the features we want in human-operated systems (with a single class of exceptions, but that's for another post :p).\r
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