I don't think this is really how things are going to work. In an ideal world, people would come up with a strong thesis that features of Bitcoin outweighs the cost, and only then would people take Bitcoin seriously. But the reality is that nobody really understands Bitcoin's role in the world economy well enough to evaluate such a thesis. There are tons of theses about how Bitcoin might be used. The only way to evaluate these theses is to implement them and see if they work.
So basically, we can't wait to see if the benefits outweigh the costs to start taking Bitcoin seriously. Bitcoin has to be taken seriously before we can weigh the benefits against the costs. There's just no way to evaluate whether decentralization is more beneficial than costly except to take the risk and try it.
In that sense, Bitcoin isn't really that different from any other new financial idea. Either you invest in a thesis or you don't, and if you invest, then either you make money or you lose money. You can make educated guesses on which theses are correct, but ultimately you can only prove or disprove a new financial idea by taking it seriously enough to try it.
People are already taking Bitcoiners seriously to the tune of billions of dollars, so I think we'll see results from this experiment. Whether the results of the experiment will be positive or negative, I don't know.
My point wasn't about bitcoin but about people posting their thoughts on bitcoin. If someone is going to try to get people rallied behind decentralized X, a good place to start is to offer practical reasons why that would be a better scenario than the status quo. Tell me why in the future I would want to take my retirement account out of my bank and deposit it into the decentralized ether. If I screw up that process, I lose my retirement account. Introduce a third party to help me with the process and you're on the road back to centralization. The same types of arguments can be made for other "this is serious business" use case for bitcoin.
Can the blockchain replace Twitter? Yeah maybe. But to compare overturning Twitter to overturning the NYSE shows a lack of proportionality and understanding of why things are the way they are in finance.
So basically, we can't wait to see if the benefits outweigh the costs to start taking Bitcoin seriously. Bitcoin has to be taken seriously before we can weigh the benefits against the costs. There's just no way to evaluate whether decentralization is more beneficial than costly except to take the risk and try it.
In that sense, Bitcoin isn't really that different from any other new financial idea. Either you invest in a thesis or you don't, and if you invest, then either you make money or you lose money. You can make educated guesses on which theses are correct, but ultimately you can only prove or disprove a new financial idea by taking it seriously enough to try it.
People are already taking Bitcoiners seriously to the tune of billions of dollars, so I think we'll see results from this experiment. Whether the results of the experiment will be positive or negative, I don't know.