Bitcoin development is becoming more decentralised. It began with Satoshi as the sole developer and miner; now there are hundreds of Bitcoin developers and thousands of miners across the world. This system is self-correcting. If we become too centralised, we are more vulnerable to attack. If Bitcoin is attacked, it will either be forced to decentralise or die, and we can always build it again.
Transcript
[ANDREAS] What do I think about centralization tendencies, like commit access to [the repository]? I think we have forgetten that Bitcoin has actually become a hell of a lot less centralized in the last... eight years of its existence. In the beginning, there was one developer [that we know of].
Their name was Satoshi. Not the real name, but still. There was one miner. Their name was also Satoshi.
All mining and development under one person. Today, if you look at [the Bitcoin Core repository], it grew from about a dozen people three years ago... to more than one hundred active developers, some of them working continuously and full-time. if you look at mining...
People say it is centralized in China, but even China is a massively decentralized. So even within China, mining is actually decentralized there. How many miners do we have today compared to three years ago? Even though these areas seem centralized, the trend is [towards] decentralization.
I am not worried because there is pressure in the opposite direction, to decentralize. This is a self-correcting system. If we centralize too much, the system will be vulnerable to attack. Then it will be attacked, and Bitcoin will be forced to decentralized or it will die.
[If so], then we will build a better one which is more decentralized next time. This is a very self-correcting [system], so I am not particularly worried about it.