RE: Centralization of Cryptocurrency - Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EOS
If you think about about the lifecycle of crypto, centralization is actually a feature. You must have centralization at the onset in order to develop the code and produce the product (e.g., token). Then, in an effort to decentralize the centrally produced code, it's offered to the public with incentives to run the code and receive rewards for doing so (e.g., mining). Then, like what you're saying, the economies of scale become a reality and a consolidation occurs with a few players.
Even though I am ideologically libertarian and recognize the ideal of decentralization, this inevitable fact remains that centralization in various forms is necessary for organized success of a project. Dan seems to be correct that the better question to ask is how decentralized a system is relative to other competitors. And he makes the case very well, that DPOS is a better alternative than things like mining pools.
Re: valuation of EOS; it is difficult to say what the value will come out to be. Dan is focused on distributing the tokens fairly uniformly. This is intended purposely so that EOS won't be unreachable to folks to use the token, and to that end it would seem that the token won't sky rocket to the moon based on the supply and expected inflation. My best guess is EOS trades around $20/token in about 5 years time assuming it reaches ETH's current market cap levels of ~$20bil. This also does not account for inflation of the USD, which could cause that price to rise considerably.
One other thing, the EOS valuation could rise further should the EOS platform allow tokens to be launched on the OS. I say this because I see 2 primary reasons to own ETH: (1) to run an app and (2) launch a token. We know that you will need (1) for EOS so the demand for the token will be there. But demand will likely increase should you be able to do (2). I think a lot of the ETH price surge we're seeing is because of (2).
Yes, I never mentioned it but I expect many ICO's to switch to EOS. At the end of the day, ETH could hang onto the ICO market if they fix their gas pricing issues during hot ICO's, and they ramp up transactions per second. Last I heard Vitalik wants to scale ETH by doing lightning network stuff and sharding, what that means is the important stuff happens off blockchain.
When EOS hits in a year and just does everything on blockchain without hiding it off in black boxes between sophisticated parties, it will just be favored by innovators.
If we have to shard ETH and do a LN transaction between two third parties off the blockchain... then those two third parties don't even need ETH to begin with. They could just build their own 3rd party encrypted verified system using anything else at all. They could smart contract off of BTC if they wanted to and do LN transactions on that. LN is sort of an excuse where they decided "We can't scale."