[samaman]

"Not only that, but the decentralised utopia that Nakamoto dreamed about, namely avoiding trusted third parties, is still far out of reach. Ironically, there are now three mining pools – a type of company that builds rooms full of servers in Alaska and other locations way up above the Arctic circle – which are responsible for more than half of all the new bitcoin (and also for checking payment requests). " don't think that's quite right..

[mason_dev]

The node operators still have just as much control over the network over the miners, and they're incredibly decentralized. This was evident in the blocksize wars that ravaged the Bitcoin community a couple years back.