Blockchain without decentralization isn't that exciting. The problem with banning crypto is that there will be an entrepreneurial group of people willing to accept cryptocurrencies for a high fee and turn it into fiat or a commodity in a neighboring country. As someone developing in the crypto space, I look at this tech as the formation of a global, secure, always-on, always-accessible, standardized, permission-less database. When people talk of "the cloud" I feel that crypto platforms fit that description more aptly then traditional services.
This is still an ongoing debate in the crypto space.
The opposing argument to concentrated mining pools is that they still require individuals to point to these pools and are essentially acting as proxy votes. It's decentralized because mining pools only have as much power as individual participants allow them to have and there have been multiple occasions where individuals have forced an action such as the UASF.
PoW seems to be on the outs recently with PoS, DPoS, DAG and other algorithms emerging as potential alternatives.
If you need someone else's permission to use it, then that person is both a bottleneck and a source of control with power that is likely to be abused. It is really important that these systems be "permissionless" in order to be legitimately decentralized. (Though I wonder if you ask that because you think the term means something to do with data control. It doesn't.)
I know exactly what "permissionless" means in this sense. However, given the only way that a transaction is materialized in the blockchain is for a block to be mined by someone, that sounds like a bottleneck to me. A pretty bad one if Proof of Work is being used!
