There's a big difference between centralized influence and centralized control. The 2010 and 2013 examples were fairly homogeneous, because the changes were fairly obvious and reasonable, the thought leaders were widely trusted, and almost all the users followed them. But a large number of people didn't follow when Ethereum split (hence Ethereum Classic) or when Bitcoin split in 2017 (hence Bitcoin Cash).
Thought leaders like Satoshi and Vitalik can influence most of the community of their respective coins, but they can't force anyone to accept their blocks.
> So if it can’t do the first thing it promises it can do, maybe it becomes more like a Rube Goldberg machine than something that is meant to be useful/practical. The fact that people are praising CryptoKitties as a “practical application” seems to support the Rube Goldberg machine/toy theory.
The problem I think is that decentralized control is really the only thing that blockchains offer over existing data stores. If you don't care about decentralized control, existing distributed logs such as Datomic are superior to blockchain in every way.
I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of blockchain users fall into two categories:
1. People who don't understand decentralization. 2. People who don't care about decentralization but are riding the hype (whether they understand decentralization or not).
This is why so many "blockchain applications" look like Rube Goldberg machines:
1. People who don't understand decentralization use it to implement things that would be much better served by an existing distributed datastore such as Datomic. 2. People who are just riding hype don't need to implement anything serious to fool people. They can implement a Rube Goldberg machine and there will always be suckers who take it seriously as long as it ticks the "blockchain" hype tickbox.
Very few people actually understand decentralization AND care about it, and even fewer of those have the technical chops to implement them. So I think it will take time for more complex blockchain killer apps to emerge.
It's worth noting that the first simple blockchain application, cryptocurrency, has already had pretty immense effects on our society, from darknet markets to crypto exchanges. You can argue whether the uses people use cryptocurrency for are good, but you can't argue it isn't useful--it's just not complex (from a logical standpoint--it's just a ledger--obvously it's technically and socially complex).
