This reminded me of complaints that developers had when Twitter started reigning in their API.

Bitcoin might be a decentralized network, but it is developed by a committee. Bitcoin has a Central Bank, and it takes the form of the current core development team. Imagine what will happen to bitcoin when Amazon and Ebay have something to say about the next version of the protocol.

I am not saying that bitcoin is fundamentally flawed. However, the vision of bitcoin as a libertarian alternative to Central Banking is. I expect bitcoin to become a protocol managed, at least in part, by a governmental body at some point in its future. The more the financial impact of each development decision grows, the more regulation that is going to be applied to the network. Difficult decisions that have significant impact result in mediation.

That aside, Mike Hearn's distributed hash table idea is a good example of the potential of the network. The bitcoin ledger will likely prop up far more than the bitcoin transaction system itself.