In order to deliver on the promise of decentralization it seems every client must have its own copy by default instead of relying on a trusted authority. No, y

In order to deliver on the promise of decentralization it seems every client must have its own copy by default instead of relying on a trusted authority. No, you just need enough servers to make it unlikely any one entity could gain over 50% of the computing power on the network. So if there were 1 million simple clients and only 10,000 clients with a full block chain, then any attacker would have to exceed the computing power of those 10,000 full clients in order to subvert the network. my understanding of bitcoin is that a given bitcoin network requires a central IRC server for command/control of miners IRC is just used as a way of getting a list of initial peers to connect to the network. It has nothing to do with command/control of miners.