> transaction system that is decentralized ... (which this would still be). I'm not so sure about that. The mining process is required for the decentralized co

> transaction system that is decentralized ... (which this would still be). I'm not so sure about that. The mining process is required for the decentralized consensus over transaction history and ordering. The incentive for investing resources into the mining process is the block reward - without that, people won't mine. If you have a centralized authority that controls minting, you have no block reward to offer. Using mining for the initial distribution of coins isn't just a way to decentralize the initial distribution - its also a big part of Bitcoin's security model, and without that, pretty much everything breaks. (At some point, transaction fees should replace the block reward - but that requires significant usage of the currency and is only possible far into the future. Block rewards are required for bootstrapping, until you get to that point.)