Agree: the baseline stays permissionless. The real contest is the price of opting out. Measure decentralization by opt-out friction: count chokepoints between keys and broadcast, and note which dependencies you cannot swap out. Design target: a zero trust path that is simple - user held keys, your own node over Tor, offline PSBT signing, reproducible wallet builds, multi path broadcast. If that path takes hours or arcana, convenience centralization wins. What friction metric would you track first?