Bitcoin Forum

In a recent interview with SEC chairman Gary Gensler, there was something that caught my attention. The chairman stated that "Bitcoin is not that decentralized". That's "partially due to the prominence of centralized crypto exchanges". You can read all about it here: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/14/cnbc-transcript-sec-chair-gary-gensler-speaks-with-cnbcs-squawk-box-today-.html

I'm afraid he's right, especially when CEXs hold most of BTC's circulating supply (eg: Binance). It's even worse now with the recent approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs by the SEC. Institutional investment companies like BlackRock, VanEck, and MicroStrategy are accumulating large amounts of the cryptocurrency.

We're essentially selling our BTC to companies driven by mainstream governments' own interests. With this, Bitcoin's true value proposition has failed (banks win). At least, the code is open source. If BTC becomes compromised, what's stopping us from moving to a more decentralized chain in the future (Litecoin, Monero)?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. :)

I've seen a lot this misconception about Bitcoin decentralization. Actually I've just answered in another topic about this.
Gary Gensler doesn't understand that the decentralization of bitcoin is about the full nodes and the miners involved, not about the number of wallets containing big funds (and frankly, those are still plenty too).
And allow me to be a bit mean: maybe he confused it with Ethereum.

Bitcoin is decentralized

Centralized exchanges and Bitcoin ETF which are centralized are not part of what that makes up the bitcoin network. If we are talking about bitcoin, we should be talking about the network and noncustodial wallets.

No, he knows that bitcoin is decentralized but centralized exchanges and other centralized ways of holding bitcoin by other users are centralized is what he was talking about.

Because bitcoin is stored on CEX doesn't change the nature of bitcoin from decentralized to centralized, and what I understand is that a lot of people do not understand that the bitcoin network makes it decentralized due to the way it is designed for nodes to control the whole system.

The only way that bitcoin can be weak in decentralized nature is if all the mining pools are bought over by government, where they choose whose transactions that they will add to the blockchain, but as long as miners don't accept such, bitcoin remain decentralized. This is why one must use a self custody wallet, and use DEX.

The network may be "decentralized"...but what happens when big companies, governments, and institutions accumulate all of the BTC (or at least, most of it)? Without people "owning" BTC (self custody), the blockchain will become the sole playground of the aforementioned entities. I could be wrong, though.  :-\

Not so long ago, GG had some much worse statements about Bitcoin, and this one about decentralization doesn't really make much sense if we know that decentralization is actually about something else, and not about who and where keeps someone's private keys. Perhaps it is a much bigger problem for us that miners from China (and other parts of the world) have moved to the US, and we can never know what the politicians in that country may come up with literally overnight. If Mr. T becomes president again, who knows what crazy ideas he might come up with.

As for who buys or sells BTC, it's a free market and no one can do anything there, and no matter how you turn it, someone won't like it. Let's remember what the reactions are when a bank refuses to process crypto transactions, or when a well-known banker says something negative about Bitcoin - and now that they have begun to speak and act positively, we again wonder where this is going.

Fortunately, not everyone sells, and it remains to be seen what will happen when (if) supply becomes greater than demand.

As usual, Gensler is cautious about Bitcoin, making a disclaimer that ETF approvals don't mean approval of Bitcoin by the SEC, as well as reiterating that Bitcoin is among speculative assets, not backed up by anything or issued by any authority.
As for a comment on decentralization, he clarified that his point was that "finance tends toward centralization since antiquity", so it's not as much about Bitcoin as it is about his belief that humanity historically gravitates toward centralization of finances. Later, he follows up with a bit of US history, about the idea of 'buying the basket' instead of buying individual stocks, and how that democratizes but also centralizes finance.
To me, it looks like it's just his overall position that centralization is natural and perhaps even positive, so he views Bitcoin in light of that position.
But as long as people are legally allowed to store their coins in non-custodial wallets, I think it's fine that some choose centralized platforms.

open to read as a book. but there is a tiered hierarchy of moderation and recruitment process for the privilige to be able to offer proposals to evolve the source code of activated rules of the network.


..
when economic nodes (NYA) have the sway of what transactions they prefer to use and see wiling to ban pools blocks that dont comply to a economic node preference

when the source code is literally in the hands of a brand that purposefully named itself CORE (center)

when the mining is no longer solo but pooled..

when full nodes offer features to disable peer services such as full archive seeding and also backward compatibity so that older nodes get stripped data or data thats not required to be validated fully..

.. whats left?

we need to stay vigilant and actually look for the changes and risks, rather then play dead and say "its decentralised simply because that was a buzzword of 2009 so must be true now"

The large amount of bitcoins held at CEX like Binance or etfs like IBIT are not owned by one entity. They are their customers funds. So what you are saying doesn’t apply.

When it comes to decentralization I think the way the hash power is distributed is more important. I remember back in the early days there was over 51% of hashpower in a single pool. We don’t have that problem anymore. China has less hashpower than before and it’s more distributed throughout the planet.

#not-your-key-not-your-coin
having a balance on a offchain system is an IOU not actual ownership (then note instances of MTGox(people havnt got 'their' coin))

and share holders of ETF have no owner claim of bitcoin whatso ever, so not even a IOU of bitcoin(note SEC regs of not allowing in-kind redemption)

we need to stay vigilant and actually look for the changes and risks,, scrutinising them..  rather then play dead and say "its decentralised simply because that was a buzzword of 2009 so must be true now"

Bitcoin network IS decentralized! Dont twist the facts.


First of all, big companies, governments, and institutional investors cannot forcibly take your coins. So if you are an individual who wants to keep your BTC in self-custody, youll always have that right...  unless you opt to sell off your stash, that is!  Sure, selling might mean rebuying at a higher price later, but thats on you, buddy.  You cannot have a global decentralized internet currency without a free market.

Really, the only way bitcoin loses its decentralization is if the bulk of node operators voluntarily shut down their setups.  But I dont see that happening in the foreseeable future.

If as much as we can agree that the total decentralization people talk bitcoin isn’t that, but no financial network actually beats bitcoin network decentralization currently. What Gensler is thinking is definitely just about the price of bitcoin and not the network, all this entities mention can only decide to affect bitcoin price If they all decide to either sell (dump) or buy (pump) bitcoin at the same time and as I said it needs to be a consensus decision still which shows a bit of decentralization too not like fiat that a single government structure can decide on. For them to affect the network they need to control more than the total hash power of the network and that’s still limited to some decisions as they also need other nodes to accept some consensus rule, this is decentralization to me even if it is not total decentralization.

the network (due to the backward compatibility trick) no longer needs the majority of the masses of user full nodes to be ready to then activate a new feature
the power triangle is now more centered around economic fullnodes(services, not users), pools, and dev politics of core

we have seen proven instances of the economic nodes clearly stating they would reject pools blocks that did not comply to the mandatory changes envisioned by core

so stay vigilant and scrutinise things when these games are played, dont just settle for letting it happen coz "ideology" "trust"

He's absolutely right, in the context in which he was speaking.

In all practicality, most holders of Bitcoin (in terms of numbers of individual holders) use some kind of centralized entity to hold their private key, which is in turn connected to your name, address, social security number, and so on.

In other words, most Bitcoin investors hold Bitcoin in the same way they hold AAPL or MSFT.

That's not in any remote way, "decentralized". Most investors don't even know what a "private key" is, let alone keep it physically on their person.

As I wrote in the Anon Paradox (https://medium.com/@stephen-r-thomas/the-anon-paradox-anonymity-big-small-1231a6a060e4), most average consumers don't want the kind of "privacy" that means escaping the government, they just want their actions kept from everybody else but a government with a court-ordered subpoena. For the latter, the only people that actually care about that are those who go against the law where they live, and most people don't want to tangle with their government.

So Bitcoin's decentralized architecture is not a value to most people who invest in Bitcoin, so it makes sense that most people don't use it that way.

Today, in practical reality, Bitcoin for most people is an investment in a brand, or an abstract idea, or a name that they know and think will go up in value. They don't know what it means and they don't care.

Yes, the blockchain architecture enables a decentralized ledger, and yes, technically Bitcoin is decentralized, but that's not the way consumers use it, and that's what somebody like Gary Gensler concerns himself with in his role as SEC chair.

I believe Bitcoin's decentralization is a perspective thing, cause of its arguments and counterarguments. It's not static, it's kind of a dimensional discussion affected by various factors. If Gary Gensler thinks Bitcoin isn't decentralized anymore, then that's his opinion. There are lots of people out here and there who believe Bitcoin is very much decentralized and all hoarding through the mining in Big firms doesn't affect its decentralization.

Even if it's becoming centralized slowly, there are certain factors that completely hinder it from becoming so. So, I believe there's no need to worry about Bitcoin's decentralization.

Isn't this the Gary Gensler was was teaching a bitcoin/blockchain course at MIT some years ago? He is well versed in bitcoin and cryptocurrency and there is no way that he doesn't get what bitcoin is, a decentralized system. That is an open and transparent system without human decision makers over ones that have them. But why does he continue to be against it? Is this politically motivated because he is gunning for the sit at the treasurer or is it because the big financial institutions are scared of bitcoin? This is for Gary, can the banks and the governments provide a true ledger and let's compare with bitcoin?

not verbatim, but you are using promotional words from 15 years ago. not looking at the reality of how bitcoin has changed and evolved over those 15 years

who are you even speaking to when you speak the promotional words.. people reading this forum have already heard of bitcoin so dont need the promotional speak. they are looking for the actual current information to do their due diligence.. risk mitigation

we should actually stay vigilant and scrutinise things when things change, dont just settle for letting it happen coz "ideology" "trust" "promotional words tell me"

He jumped out to the other side of the fence when Binance rejected his application on Binance. He wants CZ to regret the rejection and he seems to have won, CZ was gone.


Well, there's Dogecoin too. There are lots of altcoins to move to but they will not stop taking control of which coin we may try using. I think if we all start using memecoins, they will like it.   BTC may look to be decentralized. It is meant to be that way but a lot of changes are happening just when institutions are coming.

Technically, Bitcoin is decentralised, always on the code. But centralised organisations are taking control over Bitcoin by accumulating a large number of bitcoins. We can't ignore this, even though we love Bitcoin. But if you don't hand over your bitcoin to a centralised organisation, then they won't control it. It means when your bitcoin is held on a non-custodial wallet, it's truly decentralised for you. We can't stop anyone from accumulating Bitcoin since it's continuously trading on the market. 

He apparently understands absolutely nothing about the functioning of the bitcoin ecosystem, all he needs is to have as many bitcoins as possible to be centralized, totally wrong, and this man only opens his mouth to talk nonsense... well, what to say... lol .... Even a parrot talks... Don't take him so seriously, he (gary gensler) doesn't know what he's talking about.

OP, Gary Gensler's only goal is to attack Bitcoin and make people not want it. He's lying to you. If you're believing what he is saying then that is a win for him. Generally people who hate Bitcoin don't tell the truth about it. He is just tricking you. Is Bitcoin perfectly decentralized? No. Of course not. Nothing is. Is Bitcoin by far the most decentralized thing we have? Yes.

haaainnnn... Really Bitcoin is not that decentralized does he even realize what decentralization means, hmm I can agree on some point that whales acquire most of Bitcoin's supply still we cant point out that it's a massive supply centralization, still, the supply is distributed well, I would like to say on the network concerns Bitcoin is far more decentralized nd with time, I'm expecting the expansion of the network on next scale but for the supply concerns now the market is much mature comparing to the times of 2016s..

Haha.. Anyway does Bitcoiners care about it ahhh not at all, We are in the joy of 50k + so neglect him from wold.

Yes, I think this is a problem (not a very severe one however, see below). However, the answer to the question if Bitcoin is "less decentralized" due to developments like the ETF approvals in the US for me has no easy answer.

I disagree somewhat with this popular meaning for example:
My assessment is that both are important: the "mining decentralization" and the "economic decentralization". The "users" (also called "economic nodes") have the power to accept or not accept the blocks the miners mine, so if a miner cartel tried to mine with an updated code changing important parameters (e.g. the 21 million limit) the economic nodes can accept them or not. The more concentrated these nodes are, the more likely it is that they could also be co-opted by the miners cartel. And let me not even begin mentioning gubermental pressure, above all if services are too concentrated in one region like the US.

@adaseb has a point when he writes that the CEX's/ETF's funds are not their property but their customers'. That is correct. However, this does not mean these entities don't play a role in the power structure of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

One example is for example what happened in 2017 when the big block/small block war was fought out. We were lucky that almost all exchanges preserved the "Bitcoin" moniker for the original chain, and not for the hard forked chain today called "B[itcoin] Cash". Such an event can repeat. The problem is that while in theory customers could boycott/leave an exchange or ETF "behaving maliciously", most customers are quite passive and would simply accept what the exchange or service provider is doing.

So in general it does make sense to educate people that they should try to hold their Bitcoins on their own wallets with their own keys. It would be better for the ecosystem in general. However, due to the multiplicity of economic actors, I currently don't see a critical situation. The US ETFs could even have improved the situation, as before the biggest exchanges (like Binance) were probably even more dominant.

I think at least it's a good idea to have some strong decentralized "backup chains" just for the case. It would be healthy if there was a decentralized chain at least as strong as BNB for example, if not as Ethereum. But there seems a long way to go for that to happen, as presently 90%+ of the altcoin crowd doesn't care at all about decentralization. I'm optimistic for the long term though, eventually the centralized altcoin bubble will pop in my opinion.

That's a good point. Usually when people try to make the claim that Bitcoin is not decentralized, they misuse certain facts.

They say mining is centralized because of mining pools, not understanding that the mining pools don't own the miners and its just a bunch of different people participating in a group.

They say mining is centralized because a lot of it is in one country (whether thats China or US or wherever), not realizing that thousands of different entities (people and companies) mining within the same country it not at all the same thing as a single entity (though of course it is always preferable that mining is geographical decentralized as well).

They say that the ETF firms are gonna own a ton of bitcoin, not understanding that the ETF firms are holding the Bitcoin for clients, and when clients sell the firm sells the bitcoin, people aren't just donating money to ETF firms so the firms can buy themselves a ton of bitcoin haha.

They say that exchanges have all the Bitcoin, again not understanding this isn't the exchange's money but they are just holding the bitcoin for their customers. We saw with FTX what happens when a company takes customers' money and then tries to treat the crypto those customers bought as the company's own money. It's called fraud.

People also seem to not understand the difference between owning bitcoin and operating the Bitcoin infrastructure which runs the network. Bitcoin is not proof-of-stake, where ownership of coins equals control over part of the operations of the network. Bitcoin separates owners from operators, thus keeping it decentralized no matter who owns however many bitcoins.

I actually think that's his whole point: those customers own an entry in an Oracle database that is attached to their real-world identity. They don't know anything about "decentralized" and they don't care.

Most holders of Bitcoin don't benefit from the "decentralized" nature of Bitcoin, nor do they care.

Since Bitcoin could never scale to being a mainstream digital currency that could handle worldwide transaction volume, it's only remaining utility is to be an investment instrument--which is exactly how it's used today.

And since that is, de facto, how most people use the product, then he's right in saying it's not really decentralized in a way that most consumers care about.

I don't like Gary Gensler especially that rug pull scam of ETF Twitter hack that happened but as much as I like to defend Bitcoin, he is not far from the truth but that doesn't make Bitcoin not decentralized. It's a great concern with the large number of Bitcoin that are concentrated on Centralized exchanges but this Bitcoin doesn't belong to the exchange, it belongs to the people. If today all the people want to withdraw their coins from exchanges, many of them will ran into one problem or the other because they don't have exact number of Bitcoin they owe people. However, people don't even care about this at all, they don't imagine the possibility of how exchanges might run away with their money when anything hoes wrong.

Decentralized exchanges are not that simple and I must confess that one of the basic thing that make people like centralized exchanges is because of simplicity. Look at how simple uniswap exchange is, if they can create something more unique and simple like that, I believe a lot of people will use it and not depend on centralized exchanges.

Gary should face his business, he has been saying off statement these days ever since he granted Bitcoin ETF.

With that context he's saying about Bitcoin and exchanges, yeah, no need to argue as most of the centralized exchanges have been keeping a huge number of deposits from their customers. Even it is not from them, it's like a funnel that goes on them and so as Gensler says that it's sort of not actual decentralization, it goes with the system in the exchanges and shouldn't be on Bitcoin. Bitcoin alone is decentralized and that's why he's mixing it up to make it look like that Bitcoin is as what he says but in reality, there's an involvement with the exchanges and obviously, many have been depositing their Bitcoins there to sell or just simply hold which is a very wrong idea and we always give reminder not to keep it there.

Gensler is right but to some extent only, because if there were any loophole in the code of BTC then it would be found till now, but there is no, but it still embarked on the centralized path due to the ETFs approval, high money involvement, but truly that's not that much, according to ETF tracker website (https://heyapollo.com/bitcoin-etf), 10 ETFs have around 719,321 BTC in their holdings, and I read somewhere that 11 ETFs have around more then 111K BTC, I don't know how true is that, but the thing is we are not really going toward centralization by the authorities, it's just most of the BTC newcomers are only into BTC for money, they are creating hype of ETFs, making it something big, not only newcomers but they are the ones influenced by old comers.

They are creating a hype bubble, which is a good one though but it will pop with time, BTC can't be centralized by any means, if all the people using it start to run a node for validation purposes only, (just a thought), that would be a contribution towards BTC but the power consumption and other costs are high and newbies (not making money) can't really contribute but at least the ones making money should do. And according to CMC, Binance has around 426,701.49 BTC, which is less than those 10 ETFs combined, so, I think CEXs reserves don't matter that much.

And you know the funds of 10 ETFs are custoded by Coinbase, the competitor of Binance which was sued for the same reason Binance was sued, but Binance is the one forced to leave the country while coinbase was saved. That's not a coincidence.

economic nodes are the business services, like exchange services, which mining pools depend on for their coin rewards to be seen by, and miners of those pools depend on so they can cash out and pay bills with their reward splits
(user nodes are a few levels down and of lesser importance to the network/economy/politics)
in short miners follow their rewards and if a merchant is not accepting their rewards(threats of rejecting blocks after mandatory date) they have to change their block format/money presentation to their services acceptable desires,

the power triangle is
  
                       other software
                 following core reference
                                  |
                            core dev
                             politics
                                /\
               economic  /__\ mining
             / full nodes         pools  \
       user                                   miners
     fullnodes
         |
 user pruned
 user stripped(backward/unupgraded)
    nodes
          

when users of any level or miner want to withdraw coins from an exchange or to an exchange. they play to whatever the majority services use. else they cant do anything.

when services collaborate with core devs because businesses dont have their own dev team so rely on core as the reference development of software they rely on.. economic nodes just follow core dev politics or be left running with outdated code that doesnt fully validate everything

if mining pools dont follow thee politics and have economic nodes threaten that their blocks would be rejected(unseen) the pools fall inline

and because core have become the defacto reference client.. its all become defacto centralised of follow the leader as the choices are not there

It is theoretically possible for the governments and central banks to make Bitcoin centralized. What makes you think that it would be impossible for the governments and central banks to take control over any decentralized altcoin like Litecoin or Monero?
I guess that Gensler is mistaking decentralization with redistribution. A few big corporations can hold most of the BTC in existence, but the BTC blockchain will remain decentralized, as long as there are multiple BTC miners and nodes. Anyway, the process of concentration of capital and resources in the hands of a few major corporations is completely natural. Bitcoin is no different than any financial asset. It's normal for most BTC in circulation to be bought by several big banks and corporations. BTC is a scarce financial asset with big potential for a higher price in the future.

How you can make sure if Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, Kucoin, ETFs, institutions and other centralized entities aren't fraudsters? don't forget with the popular idiom "don't trust, verify".

No one can know the credibility of those centralized entities, what if they stole all of the money and use "hack" as the excuse?

Imagine if all Bitcoin has been mined and all of them belong to centralized entities, they force people to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin in the centralized exchanges. Can we say Bitcoin is still decentralized? decentralized in theory, but no longer decentralized in practical.

He's really not. If you read what he says in context, you'd see that he's pointing out that almost all investors in Bitcoin don't physically hold their own private key, meaning that their holding of Bitcoin is stored in some centralized Oracle database just like any bank account or brokerage holder would be.

For almost all individual holders of Bitcoin, there is nothing "decentralized" about Bitcoin--it's just a brand name they are betting will become incrementally more popular, meaning the value of their holding will go up in value so they can sell it at a profit.

You can talk all day long about what Bitcoin is supposed to be, the reality is that it's just not used that way by most investors. For most it's no more "decentralized" than AAPL, MSFT, or USD in a checking account.

be sure to read the terms and conditions of signing up to a service. as that is the binding/unbinding of any legal claim you can make of funds you give to a service

many scams actually wrote terms where the funds were not customers. or wrote in ways that left customers with no legal claim..
giving someone else, some other service your coins/funds does NOT mean defacto remain your ownership. the devil is in the detail of the small print
the terms could be wrote that all deposits are treated as gifts/donations and any returns are at sole discretion of service.
the terms could be wrote that all deposits are held in trust, but at sole discretion of service they can close anyones account without notice and without offering refunds. and that then becomes the services right to do so, as you signed(by using service you are showing signs of agreement to terms) to say you agree to those terms


even with the FTX case, lawyers had to check on the published details of the customer application terms/conditions of different dates to classify FTX customers. not all customers had same terms and thus some customers were separated into different classes.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/10/16/sbf-trial-what-did-ftxs-terms-of-service-say-about-customer-funds/

Are you surprised? I am not. Regulation is non-negotiable in the crypto world, and what we've seen is just the tip of the iceberg. In the next 10 years or thereabout, you would have seen enough regulation that would have further lessened the decentralization of Bitcoin. By the principle of operation, Bitcoin is decentralised and nothing may change that, but when it comes to the way businesses are being built around it, you can't say that anymore.

We first had the centralised exchanges and other centralised systems allowing Bitcoin that the government has been on their neck, and now again, the ETF, what do you expect? The usage will be more centralised. I see nothing so different from how the fiat currencies are being overseen by the authorities in this regard. I don't think that the government can ever allow what is dealing with money to be happening without having a say in it, so I understand their plight too. However, people have a choice, they can try to do it without the use of any centralised system. It is so possible as far as Bitcoin is concerned. This is just a choice in my thoughts, but I am certain that the decentralized system can cover up, at least for now.

However, I used "at least for now" because, with time, the government might start clamping down on decentralised websites and apps, it is only a matter of time. I hope people can refer to my warning when the term comes.

Isn’t this the same Gensler who is the antagonist of bitcoin? Is it possible to hear “kind” words from him about bitcoin? Of course not. All these government or near-government officials actually have a vague understanding of bitcoin and the principles of its operation. Therefore, in their statements, in attempts to discredit the bitcoin by identifying shortcomings, they only show their ignorance in understanding this issue. In short, they don't have sufficient expertise on this topic, and therefore, what they say can't be taken as truth.

gensler knows of bitcoin. he taught it at MIT

but his job, common sense, rationality prevents him from screaming "invest invest invest, i trust it with my life"
he has to say the risk averse standard disclaimer wordage, the stand back-ish stance and ofcourse needs to play to his bosses preferences

E.Warren sits on many boards that decide the direction SEC should follow. going against her and his own job would not play right for him


many people in this forum wish everyone would never mention any negatives and only scream out the utopian dream hype mountain of hope..

yet many smart people and investors actually do want a fair open dialogue of good and bad. to do due diligence and make a decision based on merits of both sides.
after all. if there is too much positivity, the words "too good to be true" start to play out and things start to sound like a scam
also trying to hide or have the negatives dismissed does not look good either.. so its better to just be open to even mention that things are not perfect, nothing ever is

by accepting bitcoins as an asset to be invested, is acknowledgement that its an asset that wont vanish easily. and thats all most people need to hear, the risk averse disclaimer after is just normal speak to expect

..
as for other large institutional influencers.. we can find positives in their negatives too
take the "bitcoin is rat poison²"

i fully agree with that statement
everyone knows wallstreet is the rat race.. and thus fiat is the rat. so if bitcoin is the thing that can poison fiat exponentially. wouldnt that make it a good thing to say for bitcoiners

Yeah I think hes just confusing everyone. Gensler's talking about exchanges holding a ton of Bitcoin which messes with the whole decentralization vibe. People dumping their BTC on exchanges is a problem. Remember not your keys not your coins! Keep that crypto safe in your own wallet, not on some exchange

Bitcoin is a community-managed asset and it is not owned by anyone. So whether it is truly decentralized or not will be judged by the whole world and the community, it cannot become centralized just because Gary Gensler says it is centralized. And any individual or government has no right to decide whether bitcoin is centralized or decentralized. So I think we don't need to worry too much about what this guy says about bitcoin. What he says won't change anything or have any impact on bitcoin, so why do we care what he says?

But what's the threshold/the percentage of total circulating supply to be held by one entity, or a cartel of centralized entities working together, before we can truly say that Bitcoin has centralized towards said entities and has failed?

I have been asking that question, not because I was trying to find at what percentage is the threshold, but to know what others believe might the threshold might be. No one would give a direct opinion. Hahaha.

ask your mentor.. he is the one not wanting normal people spending on the bitcoin network and instead locking coin up to use other systems requiring middlemen handing the payments in some other system

It's certainly got some elements that you could mistake for being a little on the centralized side, but at the end of the day bitcoin is decentralized through and through. Like considering the fact that no one owns bitcoin besides those who had them in their wallets, are also far-reaching and global with little to no-wait time (in some cases let's be real here lol) sets the precedent that bitcoin's as decentralized as it can be. ETFs however would make you think it's centralized since now, companies could effectively sell bitcoins but at the end of the day, they aren't selling the coins, they are sellign you the rights to own the coin so you're basically paying for a title and not for the property/asset itself.

So yeah, Common Gary L. He's always painted bitcoin in a precarious spot ever since he stepped into the throne. I don't like how he's painting bitcoin to be when millions of people around the planet had benefited from it and none of this would've happened in the first place if bitcoin's unreliable and centralized. Let that sink in.

I think the way most investors use Bitcoin today--wherein they don't physically hold their own private keys--demonstrates the exact opposite: that if Bitcoin were conceived as a reliable centralized system (e.g. like any standard financial institution), it would be far more popular and ubiquitous than it is today because it would actually work as a mainstream currency and not just an investment instrument.

Consumers don't care about technical terms like "decentralization", they just want an investment instrument that makes them a profit, and/or they want a cheap and fast means of performing anonymous transactions. Bitcoin can do the first, but it can't do the second. A currency that could do both, in my opinion, will eventually be much more popular than Bitcoin--and "decentralization" won't have anything to do with it.

for those still tying to quantify whats considered decentralised in regards to coin amounts:
 
if you look at the customer count total numbers of the 5 prominent bitcoin exchanges..

and then look at bitcoins UTXO count (excluding the silly ones of <900sats produced by ordinals junk dust creator)
the number of UTXO's are less then customer count of CEX

not all UTXO represent individuals..
so if we had say 100m viable countable UTXO to represent individuals. max.
then CEX customer count would need to be below 100m to be considered decentralised

I don't know how he can consider something he says isn't decentralised dangerous. For example, the dollar is not decentralised either, or any stock exchanges are also fully centralised. I guess his words should not be taken seriously. Your bitcoins belong only to you and that is enough to understand that there is no centralisation here.

IMO, it won't be avoided that he's going to talk a lot since he's part of the approval of the Bitcoin ETF spot which is beneficial to the price of Bitcoin with these applications that have been approved to contribute to its volume that we're getting right now. The effect might be for long term and the demand has been coping up high so, there could be some thoughts that let's just give it to him. But he should also stop nonsense arguments if he don't fully understand what he's saying but, he's the sec and he knows what he's doing and talking about based on his own perspective as he won't be sitting on that position for nothing.

They can use another service, or even work with things like atomic swaps which are not censorable at all, if they have the keys for their coins or are able to withdraw them before the fork comes into effect. However, as I wrote what is correct that the majority of the users would not bother with that, or directly held their coins on an exchange so they are bound to the service's decisions. So in general I agree.

Not necessarily. A simple change in the core software, like a change of a variable (again: maximum block size is a good example) can also be done by a small team or a single developer. So if some economic nodes, e.g. a big group of service providers or a cartel of mining pools, want to change some parameter they could simply do it. For more complex changes, like the introduction of Segwit, you are correct that they would need cooperation with the Core team or have expenses to pay an own team. It would become dangerous if this group has malicious intentions and is big enough - i.e. comprises both big mining pools and service providers.

However what I meant was that in situations like 2017 normally competing development teams work on their own "vision", and if they can't come to a consensus regarding the protocol, then their different implementations can be incompatible one with another. And here is where the services nodes come into play: they can decide which implementation they use. They don't have to pay a (Bitcoin) dev team.

In general I think user apathy is a bigger problem than minor changes in the decentralization grade or power structure. But obviously you can't require all Bitcoin users to be involved with "protocol politics". So while there are influential users advocating for the basic Bitcoin properties (censorship resistance, immutability, supply etc.) and at least a big minority of the user base has some basic conceptions about these "Bitcoin values", then I'd say everything is fine because a significant enough number of users will follow these "influencers" and boycott possible malicious changes.

unlike a simple variable 2009-2015 of maxblocksize
the way core code is now wrote, to do with the blocksize(weight). they have re-wrote the code into cludge where it requires many parts of the code to change to take full effect, as it would bug-out if one variable was changed. and i think this was intentional as its too sloppy to be useful or the proper way to code things

so it would require more then a scriptkiddy to edit core to offer a blocksize change

as for implementing it. a mining pool group cant just change the rules without the economic boards agreeing and accepting it.
where as economic group with dev support could mandate it as mining pools cant spend rewards if economic nodes cant see funds

so this is where i also laugh when many people cry/blame mining pools. when its actually not much in the power of mining pools and is more economically politically in the power of the dev/economic nodes

and we all know if a group of economic nodes want ed to hire a separate dev team that wants to go against the core roadmap. it would get REKT by those that treat core as a religion of immortal gods

People prefer convenience, so they will trust a centralized exchange even if that means losing complete control of their coins. Most of them don't even know that safeguarding private keys and/or seeds is the best choice for securing their financial future. As long as people keep trusting centralized entities, Bitcoin won't be able to achieve its full potential.

At least, not all coins are held by third-parties. A small portion of Bitcoin held on DEXs and non-custodial wallets will help prevent centralized entities from taking over the entire system. Hopefully, BTC stays that way forever.



The government will only be able to "clamp down" on decentralized apps if they're not as censorship-resistant as they claim to be. Around 90% of dApps aren't truly-decentralized and censorship-resistant. This makes it easy enough for mainstream governments to enforce the rule of law.

We can blame developers by focusing on making money (hype) instead of what matters most. One would hope Bitcoin stays decentralized no matter what. The future can't be predicted, so lets hope for the best.

 ::)

How about your mentor? I want to ask him. He literally SOLD all of his Bitcoins and said, or spread FUD, that Bitcoin would fail. Read the propaganda, https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experiment-dabb30201f7

SOLD literally at the price below $500, because he truly believed Bitcoin would fail. Why? Because the Core Developers maintained the block size? It's preventing the network from scaling in, no?

Eight years after that blog, has it failed? It's still chugging along producing block after block, ser. It has not failed.

Well, he is not wrong, but not that right either. Bitcoin is made to be decentralized, that's why some centralized exchanges are able to hold many bitcoins, there is no central entity that can limit or prevent that. And if we talk about Bitcoin vision or development, it's not really decided by Bitcoin holders, it will be decided mostly by miners who can vote for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, so owning a lot of BTC not really affecting how Bitcoin developing. And we talk about the Bitcoin market, it might be true the market can be easily crashed by those big whale, but if the demand and community is strong every-time those whale drop some big amount of BTC it will be bought by other people and market will be recovered.

My point is that, currently Bitcoin is the most popular decentralized Crypto we can find, so saying Bitcoin is not that decentralized is kinda misleading. I mean, how more decentralized Bitcoin needs to be if other crypto cant even get close to Bitcoin decentralization.

Lol, it's amusing to read what some of these people think about Bitcoin, and what's more amusing is they make public statements that don't make much sense without even knowing much about it. He doesn't even know how the decentralization of Bitcoin works because decentralization doesn't depend on how the amount of coins is spread among different people but it's about the fact that it isn't controlled by anyone and the whole network is running on its own where miners are helping it run for the rewards they get.

Just because companies and investors hold a large quantity of Bitcoin, it doesn't mean they own the network have a share in it, or get to govern it. They have Bitcoins because it's valuable and they know they will get a lot of money when they sell their holdings.

Gary Gensler's statement about decentralized bitcoin seems largely unknown because the number of investors in bitcoin is huge. The episode focused on Gensler and the SEC's approach to the cryptocurrency sector, which has been subject to controversy and scrutiny. The warnings issued by Gensler about the risks associated with cryptocurrency investments were met with skepticism by the community, as was his subsequent endorsement of spot bitcoin ETFs, which some interpreted as an inconsistent position. This statement will have no effect on bitcoin. Investors earn profits by holding bitcoin.

Ser, study the Scaling Debate, and The Long Road To Segwit, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/the-long-road-to-segwit-how-bitcoins-biggest-protocol-upgrade-became-reality

If the miners truly controlled the network, we would be under Jihan Wu's direction, and Bitcoin would have been forked away from under the stewardship of the Core Developers.

Plus Bitcoin may be debated to be centralized in some regard, but the network itself is decentralized.

i have no mentor and thats what you are jealous of, my ability to say whats on my mind, freely. i do not need to ass-kiss

and thats what makes me think you need to learn bitcoin as it is now, in reality, not how your mentor describes it to you.. , because you, several years later still have a mentor and recite him daily, even his insults, even his pigeon hole games

you are now even copying and reciting the ill-minded stupidity that if someone is not in religious cult A they must be religious cult B
thus you are trying to put me into a group i was not part of (though your mentor told you differently)

how about realise you dont need to be in a cult at all, escape your cult and start having independence
learn what independence is, then you will start to see where things are not as decentralised, and then able to actually try to scrutinise and highlight the central points of failures instead of just being told buzzwords of years ago, told to close your eyes and dont look, while being pampered back to sleep to not notice the traps that are forming

That is one of the issues and the other issue, which I think is at least something that Gary Gensler understands by saying "... not that decentralized..." is that decentralization is a spectrum. It would be interesting to have some decentralization index and then compare Bitcoin as an asset to other assets, but also as a system to other systems. Because on the one hand he understands that it is a spectrum, but on the other hand his goal was to insinuate that those who call Bitcoin decentralized are on the wrong path.

He also forgets that decisions by powerful actors against the Bitcoin system will cost the powerful actors a lot of money, in a worst case everything they invested to gain that power. In the banking system, this is 100% not the case. There is no skin in the game. The too-big-too-fail problem does only exist because the most powerful centralized institutions or actors (governments) will just decide to bail them out. Hence: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." There is no such bailout for powerful actors in the Bitcoin system if they decide to act against it. It will be game over and the skin they had in the game will be burned to ashes.

There is some impressive interplay between decentralization and skin in the game, which I think Satoshi has solved in a way that is worth a Nobel Prize. I have often been researching and thinking about loopholes, but I always end up concluding that it would be prohibitively expensive for any actor to gain power and then destroy the network for many, many reasons. Financial reasons, geopolitical reasons, opportunistic reasons, any strategic reasons, and gaining power in order to then destroy it is probably something that doesn't really sound like something worth striving for. 

Suddenly, Gary Genser knows all about how Bitcoin works? I highly doubt that.

This is nothing but pure misinformation from one of Bitcoins enemies. He wants to see Bitcoin gone and his rich banker friends made even richer. I have no idea why you are jumping on this propaganda train. You, Abiky, are not a newbie, you should know better by now. Shame on you for spreading obvious FUD.

It does not matter how much Bitcoin CEXes have. And it never did matter. The only case in which it would make a difference is if Bitcoin was POS, which it is not.

ETF's are fake Bitcoin. The worst that these CEXes can do is manipulate the price of Bitcoin by selling/buying.

What does Gensler mean by stating “bitcoin is not decentralized”? Well, I think this is interesting in a literal sense, for institutional investors, large corporations, ETFs it is not widely approved. Widely at the international level, the lack of uniform adoption after licensing approval will almost certainly favor the earliest Bitcoin spot ETFs, which favor the corporations that he knows the most about. Who benefits? Yes, in another sense… it means a collection of ETFs that will cooperate with each other in some special form in the future. Lol, Or this is a knife that market makers can use to take down competitors and increase their position. :D

I think you touch upon the heart of the debate here by calling ETFs (and I would presume their close cousins, Bitcoin purchased through brokers like Binance and CoinBase), "fake".

It's fine if you want to call somebody who doesn't physically hold their private key, "fake" and in a way I agree with you, but Gensler is only looking at the current practical reality of the situation, which is that most of the retail investors in the USA--the ones he's supposed to protect from fraud---are these "fake" Bitcoin holders.

And if all of those "fake" holders left the market, Bitcoin would probably drop in price by about 95%.

For most average holders of a Bitcoin investment today, their holding is kept in a centralized Oracle database (or whatever) and the "decentralized" aspect of Bitcoin itself means absolutely nothing to them.

So it's absolutely correct for Gensler to treat Bitcoin just like any other investment instrument the public can buy, like stocks or derivatives or ETFs or anything else. They all work exactly the same way, as far as your average consumer is concerned.

Genser taught a course at MIT entitled Blockchain and Money in 2018

so hes not unfamiliar with it

see
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s12-blockchain-and-money-fall-2018/

Interesting. All that knowledge and yet he did not have the foresight to invest into Bitcoin in 2018....

You would think he is getting paid big bucks to throw dirt on Bitcoin.

Either way, I am still not impressed.



Effectively, people are trading dollars in for a digital piece of paper that says you own x amount of Bitcoin and the only positive side is that they do not have to worry about losing any private keys because someone else is buying and hodling the real Bitcoin for them. The good thing for Bitcoiners is that this creates an increased demand for the buying of actual Bitcoin. But that's as far as it goes when it comes to the question of how much influence do ETFs have over Bitcoin.

And just like with CEXs buying up huge amounts of Bitcoin, all the ETFs do is speed up the demand and adoption of Bitcoin. Something which would happen without them anyway. Just much slower.

You cannot be sure he does not own some BTC, he works for the government, so he isn't going to openly say 'i just bought x amount of BTC' or 'BTC to the moon'.

But that is not even the point here, and i agree that Gary is wrong in this case, BTC is very much decentralized, there is obviously no central authority that is in control of the network and there are thousands of nodes scattered all around the world. BTC would only become less decentralized if the government finds a way to control BTC mining and use miners to their own advantage and for censoring tx's.

Gary Gensler past Bitcoin takes were kinda sus, and this decentralization thing needs some unpacking. It's not just about where your keys are chillin', like he's suggesting. Real decentralization is more like a three-legged stool – gotta have network spread, fair governance, and resistance to shutdowns, all workin' together. Miners movin' from China to the US raises eyebrows, but the network's still spread out like a global dance party. Even if some politician gets a wild hair, the whole system doesn't crumble. It's like whack-a-mole – whack one node, another pops up.

Market's a free-for-all, and folks will always have opinions. Banks sayin' bad stuff? Bitcoin shrugs it off like a seasoned investor. Now they're sayin' good stuff? We all squint, wonderin' what their game is. But hey, at least they're talkin'!

Well, not a piece of paper, but rather an entry in some database somewhere. But yes, that's the idea. The way people own Bitcoin this way is completely centralized.

And yes, as I've said in my article on this subject (https://medium.com/p/1231a6a060e4), most people don't want to hold a chunk of their life savings by some means they could simply misplace or have physically stolen from them. Most people want an "investment account" that is attached to their identity as a person for that kind of amount of money.

And yes, the "only" thing these people do is make Bitcoin a popular investment making it worth billions of dollars in the marketplace rather that a technical curiosity like it was when Bitcoins cost less than one dollar. If you want to call that thing, "small", well, that's your prerogative, but it sure doesn't seem "small" to me :).

And all Bitcoin is, in reality, is an investment asset. The blockchain architecture cannot scale to handle even a tiny fraction of worldwide daily transactions and it was arguably never even meant to do that. That means all people can do with it is invest in it as an asset they hold in a relatively large quantities and trade relatively rarely, just like they would a stock or an ETF.

In fact, when you say "adoption" here, what you are actually talking about is investor adoption. Bitcoin isn't going to be used for anything because it isn't technically suitable for anything else.

And you aren't going to get more adoption if you dismiss 95% of investors as "fake".

The important point is that there's no single entity that holds enough for it to make bitcoin centralized, contrary to the government.

How much do they really own? 100k? That's nothing!
Let's imagine a scenario where 1 company owns 1 million BTC, that's going to be 1/21 of total supply. Bitcoin will still be decentralized. Even if private companies together own 90% of available supply it will still be decentralized.

Why?

Compare it to fiat money. The government owns 100% of it. The money you have in the bank belongs to the government. The money in your pocket belongs to the government.
This is centralization. Even if some ETF buys a million bitcoin, the bitcoin I own will belong to me, while fiat money never will!

While I agree partly that in the current reality in early 2024 "investment" (aka speculation) is the main goal most people follow when they buy Bitcoin, I disagree that there is some hard technical limitation which makes Bitcoin qualify as an investment asset only, forever. This only applies to on-chain Bitcoin transactions.

There are challenges in the scaling issue, yes, but there are also solutions. Lightning is struggling a bit with adoption currently, but there is finally some movement with sidechains (ZK rollups etc.) and other L2 solutions, where slowly more decentralized concepts appear. As on Ethereum there is already more variety, and the concept seems viable and popular, I don't see why this shouldn't be achievable with Bitcoin too.

If you were right this would actually be a quite pessimistic stance. As an "investment" vehicle alone, Bitcoin would not have any real value. Bitcoin has USPs like censorship resistance and worldwide availability. While these characteristics can also appeal to "investors", if they "invest" using their own wallet, investing in a Bitcoin ETF or "exchange bitcoin" does actually not make use of them.

IMO you're seeing the crypto world a bit black and white. Some of your forum contributions are interesting and valid but others are not.

(And if you want to direct the focus to altcoins: all cryptocurrencies face the same challenge between node decentralization and on-chain throughput. If there was any breakthrough there, Bitcoin could adopt it.)

bitcoin never leaves the blockchain.. thats the point of one of its security features (unable to take off or put bitcoin onto the blockchain outside of the reward rules of auditing a block)
anything else reporting to be playing with bitcoin but not using the blockchain are just IOU tokens or pegged units of another medium

ETF's for instance are just pegged share units.. they are not even IOU because  by law, and regulation and many other things share holders cannot redeem "in-kind"

other things like subnetworks or CEX databases are IOU unsettled claims. that need to be see a broadcast and confirmed tx to confirm/settle the IOU

remember
#not-your-key-not-your-coin

This SEC employee is very wrong in my eyes since he does not understand bitcoin correctly. Bitcoin is not dependent on any kind of exchange or other institution. The users can go to another exchange in a matter of hours if one exchange would abuse their power. This is different in the fiat banking system. If you understand that you will understand why Bitcoin is decentralised and fiat is not.

They've been working on the scalability problem for 13 years now, which in the realm of high-tech might as well be a thousand years. It's not a problem that's going to get solved. The idea that every daily worldwide transaction that occurs in the whole world gets copied thousands of times to thousands of servers is simply not viable.

And Lightning is both not a solution at high scale and it is also centralized. Same with the L2 solutions. They are no different than any standard bank or Paypal transaction. If you are going to use a centralized architecture, Haypenny (https://haypenny.net/whitepaper.html) is the way to do it since it's a paradigm that is centralized from the very beginning. "Centralized blockchain" is like alcohol-free vodka: it's a waste of time. Regardless, even centralized blockchain won't get you the scale necessary to be a real alternative to today's bank and physical cash transactions, and it's needlessly complicated for the end-user.

And if Bitcoin isn't valuable purely an investment vehicle, that is... news to most retail Bitcoin investors who don't hold their own physical private key and probably don't even know what that is :). Millions of people clearly love the idea of an investment vehicle and don't care about the technical details. I don't think that's... pessimistic...

Don't "economic nodes" also have a say in the network? There's nothing stopping big institutional investment companies and mainstream governments from running their own nodes. Lets not forget that miners also choose the transactions with the highest fees out of greed. The more fees collected, the better for the miners.

Hopefully, Bitcoin will stay decentralized and censorship-resistant for generations. Who knows what will happen in the future?  :-\

While it is true bitcoins never leave the blockchain, because that's literally the only place they exist, building layers on top of Bitcoin is very useful. All payment networks have layers, with a security focus on the bottom layer, and higher layers for more efficient transactions (hence 30-60min $5 fee transactions drop to 1 sec <1cent fee transactions). I know I know you are well known for hating LN will a fiery passion. But that doesn't change the fact that higher layers are very useful and allow Bitcoin to have all its revolutionary properties while still being something that people can/will be able to use for actual commerce.


Commerce with Bitcoin is going to be:
Very large transactions on-chain.
"Everyday" small transactions on 2nd layer like LN or on centralized subnetworks in the ecosystem built by companies like PayPal, Venmo, Coinbase, banks, Binance, etc

It simply doesn't make sense any other way. It's this way or you either give up on Bitcoin being a currency and instead it just acts as a pure store of value like Gold that rarely gets moved, or you go the altcoin route of taking away everything that makes Bitcoin special in order to centralize the blockchain for high throughput. So it's either accept layers and different ways to use Bitcoin as a natural way to build a digital payment system, or accept it turning into "only" being digital gold, or crumbling into XRP where its basically crypto-fiat but run by an organization/company instead of a central bank.

Not accepting layers would be Gensler's dream for sure because then that means either it only competes with Gold and never with national currencies, or it's centralized and therefore can managed by the whims of the govt.

But I know I know now you'll say how much you hate "IOUs" and stuff.


Secure decentralized base layer, with efficient transaction layers built on top for mass use. FTW.

The only better option would be if somebody figured out how to make Bitcoin handle GBs of data per second while still being globally secure, reliable, and decentralized. Plenty of altcoins have done the first part (or at least a lot more than a few MB), but they all had to abandon most of the second part, which for digital money of course is the important part. If someone figures out that technological revolution I'd be all for updating Bitcoin with that tech, but until that theoretical day, let's stick with Bitcoin combining security, reliability, decentralization, with fast cheap transactions in a way that makes sense, which is the current path of Bitcoin.

What is the advantage of doing very large transactions on-chain though? At that point, why not just do all of the transactions off-chain?

The bigger the transaction, the more people want real identity (unless you are doing money laundering or tax evasion or whatever).

In other words, I think people want the very opposite of what you are proposing: they want anonymity for small transactions and personal identity for big ones. Who would want to buy their house or car or keep their life savings with a private key they could physically lose or be stolen? My house is in my name and nobody can take that away from me. Same with my car. Same with my savings account.

The cash in my wallet, on the other hand, is not connected to anything and that's the way I like it. If I lose it then I'm fine with that--I'll trade that off for the anonymity physical cash gives me.

Cryptos are great as investment instruments, but in terms of what consumers want in currency, it has it exactly backwards.

How can I believe what Gary Gensler is saying? Who do we believe more? the one who invented or created Bitcoin or blockchain technology? or the person who didn't invent it, but what he says is just an opinion and assessment?

Apparently Satoshi Nakamoto is the Bitcoin inventor, while Gary Gensler is not! Instead, I can even consider Gensler a story inventor. It can never happen that the one who didn't invent Bitcoin knows more than the one who invented it. That's a simple question: who do you believe more, the creator or the created? See the logic?

That's pretty poor logic to be honest with you because Satoshi certainly didn't invent Bitcoin to be massively bought on CEX with KYC and holded in custodial wallets, but I doubt you even understand what I'm saying.

I am not surprised by what GG says, the operation of Bitcoin is decentralized but its use today passes in many cases by centralized entities, so today most governments have stopped seeing it as an enemy and think of bans, they know that with the current use and legislation can control it to a great extent.

Yes you do frankandbeans, and it's Roger Ver, Mike Hearn , Jihan Wu, and all of those who spread the same FUD now and during the scaling debate. Plus where's your other mentor Jonald_Fyookball. Although I respect Jonald, I believe he's merely naive/misinformed, and gaslighted thanks to people like you. The problem is he doubled down when he should have tried to be more objective and neutral.

Plus where is the other big blocker who also sold all of his Bitcoin for the forked shitcoin. The popular one, Kevin Pham. That's another person who was influenced by the wrong people, making them believe that they are HODLing the real Bitcoin.

windfury, you are soo boring that you cant even realise how much of a copycat you are
find a new script

if subnetworks were human.you would be one.. you try to be someone else, not realising your position in the eco-space. find your own identity and opinion.. you are not helping yourself.

firstly roger, hearn had their own idea's that opposed the core roadmap. separate and unrelated to me
secondly roger, hearn went their own directions, nothing related to me

jonald was a troll,much like you. emulating other. and even i told him to stop being a copycat. i dont like kiss-asses. i prefer people to think of ro themselves and actually learn things from data and facts. not some social media member they read and blindly copy/follow

---

anyway back to the topic
in the gensler video he was not talking about bitcoin the network, nor bitcoin the code. he was talking about BTC the coin.. which if you look at the number of utxo's which indicate a limit of individual holders being X and then if you total up how many customers are signed upto CEX's shows the majority of people whom assume themselves to be calling themselves "bitcoiners" actually dont majority hold coin in their own utxo. instead they are other system balance holder, of some middleman service, centralised around half a dozen services

but also.
if you look at the bitcoin control triangle.. (mining pools, devs, economic nodes) certain actions in this last decade have shown that bitcoin is not powered by thousands of separate entities.. but instead entities that total under 100.. yep less then 100 entities that control the 3 main central points of the influential control triangle

less than a dozen devs with reference client maintainer keys and technical discussion moderation positions
less than 2 dozen mining pool managers
less than 5 dozen economic node CEO's

me saying the obvious is not negative.. its to make people aware of the risks, rather then other people who want people to close their eyes and dream of utopia

we need to stay vigilant and actually look for the changes and risks, rather then play dead and say "its decentralised simply because that was a buzzword of 2009 so must be true now"

It's a "free market", anyways. There's nothing we can do about CEXs and institutional investment firms acquiring BTC. After all, Bitcoin is decentralized and open to anyone. We must encourage people to store their coins on non-custodial wallets to prevent the wealthy from dominating the market. Only this way, Bitcoin can remain truly-decentralized and equitable for all.

Ultimately, network consensus lies in the hands of nodes and miners themselves (not BTC holders). As long as everything is done in the best interest of the Bitcoin blockchain, there should be nothing to worry about. Hopefully, Bitcoin will last for generations alongside government-issued digital currencies (CBDCs). No one can predict the future, so lets hope for the best. :)

Yes, I agree with that statement, Bitcoin is not as decentralized as it used to be and every year this situation is getting worse because people with more money and power gain control of it. We wanted massive adoption and we got it but sadly, that comes with costs. Bitcoin exchanges, casinos and many other crypto-related services are regulated and are forced to ask you for KYC documents. Bitcoin mixers will probably soon become illegal to use and privacy coins might also be in danger.

I always say that 2010-2016 were golden times, this was the time when Bitcoin was decentralized and without KYC. When price started booming, many companies showed interest in Bitcoin and with money, they bought much of it and gained control. While you could mine Bitcoins in post 2016 at your home, now it's not possible and mining become only a commercial business.

sorry to inform you but LN is not the solution you think it is..
it does NOT have the "security" you think it does

the work arounds to some of the flaws involve people depositing coins into a cex and then 'renting' a channel with inbound msats on the CEX side of the channel allotted as unsettled balance for you to then request passing back to the cex channel manager to route around the subnetwork in 99% of users cases, where the coins are not user owed when renting inbound balance.. (with no actual confirmed sat on any key the user has)
there are numerous other flaws yet to be fixed or worked around, amny mentioned in many topics. even by LN devs themselves

the future will see people create new/better next gen subnetworks that fill a niche, but LN is not the answer, nor solution. its the gimmick sandbox testing ground to make mistakes on.. but treated as the promoted solution promiseland everyone should move over too, but not many want to nor should due to issues..(over 7 years only gained 5000coin and declining.. other main networks that bridge pegged tokens of btc representation had more then 5k btc locked and pegged in a shorter growth period, which should tell you something)

..
as for your recent drop into reciting the usual promotions of idiots and then reciting the extreme idiocy of thinking bitcoin should leap to GB per second.. id advise you to not fall down that cultish path before you earn a reputation worthy of being called an idiot like the other tribe of idiots you are recently now citing as your rebuttals

escape while you still can
bitcoin scaling is different to bitcoin jumping/leaping so dont do the stupid never before been proposed "GB/sec soon" stupid narrative, instead try to stick to proposals that are logical and are not obsurd. learn about SCALING not the extreme leaps used as rebuttals to avoid any progress..
things such as:
fee formulaes to penalise only the spammers/junks(not everyone) to reduce spam filling blocks to allow more genuine users
lean transactions to allow more transactions without blocksize leaping
uncludging block format code(1xbase 3xweight) to allow more lean tx's to fill the 4mb space rather then the miscount, misplacement strategy
then when blocks fill at a majority of blocks per timescale with fee above rate for timescale. triggers a commonsense scale increase of a block. without needing dev politics to decide, and not be some stupid miniscule increase as a dev chosen compromise to oppose the crowd, and not a extreme size to just go full anal.

and yes some next gen subnetworks yet to be released that actually are more secure in their pegging of value, and more secure from theft and actually do as promised for the niche usecase that may want to use it

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

Layer 1 where the blockchain is is strongly decentralized.

A bunch of people storing their life savings in Coinbase or Binance does not change that.

If any of these exchanges were to fall, like FTX did in 2022, it will drag the Bitcoin price down as people look to exit the BTC market, but ultimately, bitcoin will become more scarce and the price eventually goes even higher.

This is why I am not concerned about things like Coinbase having custody of 1 million bitcoins.

gensler does know about bitcoin, he taught it at mit..
also without just reading this topic title and instead listening to the actual whole context of the interview. he was not talking about bitcoin the  technology he was talking about btc the currency unit.. which if you done a UTXO count and minus-ed off the unspendable dust utxo.. to count spendable utxo's and compare it to user count of CEX. majority of people that think they are "bitcoin owners" dont actually have sole control, key ownership of bitcoin because its in a CEX. and what does the C stand for.. centralised

i know some people want to only scream utopian happiness thoughts of dreams and potentials.. but readers of this forum already got the advertising to hear about bitcoin to then come hear looking for information to do due diligence, so they want to hear good and bad, to risk mitigate and understand things for real. not the hippy utopian version that slides things under the rug or tells people to not think about and go to sleep with a warm hug version

That's why most people want to return back to the old way of trading which is using decentralized exchanges and some exchanges that didn't require KYC. I missed those days when you didn't really need to send exchanges your personal info just to trade bitcoins but right now, you have to, especially for local exchanges that didn't require this method before, they need to ask their users for it because the government is also monitoring their activities. this all happened due to the recent incidence of multi-million scams across the country and the result was tight security of all exchanges. Nevertheless, if you don't do anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about because you are clean, but if we have another good choice like some exchanges offer full anonymity, that would be good.

You can still use decentralized exchanges and don't need KYC, many DEX are still active and you can use them these days. No one has the right to force you to use CEX and provide KYC to buy bitcoin. It's simply your choice. Furthermore, we should also adapt and accept what is happening because if we want bitcoin to become popular and increasingly valuable, having to face what is happening is inevitable. How can bitcoin gain popularity and become big without government recognition and without the participation of large financial institutions? That's the price we have to pay.

Speaking of scalability, this same issue lead to a hard fork that created bch, even with segwit increasing the block size to 4mb we still have high gas fees on time of network congestion, so many Companies and developers has been working on this same issue, lighting network was introduced and its so complex to run a node that my dad wouldn't be able to understand shit, I don't think bitcoin would ever get passed the issue of scalability in the next 10 years, but we still have to be optimistic about it.

So for now we have no choice than to use bitcoin as an investment asset that it is Currently playing a perfect role at beign.

Ehm, do you know what "scaling" means? It doesn't mean increasing the block size ;) (Of course they could go the BSV way but that would lead to massive centralization). The whole point of scaling solutions is that the smaller transactions should be only stored by a subset of the nodes.

And as I wrote, solutions are already there. LN is such a solution, only that it is still in its infancy. If you think that a couple of years (LN is developed since 2016 but usable since 2018) is enough in the case of an extremely difficult problem, you're wrong. Lightning is not centralized, or why do you think so? The only drawback is that it is only trustless if you monitor your payment channels carefully and are ready to close the channel in case of misbehaviour. And yes, I think this makes it not ideal and not a solution for big amounts, at this moment.

I agree that current sidechain models have still centralization problems, but if the 2-way peg for example of Nomic works, then there could be decentralized derivatives soon ;) (And Paul Sztorc a long time ago has proposed a really decentralized sidechain/L2 paradigm with Drivechain.)

By the way, your currency platform seems to be similar to 90's and early 00's "web currencies". ;)

LN is nine years old (https://web.archive.org/web/20150301065655/http://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper-DRAFT-0.5.pdf) this month. It hasn't solved anything because like every decentralized architecture, it will never scale to mainstream transaction volume. These architectures can only be viable for that purpose if somebody figures out how to increase the speed of light. LN is an improvement because its "more centralized" than Bitcoin, but is still not centralized enough to solve the problem. Of course you can make it even more centralized to increase the scalability, but then you are not meaningfully differentiating yourself from a centralized architecture--at which point the use of blockchain is superfluous and indeed a hinderance to both scalability and usability.

Haypenny is the only digital currency paradigm out there that will truly scale to the millions of transactions per second required to handle worldwide daily demand, replacing credit cards and physical cash. Nothing else comes close.

And the block-split-combine paradigm is unique, and there has never been a simpler form of numerically-delineated value transfer ever invented. It's a game-changer. And it's more private than cryptocurrency could ever be since it doesn't rely on a private key, and it enables instant adoption since it doesn't require the user to have a key pair. And currencies are locked in at the same minting amount (100T), meaning that all currencies are the same, making it much more transparent for end-users (fixing the problem NFTs have).

(And yes, using Haypenny as Bitcoin's defacto L2 network is one way people are looking at using the platform).

so its not a solution.. its a niche with risks.. cheers for confirmation.
and lightning is centralised
just check out who owns majority of its <5k coin(~4600 at time of post)

LNB=fg ~962(over 20% in 1 entity)
bfx ~629 acinq ~460  (over 23% in 2 entities)
kraken ~260
[ list above is 50% of LN capacity.. 4 entities]

then we have others
okx ~257 riverfinancial ~237 binance ~250  walletofsatoshi ~229 nicehash ~185  
[above is another 25% is in 5 entities]

yep 75% of capacity is in 9 entities


if 75%+ (i did not list all) of LN capacity is locked into 9 SERVICES, its not really the solution of independent 'own your coin' network for easy transaction peer to peer it proposes as being the solution of

I have noticed a pattern of attack from high profile people and what they does is that they attack Bitcoin on any given opportunity, they don't like Bitcoin and they are always the big guys that has heavily investment else where and don't have Bitcoin and why they do this is because they are afraid, they fear that Bitcoin is going to become exactly what they fear and whether they like it or not, it will achieve what Satoshi created it for purposely.

Gary Gensler hasn't keep quiet since last year, since December he always has different things to say as if his opinion really matter. Bitcoin is this, Bitcoin will not do that, Bitcoin is not what people think, yes we agreed but he should face his work than always making comments on something he can't control. Instead of him to worry about losing his job if Trump win the next election, he is busy squatting with Bitcoin hate.

Full anonymity lead to the ban of one of our best black markets the silk road market place, it functioned fine as a back Market and what happened, so many criminals found a new way to hide their crimes and some government officials used it to steal funds without a trace, I can't blame the government for their resentment towards bitcoin even if I know they want to have control over it in a way, but that's what they do, control people.

And how can we regulate and stop crimes with full anonymity of  users, not everyone is genuine like you and me, I think some actions has been necessary up to date, even the creation of centralized exchanges and it doesn't stop you from holding your bitcoin or digital asset yourself.

As I've said before, The Anon Paradox (https://medium.com/@stephen-r-thomas/the-anon-paradox-anonymity-big-small-1231a6a060e4), says that most people don't want the kind of anonymity that tries to protect you from the legal authorities, but rather they want anonymity from other citizens, companies, marketers, and criminals. And the paradox here is that people want their largest holdings like their home, car and life savings held the exact opposite of anonymously: they want these things in their own name so they can never lose them.

bitcoin is not full anonymity

its a PUBLIC LEDGER (emphasis public)
bitcoin does not ask for names nor needs to know names to prove ownership claims..

however when people use services and talk about it on forums they associate their own identities to addresses via their own admissions publicly
which is why the term pseudonymous was used instead of "full anonymity"

bitcoin doesn't require your name,  but it also wont scrub the internet to remove reference, if you divulge your name in association to bitcoin

The LN is still experimental and not ready for mainstream use. There are many bugs/issues that need to be fixed before it can be considered a "good scaling solution". I wouldn't call it "decentralized", but rather "partially-centralized" because of the way it was designed. With LN, you'd need to trust payment channels before transacting on it. What if the one opening the channel is a bank or a government institution? Then we would be introducing the very concept of a "middleman", which Bitcoin was meant to avoid in the first place. To enlighten you, please read the following article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/is-the-bitcoin-lightning-network-centralized

I believe the threat of centralization within the Bitcoin ecosystem is growing at an alarming rate. Unless we do something about it, things are going to get worse in the long run. Remember when the Internet was once truly-decentralized and now it's controlled by "big tech" companies? The same future awaits BTC if we fail to protect its decentralized and censorship-resistant design. Maybe there's "light at the end of the tunnel"?  ::)

Well, yeah  :).

I was going to try to make that point in the Anon Paradox (https://medium.com/@stephen-r-thomas/the-anon-paradox-anonymity-big-small-1231a6a060e4), but I couldn't figure out how to express that in an elegant and compact way.

Bitcoin, and other public ledger cryptos give you the very worst kind of non-anonymity in that they only expose your PK those who really really want to find out who you are, which means the biggest targets for hackers (i.e. they expose those who the hackers really want to spend the time triangulating).

I suppose you could say Bitcoin is effectively anonymous if you are careful... but most people aren't careful (and most consumers don't want to have to be careful all of the time). Hence, in everyday practicality, Bitcoin probably represents a big security/privacy issue for most average consumers.

Once again the paradox is that the decentralized public ledger approach is actually less private than a centralized company that legally commits to protecting your privacy/anonymity like DuckDuckGo, NordVPN or Haypenny...

That's the paper, but not the implementation. And what do you want to say with that? ;)

Your 90's centralized web currency concept is even older, regardless of the minimal improvement it may provide over some existing solutions ;D.

First, it does solve "something": you can already transact much cheaper and faster on it. Even if it's currently not providing "VISA levels of TPS", because of the adoption problem (channels have to be created with on-chain transactions). But: Do we need "VISA levels of TPS"? Currently not. There is VISA, there are fiat currencies, there are altcoins. They can coexist with Bitcoin for some decades (and maybe forever, I'm not an "absolute maxi").

I know the theory you're referring to (decentralization-scalability-security trilemma) but it isn't a law of nature. It's simply based on the experience that all three characteristics are difficult to achieve at the same time.

However, there is a never ending progress in the scaling area. LN is being adopted by mainstream exchanges. On ETH you have already working rollups, Bitcoin probably will get them soon too. The progress is gradual and it's unlikely that the current scaling tech can lead to an adoption by 8 billion people in the coming 5 years. But we're already in the hundreds of millions and getting closer to the goal. :) It is also likely that the progress regarding latency/bandwidth and storage will be faster than population growth, so at most in a couple of decades the problem should be completely solved.

The most likely "vision" for a Bitcoin which can scale for billions of users is a variety of different solutions working in parallel. LN could be used for small payments, on-chain only for big transactions ("settlement") and sidechains, pegged chains and rollups for everything in-between. And this variety makes the whole system more decentralized and complex.

d5000 is part of the crowd OBSESSED with thoughts that everyone migrating in their billlions of population over to a flawed buggy subnetwork that doesnt even have its own network wide audit/security model, called LN

its like he wants to use tech that is pre 2009

LN can open channels and display balance that is not funded by a bitcoin utxo
(all the services that 'open channel instantly' or 'offer inbound balance') using temp ID instead of TXID proven this fact is possible

heck there is no network wide audit/security so channels can open using the same TXID more then once (aka double spend)
thats how bad LN is

what d5000 needs to realise is, yes next gen subnetworks will be utilised for different niche requirements and they will have niches, but the failed sandbox experiment known as LN is not the solution, epecially when it has had years of opportunity to fix the issues even LN devs admit it has

but lets just list some of the user experience issues
they have bottleneck issues of liquidity, rebalance snowballing effects, path not found, unco-operative partners.
plus many other bad issues let alone the weak code and bugs and other flaws dev admit to aswell

even now LN has stalled on adoption only peaking at 5.4k btc top capacity.. and now at 4.7k
heck even bitcoin ETF managed to lock up 5k IN ONE DAY

but i do laugh that d5000 is stuck advertising tech pre2009(non blockchain decentralised audited/secured) using out of date utopian PR wordage from 2018.. trying to scream to the masses of wanting billions of people to migrate over to the crappy subnetwork..

but as i said, other new(yet to be designed from scratch) subnetworks that will learn from the mistakes of LN will come about, but it wont be one solo subnetwork, but multiple bridged subnetworks for different niches

What I want to say with that is that they've been working on LN for a very long time--might as well be centuries in the realm of technology--and yet it doesn't come even within several orders of magnitude of being able to handle worldwide transaction volume.


Well, yeah, of course it does. I guess I should have more carefully defined my context with that statement. It doesn't solve the problem I was talking about solving...


I agree. I think blockchain-based cryptos are perfectly fine as investment instruments or large-scale value stores. But they will never be, themselves, actual mainstream currencies. For that you will need a system like Haypenny, which can support currencies based on whatever value store you want in the backend, but do so in a way that supports worldwide transaction volume.

Oftentimes people confuse decentralization with distribution, or maybe I would say fair distribution in this case. Let's also not forget that his final intent is to discredit and take bitcoin down, and this type of declaration are pretty smart because they can actually confuse people when you think about.

I'm pretty sure that he knows exactly what he's doing and saying, he's just saying stuff in his own interest, that is the difference.

Indeed, his confusion is almost certainly intentional and possibly just faked, so he can confuse others.
I completely agree that his statement is in line with his interest, not with the reality. I've said it many times that we should never trust personalities' declarations.

You're funny (...not). I suggest you to read my posts in this thread again ;D
For me LN is the equivalent of a prepaid card in Bitcoin's world. It's good enough for small payments. Sounds lame, but small payments are 99% of all payments.
It is not centralized per se, although of course as it's a neutral technology it could happen that its topology is centered in some big hubs, but that can be fixed as barriers to enter LN are quite low.
The solution you seem to be obsessed with, however, has just this problem: big block coins have extremely high barriers for new node operators, due mostly to bandwidth requirements.
And legiteum is completely right about that not every payment has to be recorded by the whole network forever, even if the solution he proposes is ... even more lame than big block coins in my opinion. ::)

(btw, the solutions I'm probably most "OBSESSED" about are sidechains, rollups and similar tech. ;) )

Compare this sentence with my conclusion in my answer to @legiteum, finally something we (almost) agree ;)

analogy
bitcoin is the debit card bank account you own for your funds, takes a bit of time to confirm minutes-one day
LN is the IOU game of buy now settle later.. basically credit card.. you need to settle up at end of month-year
majority of LN services offer instant balance.. (meaning no funding lock created to take in your funds to be in your control)
where you then have to pay down that IOU balance at a separate time.. yep LN is mostly more resembling credit card

when over 75% of that 4600 capacity is held by only a dozen services... its definitely more centralised than funds on the bitcoin network


oh here you go again repeating crappy old narratives of a group promoting stupidity and you just blindly repeating it
im not a "big blocker" because the group that push the term "big blocker" are pushing it to mean GB blocks asap extremes

my actual opinion is:
a. de cludging the 4mb block code to not be 1mb base 3mb witness and instead a open 4mb space that can be fully utilised by even legacy and or the other tx formats
    thus allowing more transactions, rather then junk unrelated to transacting
b. penalising the spammers and bloaters(not everyone) so that less spam/bloat = more room for genuine transactions
c. re-implementing hard validation code that counts and validates all bytes to have a purpose and lean preference = more transactions
d. not LEAPING blocksize, nor moving blocksize via core dev politics, but SCALING in adjustments based on fill rate and fee of a math formulae that if reaching a threshold of prolonged congestion, then the blocksize can increase at a set milestone all nodes know the formulae of(much like node know difficulty formulae), a rule in nodes to be in consensus to agree on. without dev politics(god mode) decisions

emphasis scaling not leaping.. (and no dont mis interpret it as "big blocker" narrative of quick climbs to extremes via words you heard from the idiot brigade which you seem to be repeating your many points from
there is more to it then the silly narrative of leaps to GB blocks your crew suggest as the only alternative to LN


funny thing is the idiot brigade group you got most of your talking points from.. are the ones that want the blockchain bloated up with hundreds of millions of unspendable dust utxo with a meme attached, which they dont want stopped
YET
then want real purchases of real goods and services to be removed/stopped from utilising bitcoin and instead done on their preferred(flawed) subnetwork of middle men taking a fee per routed payment

if you had a level head. and a actual inclination to think for yourself about whats best for bitcoin
you would not be following the idiot brigade diatribe of trying to get everyone else off bitcoin and whilst saying that the junk should not be stopped

and yes they want bitcoin to have high fee's because they dont want bitcoin to be used everyday by people, they want people to leave bitcoin and be locked into partnerships on the other system you falsely think is the only solution

Who the heck is Gary Gensler? Is he Satoshi Nakamoto himself? Nope. This is why I find it silly when some people care about some random person's opinions instead of using their own heads properly.

Fact is that BTC itself is decentralised, but some stuff related to it like exchanges etc that require KYC are centralised. They are different.

Your analogy is wrong. If I buy liquidity on a Lightning Service Provider, I'll have to pay them. If they provide me some free liquidity at the start as a promotional measure, this is completely independent from Lightning's concept.
If I manage my Lightning channel by myself then I also do an upfront payment to create the channel.
Where is the "credit"?
You can use LN in a "centralized" way "trusting" a third party but that's not the way it was designed. It's like holding your BTC on Binance ...

Everything above 4 MB is "big blocks" in my opinion.

You actually contradict yourself here. If you try to "penalize" spammers then you'll get even more difficult to cleanup spam like Doginals (https://drc-20.org/) or Stampchain (https://github.com/hydren-crypto/stampchain/blob/main/docs/src20.md), which are more difficult to detect because they use transactions resembling ordinary "payment" transactions. OP_RETURN was created to prevent that.
The witness discount has its reasons.

Again, how do you want to detect spam not using a known scheme like Ordinals, but another obscuranted method?

In general I'm not against this idea, I have supported it actually multiple times. It could however be quite challenging to find a formula which can't be gamed.

And I guess if you're against L2 solutions then I guess your formula would be quite elastic, i.e. reacting fast to congestion. But as you can't distinguish spam from legit transactions (it's impossible, believe me) then you invite the spammers to spam the network even more with such a formula -> and then you're again helping centralization (Yeah! We're back on topic!). The formula thus would have to be extremely conservative, also to ensure a fee market can develop (fee market does not mean $100 fees though, but it should be able to go significantly over $0.10 in times of high demand.)

I suppose that you have good intentions for BTC, but you're simply unrealistic if you think spamming can be stopped "the Luke-Jr way", i.e. with a hard-coded "spam control" like Ordisrespector.

PS: My personal hopes on how spam could be stopped or at least made less attractive is ZK tech like in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5461529.msg62625056#msg62625056), which would allow full nodes to ignore arbitrary data.

i NEVER said they GIFT you 'free liquidity promotion'.. i said they credit you liquidity(give you a credit limit) which you have to pay back + a fee(interest) for the amount you use
they just call it 'renting' to hide the game of credit

as for you managing your own channel using upfront funds locked by you:
(a) then offer someone balance(renting your balance out) from your channel output which you then need to settle later where they need to pay you for "rent"
or
(B)you want them to equally offer their side balance to you..

you are in (a) a loan manager or (b) each offering mutual loans to each other and settle later

if you just use your balance for you to buy goods or services(no renting out balance).. you are doing a buy now settle later of the goods. where you IOU them. (you took out a loan that settles later)
..if the goods supplier is a hop+ away
you are taking out a credit line with your channel partner so you owe him. and he takes out a pay later loan with good supplier he needs to settle later. where you gets the goods before settling the credit/loan
..
and in all cases of using LN... the payments are not confirmed on the blockchain and terms(states/commitments) can change before settlement . meaning they are all IOU where the IOU agreement can change, until channel is closed and everything is settled.. the only question is who owes who whilst channels are open

so yes LN is a credit scheme, where 99% people are the borrower and only a lucky few get to independently open channels with their own coin locks to be a loan officer

4.1mb is not big blocker..
heck we are 8 years passed the cries that 2mb was big. we are even 7 years passed where core devs thought(admitted) that 4mb was not detrimental to the network
thing have moved on since (moores law), even 6mb 8mb today is not "big blocker" detrimental to the network. but dev politics are not ready to change their roadmap

hard drives of 4TB are not $thousands, heck they are not even multiple $hundreds. heck they are not even sing $hundred any more..
a 4TB hard drive that can store ANOTHER ten more years* of block data for the whopping hard drive purchase price of 2tx fee's of 2 months ago congestion rate rate or just 20 tx fee minimum whilst no congestion

i find it funny how people think a $50 hard drive for 14year of old data +10 years* of future data is a economical threat to bitcoin.. but a $25 fee for 1 tx is in their silly minds not a threat but a expectation for the future (facepalm)
funny part is more people have avoided bitcoin due to the fee. not due to hard drives..

so hard drives are not the problem so please do the actual maths and realise those idiots you copy screaming "big blockers" are not talking about 4.1-8mb blocks.. they are talking about GB blocks.. as their exaggeration to their exaggeration of how they want to make bitcoin scaling feel like a non-option by the idiot screamers you copy words of pretending when others talk about scaling (small progressive adjustments via many methods, efforts) are in the minds of the screamers you copy words from pretend scaling is GB network threatening blocks just to try to get the scaling talk to stop. so that the only solution talk is of migrating everyone to subnetworks, because they want to promote the faulty subnetwork as the only option, plus its free promotion if they can get people to not offer other options

by them screaming exaggerations of 'blockchain cant cope with 'big blocks' (exaggerated GB size leaps).. its their attempt to try to quash people from even discussing or making proposals for actual rational SCALING(which is not just increasing blocksize but scaling tx count within blocks via many option),.. the silly idiots want to pretend the only bitcoin options was GB or migrate people offchain..
they dont want people talking about the multitude of rational options.. and just want to pretend those wanting scaling must belong in some GB group of threat.. (facepalm, tut, laugh, shakes head)

(*<600gb so far plus 10years of 4mb(4*525000) = <2.7TB)


do you know whats great about code.. code creates rules, creates formulaes and creates policy
code can limit how many op returns can be used. to ensure tx stay lead.
code can do alot of things..


bloat is detectable by bytes not part of the input output of value
spam can be detected by the UTXO age being spent to often
EG someone with a 1 confirm can be set as a 144x fee to attain priority
someone with a 144 confirm only needs to pay 1x fee to attain priority


and you think dev politics cant be gamed...


subnetworks (next gen not the current flawed sandbox offerings) will have niches.. but to presume every needs to migrate away from bitcoin into the singular flawed subnetwork you promote and idolise.. thats where you lose me and i laugh at you

as for your other assumptions... ill just tut and laugh.. ill give you some more time to actually think about a proper rebuttal rather then the one you gave
hint: recently conjestion was 2500 average tx per 4mb cludgy bloated block paying $20 each last month is where people give up using bitcoin daily and just didnt bother using bitcoin for months.. which leads to centralisation via avoidance
however
(in a congestion scenario of blocks of~ 8mb best case (if things got fully efficient, lean where every byte counts again)

30,000 tx (of lean tx, uncludged block format, de spammed, debloated) $2 per tx during congestion is more for a mining pool then the 2500 x $20 current congestion.. but users pay less
.. its economics. more space for more tx(and more erognomics of the space, and other things) means people pay less.. but total fee becomes more

again ill give you time to come up with a better rebuttal then you just said, and just laugh and tut
the presumptions you make of me are more laughable of the ones i make of you
i have never even said anything that sounds like "lukes way" yet i can quote you many times sounding like the idiot brigade that promote off-ramping everyone over to the single subnetwork they call "solution" and your other sily buzzword you repeat without independent thought


nodes without FULL storage..
nodes without FULL verification..
are not.. wait for it.. [drum role]..... FULL nodes
they would be considered pruned, stripped, bridged, downstream nodes

ill give an example
in the 2016-2017+ era of node versions

a 0.11 (presegwit node) peer connecting to a segwit activated node.. has the segwit active node strip the witness and hands the pre segwit node a stripped block where it does not have the (witness)signatures/scripts/bloat of segwit/taproot ..  but BLINDLY passes them as valid due to the opcode trick segwit/taproot uses to deem data after opcode should be passed without inspection, even if missing signature witness)

these older nodes are not full nodes as they dont validate all data and dont store all data.. so they cant then act as IBD seeds for other FULL node peers to leach blockchain data from

those older nodes then due to how peerconnect works become a under layer of nodes at the bottom of the tier system of network peers
even gmax and his team called these nodes downstream, bridged, stripped nodes

@franky1: I try to be very synthetic because otherwise this discussion will derail from topic completely. After this post I'll exclusively continue discussing about topics treating centralization dangers in Bitcoin. For the big block and "Lightning good/bad" topics you seem to like so much there are other threads.

1) Lightning providers: Again, the service providers can offer you a credit model if they want to, but this is not like LN was designed. You're confusing the technology with a particular way some providers use it. LN was designed as a prepaid system. I personally don't approve the "credit" business model too much but such models emerging are inevitable, like people holding BTC on Binance (and even "staking" them, lol). I also heavily doubt that 99% of LN users use a "credit" based model.
2) Block size: First, of course, storage is NOT the problem. RAM/Bandwidth/CPU capacity for validation is. My reference is still the Bitfury study from 2015 (https://bitfury.com/content/downloads/block-size-1.1.1.pdf), where the block size which would lead to centralization (where standard commercial hardware would already not be enough) was estimated to be about 4 MB, above all because of RAM usage (if all blocks were 4 MB, RAM usage was estimated to be 16 GB). Yes, 9 years have passed since then, but commercial PC hardware still has mostly 16 GB RAM or less. There are of course high end gaming PCs with 32 GB now but this would barely be enough for a full node when blocks are at 8 MB and not many people have the money to dedicate such a machine to Bitcoin. Thus it leads to .... drumroll ... centralization!
3) Code is beautiful, yes, but please give me a concrete example how you would penalize someone bloating the blockchain with Stampchain NFTs, which look exactly like payments and additionally bloat the UTXO set.
4) Your "evaluate spam by UTXO age" would not work. It would exactly benefit Ordinals/Stampchain-type spam, because people hold these NFTs for a while.
5) I don't say everybody has to migrate to a particular subnetwork, but it will be increasingly beneficial for users to migrate to one of many, or at least to use them for small payments.
6) Full nodes: The idea is that these nodes could provide full validation without full storage. There are for sure challenges but we're talking about future tech here. And I actually would agree with you that while such "ZK nodes" could be attacked in some way full nodes can't, they're not full nodes. This method (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-to-Securely-Prune-Bitcoin%E2%80%99s-Blockchain-Matzutt-Kalde/d855ac1c3fe47a5b47d808bf763ba95b993ce8da) however seems also promising even if its not using ZK.

Each has our own perspective on how they view a thing even if it was wrong. Meanwhile, BTC is decentralized but maybe some thinks it isn't now due to the changes that occurs in the space such as regulation and accumulation (only to name a few) as there might be more than these but for me, I still think BTC is decentralized and will remain like this because I believe that it's not like the other coin that has lots of teams and then lots of supply.

You know, some of them may be untrustworthy and hold most of it and even if not them, investors can do it. Some says Satoshi Nakamoto owns a lot of BTC but I still don't think he will sell it only to make money because his vision is different from the majority.

yes this topic is about BITCOIN so dont use it to promote the shoddy sandbox test subnetwork you want people to migrate over to, to leave bitcoin with less users,, or else i will have to point out where you are going wrong with your recitement of the shoddy network promotion text you are repeating but unaware of the details of effects it has and can cause to the bitcoin network via pretending it too is bitcoin

..
as for bitcoin centralisation/decentralisation
(the network)
yes bitcoin has central points of failure and we should not be utopian dreaming that bitcoin is perfectly decentralised as that lulls people into sleeping and dreaming of silly words recite to them like an advert.. rather then scrutinising the risks

we should be looking for fixes and proposals that diminish the power core have over the protocol we dont need them acting as politicians
instead bring it back to the full consensus system of needing majority network readiness before new features activate so that a majority of the network can be ready to fully validate and archive FULLY and secure the network and data,(its called data/network security, and a good thing) unlike the current soft process that has junk thats not even seen as bad but is not helping the network, and allows dev politics to get involved, meaning we then need to trust, appease, bless and kiss the ring of devs.. (which was not the point of bitcoins invention)

and no ordinals junk does not look like a normal tx.. there are obvious signs its different and code can be made to recognise that.
(hardening up the soft opcodes(now hundreds) that allow data to pass unchecked). require network readiness if someone wants to use an opcode with new format conditions.. (network security) and checking every byte meets a rule(data security)

as for bitcoin centralisation/decentralisation
(the btc coin)
is what gensler is refering to.. which if you count up the UTXO's of the NON dust junk crap.
and the count up the users registered to CEX. from a userbase.. users proclaiming to be bitcoiners are higher % just CEX users

as for the coin totals
the amount of coin moved in the last 3 years. most of the coins within active age, belong to CEX custodians

But still, the CEX are holding the money anyway which means that they can runaway with it anytime they want and people won't have any kind of ability to chase them, remember Mt. Gox? I think that the reason that Gensler been saying this is because a lot of us are trading bitcoin, and most of the trades are happening in CEX. To me, decentralization is simple, it's that there's no head that leads the way, everyone's free to do what they need to do like an anarchy society.

Boring and a copy cat? For merely telling the whole truth about you and your mentors Mike Hearn and Roger Ver? To which you are currently denying that you're supporting their ideas during the blockchain debate. Hahaha!

I truly hope you didn't sell your Bitcoin for BCash, franksandbeans. Because that obviously would be the worst financial decision ANYONE could have made.

It's true that CEX and ETFs hold the majority of BTC, but even if those centralized exchanges ran away and took everyone's bitcoin, that wouldn't make bitcoin centralized. They still don't have control over the entire bitcoin network, they can't print more bitcoins like other centralized assets...So bitcoin will never become a centralized asset even if they hold the majority of bitcoin. And what Gensler says doesn't mean what he says is always right, he's a nobody. It seems that he is still angry that he cannot stop the popularity of bitcoin, so he will continue to attack bitcoin until he is exhausted.

i never even touched any fork of bitcoin nor do i advertise or promote other networks pretending to be bitcoin... yet you have with your mentors shoddy subnetwork he wants to migrate bitcoiners over to and where he wants to stop people buying daily goods on the actual bitcoin network,, which you then recite

you actually do have a mentor.
other people have independent minds to think for themselves and say many things
my opinions are my own. my insults to you are my own unique insults.
my words to you are my own
my thought on development are my own and differ to the ones you quote and different to the ones you also quote others of being

yet your words, insults and lame posts are just words heard by your mentor before you, thus your words are not original, nor are your insults

you should atleast try to be original and unique and independent.. that should be a minimum

pease learn the meaning of independence.. it will not only help you in life, but help you understand what decentralisation is
you just acting a slave to someone elses trusted character and characters(words) is an example of centralisation which you adore

you would rather have code weakened, softened and backdoored to allow one central group control to slide things in without network readiness.. to then require their political decision of needing them to close their exploits, which they refuse..
your acceptance of this policy will not benefit you or others in the long run

dont treat devs as immortal gods you should trust by default and allow them to do as they please without oversight or scrutiny. learn to scrutinise devs that have grabbed the powerhouse of being te "sole reference client"
we should use code to harden the rules to protect the network, not soften the rule to allow a central point of failure do things that caused congestion and bloat... and pretend they didnt know of the repercussions of their error, i was telling them since 2016

if you have more trust in core devs, than the actual code(due to you not reading code, thus blindly trust those that wrote it)
then you have much to learn and have had, but still have much time to learn from your mistakes

Unfortunately, he is right. A few exchanges hold a big portion of total circulation. I have always said that, if a 10K Bitcoin sale changes the market by 10% or more, what will happen if Binance or some other whales decide to sell 50K Bitcoin in one day? We have seen such things after the ETF approvals. Grayscale was dumping their Bitcoin and this is the reason we didn't see any effect of ETF approval. We started to see the difference, though, only after Grayscale stopped selling their holdings.

Unfortunately, crypto newbies prefers to use centralized exchanges because they can use those platforms whenever they want. They can sign in to their exchange account even if they lose their password. They can recover their password. They use those platforms because of the simplicity.

Apart from centralization on big exchanges, the high potential volatility emerging from relatively low volume is true currently mainly because of the Bitcoin which is circulating, 95-99% (estimation without any source, but I don't think it's incorrect ;) ) are to be traded for currencies instead of being traded for goods and services. There is no "rooting" of the Bitcoin price in the real economy. People don't know how much it "has to be worth".

If we had more currency usage, then big sale transactions (but also big buy transactions, to some extent) would not matter that much anymore as we'd see a steady circulation "rooted" in the real-world economy. And for these usecases there's Lightning and (hopefully soon) sidechains. Each time a merchant (e.g. Bitrefill) is guaranteeing a price for 15 or 30 minutes Bitcoin is "backed" in some way by the merchant for this timeframe. Several years ago I started a thread about expanding that concept of "backing" Bitcoin by goods/services (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1926913.msg19121816#msg19121816), but it did not receive much attention. Other ideas would be adding Siacoin-style contracts for trading hosting space for BTC, I guess with LN such a marketplace should be feasible. It doesn't matter which good or service is involved, with the exception of DeFi, i.e. services inside the "Bitcoin/crypto circlejerk".

---

You seem to refer to the Taproot introduction here. But Taproot is not the culprit of the Ordinals spam. See next part. Nor would I agree that Core has that much power like you say. If Taproot was more controversial (e.g. like Segwit) alternative proposals would have been discussed.

STAMPCHAIN, not Ordinals (Ordinals can sorta be recognized but they can switch to a worse protocol at any time). Please read the proposed protocol. They are creating fake public keys to store data on them. There are no "obvious signs" which public key is true and which is fake. This is actually not a new method, it was used to store data before OP_RETURN was introduced, and it was the reason for OP_RETURN introduction for these protocols not cluttering the UTXO set. Why? Because you can't tell which things are "arbitrary data".

Please understand: as bad as Ordinals and BRC-20 are (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5451905.msg62211946#msg62211946), Stampchain and the 2013/14 pre-OP_RETURN token protocols are MUCH worse for scaling and would lead to much more centralization risks.

- Hardening opcodes, if I interpret correctly what you mean, would imo make future softforks impossible.
- Require network readiness would make creative usage of contracts depend on "Core approval". You would actually increase Core's power, not reduce it. This would lead to a never ending war about details and so creative usage of Bitcoin Script (I don't include Ordinals in that, but things like LN) would be discouraged. You may like that but I don't.
- "checking every byte meets a rule": Actually you even propose to "worse" scaling if you want "every byte" to be checked for a "rule" or "purpose", because that would increase resource usage of validating full nodes. And: How to check for that purpose? For example, if you want each public key to be check if it really corresponds to an existing address, you would forbid to create new addresses, to create a lock-in and a privacy nightmare.

In other words, the distribution of Bitcoin's supply is centralized. But not the network itself. I sure hope developers find a way to fix this in the long run. As long as Bitcoin preserves decentralization + censorship-resistance, there should be nothing to worry about. We must encourage people to take BTC off centralized exchanges and/or wallet providers. Only then, true equality will be achieved.

It seems Gary Gensler needs a lot to learn about crypto/Blockchain tech. Especially when he used to say PoS coins are "securities". Either he doesn't understand how decentralized protocols work or he is just pretending to harm the crypto industry. Even after the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs, he advised investors to be wary of the risks of buying and holding BTC (reiterating it can be used for criminal activities). Hopefully, the SEC chairman is replaced by someone else who values the true power of Bitcoin/crypto. Maybe the best is yet to come? :D

Gary Gensler taught a class at MIT on blockchain. He knows very well what he is talking about.

He was saying that the way most holders of cryptocurrency use it it's not decentralized--it's a brokerage account in an "oracle database" in his words. And he's absolutely right.

d5000 for someone like you thats been around long enough to have had the time to learn enough, you yet again show you dont know enough, by contradicting yourself and by then saying obsurd notions

first of all i have been talking about the funky junk being able to be added if segwit activated since core proposed segwit back in 2016.. creating new soft(open/un-format required)opcodes that were treated as valid without checking data after opcode.. since 2016..
so no its not about taproot.. i never mentioned EVER taproot starting it all, taproot is just the prime example/demo/effect/result of the previous exploit softening has caused since 2017, where years later taproot is the result/example.. not cause

secondly. stampchain. is not complicated. its just multisig of EG 1of2 where it needs one signer key and the other key is junk data
(funny part is i think it was me that gave them the idea in early ordinals days, to use multisig instead of witness metadata/op_returns)

op_return and stampchain does not create 4mb of memes..
op return is limited to 80 bytes and stamps have 20byte thus leaner then the meme junk
and the great thing about code. code can create rules.. as thats the beauty of it
code to limit arbitrary data to keep bitcoin clean for its main intended purpose.. a purpose you seem to have forgot
(and no dont reply that you think bitcoin should be free to become a junk data library/comic book store of images)

i think you really dont understand why bitcoin was such a great solution to digital money concepts of the early years..
i know you want arbitrary junk data as it makes bitcoin annoying and helps you to promote other networks people should use to get away from the annoyances.. but how about you stop promoting other networks and start to think of what is best for bitcoin.. via fixes to the annoyances. rather then wanting the annoyances to continue just to promote user exits as the only solution you could find

hardening the rules again actually means core devs cant just supplant new stuff which then by default require people to rush into using core as sole reference updated code to stay fairly 'fully' again after they change things.. thus keeping them on power
it stops core from being so lax. instead hardening the rules would require core to be scrutinised more pre feature operation, to then have the community then see there is nothing that could go wrong before core do anything.. as it should be

and it then also requires core to hope what they make meets the standards/benefits the community see as a good thing/to see its merits..
meaning core have to actually explain things and show things rather then throw things in and see what sticks

which another brand could then also publish its own proposals and community can check its merits too and there wont be a REKT campaign fear of 'dont use software as its trojan.." of sily fear campaigns. but instead actual fair adoption due to the activation not happening pre majority thus safe to start allowing different nodes onto the network with different feature offering/proposals with no threat level of any brand instantly changing stuff

as for your willingness to not want core to have network readiness as you think it will hinder cores innovativeness/creativity .. well maybe that will kick them up the ass to motivate them to actually make something network benefit worthy, rather than things sponsorship worth

but i do gotta laugh how you dont want nodes checking everything but then try to refer to nodes not checking everything as "full"
pure comedy

I remember watching some of those MIT OpenCourseWare:

Introduction for 15.S12 Blockchain and Money, Fall 2018
Professor Gary Gensler
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s12-blockchain-and-money-fall-2018/

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63UUkfL0onkxF6MYgVa04Fn

True, but since there is a hard limit of maximum coin supply of Bitcoin subject to halving rewards for miners, Gary Gensler is not totally wrong here. Though I think he is an enemy of defi and permissionless cryptos in general.

Well, Gary is now a government official. So that means he's forced to spread negativism of Bitcoin. Else, he would risk losing his position as head of the SEC. I know most people keep their BTC in the hands of centralized institutions. But there's nothing we can do about it. Especially when BTC is decentralized and open to anyone.

Thank God, network consensus lies on nodes and miners than those with a large economic stake in it. Otherwise, BTC would've been under the control of governments and corporations alike. ETH is in big trouble after doing the switch to PoS. I sure hope Bitcoin stays PoW forever for complete decentralization + censorship-resistance. We're living in uncertain times, so expect the unexpected. Who knows how Bitcoin will fare in the long run? :)

Forced? By whom? Why?

From the standpoint of the SEC, Bitcoin is just another investment instrument just like all of the others, and consumers should be protected from fraud, which helps markets function and raises the price of instruments like Bitcoin.

There's no conspiracy. The illuminati is not out to get Bitcoin. Anybody in the US can buy Bitcoin anytime they want. They have Super Bowl commercials about it. People are inventing government intervention out of thin air. Not only is there no government intervention, there's not even a valid reason why there would be intervention and tons of evidence to the contrary e.g. that the ETF was just approved by (checks notes) the same government that is supposedly secretly against Bitcoin.

Look, I get it: it's not as much fun to invest in something if it doesn't have a "catch" associated with it. Lots of people click on those ads that read, "CLICK HERE TO READ WHAT THE POWER COMPANIES DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE". I guess those things work, right?

But the fact is that every bit of earthly evidence points to the fact that in the US and most of the world, Bitcoin is legal and nobody is interested in making it illegal, and in fact access to Bitcoin is actually expanding.

If that diminishes the thrill for people who think otherwise, well, I guess that's what engineers like me do. Sorry.

I think this is not right, if the government really hates bitcoin then why did they order him to approve bitcoin ETFs? I think what he said is just his personal opinion and no one forced him to say those things. Since even bitcoin investors have that mindset, I see many people complaining that using centralized platforms or institutions holding too much bitcoin will make bitcoin more centralized. So I think it's just that everyone's views and thoughts about bitcoin are different.

Except that you're spreading disinformation, lies, and gaslighting everyone to manipulate and convince them that big blocks is the correct path to scaling the network. That's playing 4D Chess to make people support Rogercoin and Craigcoin without directly telling them, no?

It's there in your trust-rating, everyone should read it. You're full of FUD ser.

when your mentor and his cultish clan cried to mods years ago and then told you a sob story when he recruited you. you are now just going in circles making yourself look silly, by ignoring code, ignoring blockdata, ignoring statistics, ignoring logic, math, economics, to only care and consider the cry appeals.. as your backing for the opinion you quote from your mentor about how you see bitcoins future going

if you dont want to look stupid or be called stupid or question your own mind of if you are actually stupid or not, how about stop acting like you are and actually do some research independently for once to break your cycle

now stop crying that your mentor has a record that he cried to a moderator years ago about me calling him an idiot and later me calling you an idiot. and simply stop acting like one and finally learn about bitcoin

i use blockdata, code, maths, logic, common sense, economics to back up what i say.. you can only quote cries and moderation appeals.. grow up, take some time to learn bitcoin not how to play victim

by the way
the "big blocker" narrative you speak of is a STUPID extreme LEAPING stupid version of proposal came up by your mentors cultish tribe

scaling bitcoin is more subtle than the narrative your mentor taught you.. but you just want to go with the cult narrative to avoid ANY actual discussion of true scaling
its your mentor that has supplied you with gas.. and you can escape the gas chamber he locked you into

..
now dont press reply with more cries.. instead take the time to actually learn about bitcoin past and future proposals..

Ser, you're the only person here saying that someone "cried to the mods". No one cried to the mods or to those two BITCOIN CORE DEVELOPERS who gave you both negative trust-ratings. Plus there's another person who said you promised to pay him to "enter a dialogue with you" in the forum? WHICH you didn't pay, and you got a negative trust-rating for it. Is that our fault? No ser, the lies, the FUD, the disinformation, and the gaslighting will always be noticed, and they did notice.

Gensler is just upset & embarrassed that he had to approve to spot etfs, basically either approve or get sued. He must be in either politicians or bankers pockets because he is well versed on Bitcoin after teaching classes at MIT years ago. The good thing is we don’t have to care what he thinks any more.

gensler knows what bitcoin is
gensler quote of this topic was about BTC the currency not Bitcoin the network
genslers is not actually against bitcoin, he is just not utopian fluffy animal meme dreamspace promotion about it
i feel gensler is just doing the same risk mitigating talks any/all assets get.
plus yes he has to toe the political party-line of Mrs Warren who is on the chair board of many commissions that decide on SEC matters.  so he has to tread carefully and not show favouritism to a particular asset class

and we should all be happy to admit the good and bad so we can all have risk mitigation awareness and not lulled to sleep with cartoon memes of snake oil promotions of greed and tricks to snare people into riskier positions
EG
we should all use genslers words to re-energise #not-your-keys-not-your-coin tag line. rather then say 'everything is awesome now heres 6million memes you can get if you deposit into a CEX, now go to sleep"