"Not your keys, not your coins", What's the threshold before it fails?

[Wind_FURY]

There are 81% of Bitcoin owners who, probably because of the lack of Bitcoin Education or laziness, say that they'll move their coins to their bank's "crypto storage" if it was available. It will not be a good future, if true.



Let's pretend that pie chart also represents the rest of the world, and that a large portion of the supply has actually been "deposited" under the control of centralized entities. How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

[1714681503]

1714681503

[Don Pedro Dinero]

How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

If we consider success as a large majority using bitcoin as Satoshi conceived it, P2P outside of centralised entities, we can say that it has already failed and I believe that the future trend is going to get worse.

Many people buy bitcoin simply to see if they can make a profit, from their mobile phones, and sometimes they buy a substitute product that replicates the behaviour of the price of bitcoin without knowing that it is not really bitcoin. This happens in banks like Revolut.

Add to this the number of people who buy bitcoin from centralised entities such as Coinbase or Binance, or the fact that more and more bitcoin casinos require KYC.

In this context, I am not surprised that users who buy bitcoin at Coinbase or a derivative product at Revolut say that they prefer to keep their bitcoins in a bank, because they have no idea what this is all about.

[Jawhead999]

The thing is, the survey initiated by NYDIG was asking about cryptocurrency, not Bitcoin.

Most of cryptocurrency aren't intended to remove third party, so they're not used the coin/token as "be your own bank", although they have an option to hold their coin/token in hardware wallet/cold storage.

However I don't think Bitcoin is failed just because majority of people trust their coins with banks. If we refer to whitepaper, we can say Bitcoin is still failed because most of people use Bitcoin as a commodity instead of as a currency.

[Don Pedro Dinero]

The thing is, the survey initiated by NYDIG was asking about cryptocurrency, not Bitcoin.

But the graph talks specifically about bitcoin. It is assumed that the respondents have or have had bitcoin, even if they have other cryptocurrencies as well.

[m2017]

On what studies are the results based on which this pie chart is based? How many people participated in this survey? Who conducted this survey? It would be nice to see a link to the source.

I would not completely trust such pictures, which, by the way, can be fabricated (survey results) in one direction or another. For example, to create public opinion that banks can be trusted to hold crypto currencies.

I am 100% sure that if you conduct a similar survey on this forum, the results will be radically opposite. I wonder what not smart people (among bitcointalk users) will vote for their readiness to entrust their crypto currencies to banks?

OP, you should add exactly the same poll to this topic.

Regarding your question: I think 30% will already be enough to consider that bitcoin has failed. I can’t say for sure (and who can) and this figure arose purely intuitively.

[tbct_mt2]

There are 81% of Bitcoin owners who, probably because of the lack of Bitcoin Education or laziness, say that they'll move their coins to their bank's "crypto storage" if it was available. It will not be a good future, if true.

Let's pretend that pie chart also represents the rest of the world, and that a large portion of the supply has actually been "deposited" under the control of centralized entities. How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

81% is majority and it can be a big issue in future but I am very doubtful about the information. How did they conduct the survey to get that result?

Survey methodology is important to use the sample as a reflection of the whole Bitcoin owner population. If the methodology is bad, the result will be not a good representation for the big population. The figure surprises me as I am so doubtful about reasons of those people, how did they decide to own and use bitcoin. With them, central banks are not risky and they are readily to use both central banks, their cryptocurrency storage service in future without fear that their bitcoin will be stolen.

But probably they see similar risk from centralized exchanges and central banks or even consider central banks are safer than centralized exchanges to store their cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin will not fail but those people fail with their choices and lose capital. Their failures won't be Bitcoin failure.

[mk4]

I mean — it's really not a surprise knowing how much bitcoin/crypto people store on centralized exchanges.

I think people will learn their lesson one way or another though, mostly through mistakes and regret — hacks, centralized exchanges going bust, governments seizing their funds, etc. unfortunately. At the very least, those who want to self-custody actually can.

[stompix]

How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

Why would Bitcoin fail if the "cabal" would hold 90% of the coins?

There are 1915 addresses holding 40% of the coins, for comparison, there are around 4,000 commercial banks in the US and  762 crypto exchanges listed on Coingecko, not including derivates and defi.
Do you think that right now the wealth in coins is spread that much around?

If we consider success as a large majority using bitcoin as Satoshi conceived it, P2P outside of centralised entities, we can say that it has already failed and I believe that the future trend is going to get worse.

Bitcoin is a tool, it can simply be that for some it's better as an investment for others a p2p system of transferring value, the one doesn't exclude the other and nobody can say that is has failed simply because he doesn't like the outcome. Just as some might like the same future that Wind_FURY is afraid of or even dislike his own vision of utopia. For example, I'm quite happy with all CEX going bankrupt and then in the trashcan with Binance leading the pack but when I say something like this in the forum I get one hundred angry #SAFU followers screaming at me!

In short, it's not me or you or even this forum that decides failure and success, it's the world, and the world is saying that they would love their coins in a bank! Their keys, their decision! What are you going to do, seize their coins?  

[spectre71]

I keep as little as possible on my exchange, long term stuff get's moved to HW wallet. However I do have a presence on Fidelity but they are not an exchange and I am not worried about them. I can move in and out of the market with zero overhead. You just can't move anything in or out and I kinda like that for what I use it for.

[HeRetiK]

There are 81% of Bitcoin owners who, probably because of the lack of Bitcoin Education or laziness, say that they'll move their coins to their bank's "crypto storage" if it was available. It will not be a good future, if true.

Let's pretend that pie chart also represents the rest of the world, and that a large portion of the supply has actually been "deposited" under the control of centralized entities. How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

81% of Bitcoin owners does not necessarily mean 81% of bitcoins since I would assume that those 81% are rather newish to Bitcoin and accordingly have smaller holdings than the remaining 19%. So that makes it slightly less bad, in a way? Except it shows as disconcerting disregard for Bitcoin's core principles.

So accordingly I'm afraid to some extend Bitcoin already has failed. Not in the sense that it's really in danger of being under centralized control, but rather in that it has failed to convince people of trustlessness, permissionlessness and rethinking monetary sovereignty. But maybe there's still hope that folks will learn their lesson before they ruin the space for the rest of us.

[Charles-Tim]

Let's pretend that pie chart also represents the rest of the world, and that a large portion of the supply has actually been "deposited" under the control of centralized entities. How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

Did you know the amount of coins the exchanges are holding? The coins is not belonging to the exchanges but to people that leave it on the exchanges. But bitcoin has never failed and it remain decentralized. Ignorant people can decide to leave their coins on centralized platforms, which is not the right way because that led to the lost of having the full control over owns coins.

On what studies are the results based on which this pie chart is based? How many people participated in this survey? Who conducted this survey? It would be nice to see a link to the source.

I used picture search and I did not see anything. But it can be true or not true. Not all researches are accurate. Only when you will believe it to be true or not true is when you see the total number of people in the survey and the methodology used.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Whatever HeRetiK said. The Bitcoin community (the people, not the software or currency) has failed convincing the majority to value custody, but what else to do or say? People are just dumb. By the way, how certain are we about these stats, again? I quickly reminded stats in the crypto world are as unreliable as weather predictions during a storm.

In short, it's not me or you or even this forum that decides failure and success, it's the world, and the world is saying that they would love their coins in a bank!

The world is dumb, no other possible explanation. You can't be informed about exchanges going bankrupt, hacked etc., knowing that bitcoin was created for you to own the keys, that exchanges will charge you more than necessary, and still consciously choose to go in that direction. It's nearly impressive.

[Upgrade00]

How much of the total supply must be under the control of a Cabal before we could consider that Bitcoin has failed?

100%.
As long as you have your Bitcoin safely in your wallet and you own the keys to that wallet then you will have no issues how the other bitcoins are spread.
No one is going to sink billions of dollars to own majority of Bitcoins available and then destroy it.

Worse case scenario is that privacy becomes difficult to maintain cause decentralized exchanges become more and more obsolete as they lose even more customers to centralized options. This will limit privacy trading options to the barest minimum.

[SamReomo]

Whatever HeRetiK said. The Bitcoin community (the people, not the software or currency) has failed convincing the majority to value custody, but what else to do or say? People are just dumb. By the way, how certain are we about these stats, again? I quickly reminded stats in the crypto world are as unreliable as weather predictions during a storm.

In short, it's not me or you or even this forum that decides failure and success, it's the world, and the world is saying that they would love their coins in a bank!

The world is dumb, no other possible explanation. You can't be informed about exchanges going bankrupt, hacked etc., knowing that bitcoin was created for you to own the keys, that exchanges will charge you more than necessary, and still consciously choose to go in that direction. It's nearly impressive.

They won't listen to us even if we demonstrate to them the consequences of their dumb actions. The community has tried their best to convince them to have self-custody of their own coins rather than relying on any third-party solutions or custodial wallets, but those people are truly dumb and they won't listen to anyone other than their own stupid instincts or we can say their own traditional belief systems.

I'm pretty sure that most of them already know that exchanges aren't safe for their Bitcoin but still they still trust those exchanges blindly and keep their coins in those custodial wallets. We have seen many of the exchanges in past that were attacked by hackers and the assets of the users were stolen during those attacks, and those people have also learned about those incidents many times, but still they won't learn any lesson and keep their coins on those custodial wallets.

Those people will only get their lesson when their coins get hacked or the exchanges go bankrupt or show bankruptcy only to steal their coins. Most of them have heard about case of FTX, and still they act like sheep after seeing the game that the founders of the FTX played with their users. Even if we try 100 methods to convince them they will still do those dumb things until they learn their lesson when getting robbed by those exhanges.

[hugeblack]

Bitcoin does not work on the principle of proof of stake^[1], in which the owners of the currency decide to vote or decide whether it will succeed or fail. In proof of work, the currency will remain decentralized as long as the parties that decide to mine are decentralized or well distributed, so you have to focus on the full nodes and the miners more in Who owns these coins?

If we assume that Bitcoin is decentralized, then here is Satoshi's philosophy, meaning that if Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to be his peer-to-peer currency, then his vision or our vision in the forum has no meaning in a decentralized economy.

"Not your keys, not your coins" is a basis for protecting the investments of individuals and not for proving the centralization or decentralization of the network or its success against its failure.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

[DaveF]

There is A LOT of inertia involved here. For a VERY long time we have been telling people to keep money in banks, since they are insured and regulated. We have been telling people to have their brokerages hold their stock certificates instead of getting physical ones sent to them. We have been telling people to have the appropriate entity hold their bonds be it the bank / the brokerage / the government instead of keeping physical ones ourselves. Now, we are telling people that they should ignore all of that for crypto and do it themselves.

Overcoming that inertia is going to take a while. Educating people is going to take a while too.

-Dave

[Faisal2202]

This is something new as I was not aware of such information that there is a huge amount of population that wants to store their BTC on the bank, but if they are in BTC and wish to store their BTC on the bank, then those people really do not know anything about the fact that "not your keys, not your coin" because all they want is some central authority whom they would blame after as many people do not like to take full control and responsibility of their assets.

But if that's the case, then they should really get some education. And these people might only adopt BTC for making money, as they have no concerns and are benefiting from the features BTC and blockchain provide.

[stompix]

In short, it's not me or you or even this forum that decides failure and success, it's the world, and the world is saying that they would love their coins in a bank!

The world is dumb, no other possible explanation. You can't be informed about exchanges going bankrupt, hacked etc., knowing that bitcoin was created for you to own the keys, that exchanges will charge you more than necessary, and still consciously choose to go in that direction. It's nearly impressive.

Yeah, we know it, because if everyone was some kind of economic genius we would not have to clean any mess right now, there would be no need for Bitcoin, and fiat money would work perfectly! But since it's not the case, what are you/we going to do? Probably nothing as I don't the community getting with a plan like "No nocoiner left behind" or something like that!

People will keep investing just for gains in $, people will keep their funds on Cexs and they will worship as messiah every piece of you know what investors who is in just for the money, and we'll soon all realize that it's not that every current system is bad, the people running it made it so and the whole world is just too unwilling to make a change, so, sooner or later we're going to turn this one into a shitshow also and of course, we're going to blame the "cabal" for it!
But I hope to watch the final act from my cloud above and leave this earth while we still haven't managed to turn it into something else!

In proof of work, the currency will remain decentralized as long as the parties that decide to mine are decentralized or well distributed, so you have to focus on the full nodes and the miners more in Who owns these coins?

This is tinfoil material but since we started with cabal stuff, whitelist addresses!
Every exchange requires that you only deposit from addresses you prove you own to addresses you also prove you own just like your ssn or tax number or whatever, then shops are forced to do the same, as time passes more and more coins enter this loop from which no coin can get out,  so, how can decentralization help you when nobody is accepting coins from non-registered addresses except a few rebels here and there and the majority is trapped in a centralized system?

As for the mining, Foundry is at 30%, it's a closed pool with only big guys from the US mining there, people with seemingly unlimited money that keep adding gear even while profitability goes down, I even doubt those 30%, I have a feeling they are hiding hashrate in other pools not to create a panic.

[franky1]

when certain people "in the community" believe the future of bitcoin is not to have people receive actual confirmed value on the network to their key, but instead be handed unconfirmed txdata on a different network and told not to broadcast said tx for months..(which can be easily RBF'd).. then those certain people have failed the bitcoin test of received value

[Bhunter1997]

what’s really the essence of moving you crypto access to a bank? What’s the whole sense of decentralization then?
Well just like you said “because of the lack of Bitcoin Education or laziness” Because that should be the only reason someone should even think of moving their Crypto Asset to a Bank Storage.

I mean there are so many ways people can make sure that their assets are safe and so there’s definitely no essence or need to go move your Bitcoin to any sort of bank Storage. This is why people should really should first gain full education and knowledge of what you wanna do or are already doing. It’s not just enough to own Bitcoin, also know everything about it, because someone who knows everything about Bitcoin won’t be as naive as getting the thoughts of moving his Bitcoin to a Bank Storage.

That would be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life because that I think will be transferring the control and circulation of Bitcoin into the hands of an organization or even a person, Bitcoin said would no longer be so different from our normal fiat currencies. That’s so ridiculous if you ask me.