Gary Gensler: "Bitcoin is not that decentralized"

[Z-tight]

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.

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.

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[umbara ardian]

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'!

[legiteum]

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.

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, 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".

[coolcoinz]

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.

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!

[d5000]

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.

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.)

[franky1]

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.

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"

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.

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

[hZti]

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.

[legiteum]

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.)

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 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...

[Abiky]

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.

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? 

[thecodebear]

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.

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"

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.

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

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.

[legiteum]

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

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.

[bettercrypto]

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?

[Poker Player]

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.

[Wind_FURY]

How about your mentor?

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

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.

[franky1]

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"

[Abiky]

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.

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.

[shield132]

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.

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.

[franky1]

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.

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"

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.

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

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.

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

[NotATether]

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.

[franky1]

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