Every new rev of the Bitcoin codebase is a "fork" in the Github sense.
Not really. If that would be the case, then we would have a new altcoin each time, when the new client version is released. Which is not the case. If you run a full node, then you can see different client versions, used by different peers. And they all follow the same chain.
What I meant was that every new rev of the Bitcoin core by its team is a new version of the software. It can be adopted by the major players or not.
Also, wallets choose nodes, and that decision basically dictates what rev of the software is running.
If your BTC is worth $150k on one wallet and $1.98 on another wallet, guess which one the user will choose?
In practice, only when consensus rules are changed, then we can have some "potential forks", and only if new rules are activated by some minority (which is why soft-fork enthusiasts usually want to get 90% miner support, to not end up in a minority fork, which could quickly turn into an altcoin).
Correct, and the question would be, which is the "altcoin" and which is Bitcoin? The US government along with top Bitcoin-holding cronies could dictate the answer to that question. That's what I'm saying here.
If you want to say, "the community" wouldn't accept it, perhaps the way to say it is, "the community" would be those individuals and companies because small holders will never matter.
only the small group of people who control most of the supply of Bitcoin actually matter
It is more complicated than that. If you assume, that one group can control everything, then who it is, exactly?
I put the partial list in the OP, but it includes major and influential holders like Michael Saylor and Donald Trump, brokers like CoinBase and Binance, the ETF companies, the major minors who own >60% of the hash rate, and a few others.
If the US government got to those people--which would be pretty easy--then Bitcoin would do whatever those people said because they would dictate whether you are going with the bulk of the market or not.
Developers? They can release a new version, but it can be rejected, and it takes time for people to upgrade. A lot of them still run the old version, it takes months to upgrade, and if they would release something incompatible, then the new version would be in a minority, and would quickly lose. Also, Bitcoin Core is not the only client in use.
Miners? They can push the chain forward, but they have to stick to the rules. If they would want to stop halvings, or do other things they would want, which would be incompatible, then their blocks would be rejected by the rest of the network. Mainnet is not signet, where miners can control everything.
Whales? They can control their own coins, and nothing else beyond that. By having thousands of BTCs, you won't force some other coins to move in a certain direction, if their owners won't make a valid signature. It is not a Proof of Stake, where whales can control new coins, by staking the old ones.
Again, all of these people are in the ecosystem for one reason:
to make money. Threaten that, and they will do whatever the government wants.
And yes, the whales don't "have to" do anything, but imagine a Whale can be worth either $1,000 or $1 billion. Guess which one he will choose?
Bitcoin has never been private nor anonymous...
It is, if you use it correctly. Of course, many people for example reuse addresses, and then, it is normal, that if you can connect a single address to a single person, then you can trace the whole history. However, this is not how the system was designed. By default, the client will use a different address each time.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "correctly". If you use it the way Satoshi envisioned, it's very intentionally not anonymous because it's an open ledger. Obviously there are tools
on top of Bitcoin that can change that equation, but that's not Bitcoin.
And yes, it's not like people's names are on the chain, but chain analysis is pretty good--and good enough to make it so you cannot be sure. And the way most people use Bitcoin is easily tracked if somebody wanted to.
Bitcoin hasn't lost its decentralization. I think where you you are pointing at is how centralised platform are more preferred to decentralised platforms. The increasing number of individuals using centralized platforms is alarming after the preaching of cryptocurrency goal is to be decentralized.
You won't blame them cause decentralized platforms haven't created ease of use. And centralized platforms are winning everyday.
You're right about individuals adopting bitcoin just to make profit. No doubt. Bitcoin is slowly or maybe it has and it's becoming an asset controlled by the wealthy. It's heartbreaking. Even if the wealthy someone controls the price. It will always go up. In the sense that, there is a fixed supply. That scarcity alone creates more value than any other thing.
I'm pointing that out too (and point it out a lot
), but I'm also trying to make people think about what they mean by "decentralization". If you mean, "it runs on a bunch of servers in geographically separated data centers", then yeah, Bitcoin is "decentralized" but then again a lot of things are like that.
The
original definition of "decentralized" in the context of Bitcoin was a network that could not be easily controlled by the US government because there was no central legal entity or small group of entities to prosecute.
By that definition, Bitcoin is no longer decentralized.
