Total BS: "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments"

[legiteum]

I think a single government, even the US one, cannot control Bitcoin, if we take out completely irrelevant (because of how unlikely they are) scenarios like "the US buying all/most Bitcoins into their strategic reserve" or something like that.

They wouldn't need to buy a single sat. The US has legal dominion over most of the holders of Bitcoin, so they just order those people to do what they want. If CoinBase was faced with either shutdown by the US government or compliance, they would choose compliance. (And let's be real here: anything that the US government did would be done in concert with major players like CoinBase, since they and others like them would be the ones lobbying the government to make the changes they wanted).

The "trademark" issue imo would also be irrelevant. The "real Bitcoin fork" would then simply be assigned a "neutral" name like "Peer to Peer Coin" or "Decentral Coin" on US exchanges, and 96% of the world population would have a good laugh about the MESA-style IQ of the US government and their citizens, because of course that would give competitive advantage as a gift to ETFs and other financial actors outside of the US, because they don't have to obey that rule. No more "crypto capital of the world"

You don't think thousands of products calling the US-approved network, "Bitcoin", and being forced to call non-approved fork(s), "something else" wouldn't have an effect on consumer investor adoption? Really?

And is that the 96% of the world's population that controls 2% of the world's resources you are talking about there? 

(And let's not even talk about the extreme concentration of BTC itself ).

Money is the only serious driver here, not warm bodies.

The US could easily control the market cap for Bitcoin by threatening to cut off almost all of it's major investors, and virtually all BTC holders only care about the value of their bags, so the US could easily use this leverage to make these holders do anything they wanted. If your choice is, "use the US-approved fork and your net worth is $1 million; use the non-US approved fork and your net worth is $1.98", guess what everybody would choose.

[Mia Chloe]

~snip

Actually the fact is for a context like this this idea of control is pretty much relative. We already know undeniably that bitcoin is built on a decentralized network but actually when we refer to the government controlling it we are not basically referring to a change in the already existing protocols and schematics.

For example bitcoin is mostly related to finance and the government has a huge control over finance so they can also indirectly dictate how the people at the base level of this decentralization use it which is also a form of indirect control too.

[serjent05]

The US could easily control the market cap for Bitcoin by threatening to cut off almost all of it's major investors, and virtually all BTC holders only care about the value of their bags, so the US could easily use this leverage to make these holders do anything they wanted. If your choice is, "use the US-approved fork and your net worth is $1 million; use the non-US approved fork and your net worth is $1.98", guess what everybody would choose.

Interesting, looking back at the history of Bitcoin, can't find anywhere about US government promoting Bitcoin nor any help from its office for Bitcoin to take footing.   All I read and heard is, independent individual making great contribution for the success of Bitcoin and why it is in its place right now.

What I see is that the US is just taking advantage of Bitcoin's popularity after it was established.  It makes sense that withdrawal of the US government will somehow shake the Bitcoin market but isn't this happen when China took their support off to Bitcoin years ago?  And yet look where Bitcoin is now?  Indeed US is a powerful country, but the world does not consist of the US only, there are lots of factions that are actually neutral, and some were even hostile to US implementations.

[Smartprofit]

Yes, the US is a large country, but there are many different countries in the world (both large and small)... The populations of these countries can use Bitcoin without any regard for the US government. 🙋

Furthermore, in my opinion, if institutional players stop manipulating the Bitcoin price and issuing "paper Bitcoin" (derivatives), it's entirely possible that the Bitcoin price will rise and the number of full nodes on the network will increase.

After all, in 2021, that is, five years ago, the Bitcoin price was $69,000, which is higher than it is now. And back then, there wasn't such a strong influence on the Bitcoin price from Michael Saylor, spot ETFs, BlackRock, or Coinbase...

In my opinion, institutional investors aren't needed for Bitcoin to thrive.  There are plenty of wealthy people in the world who would be happy to buy a decentralized global digital currency.💁

[legiteum]

The US could easily control the market cap for Bitcoin by threatening to cut off almost all of it's major investors, and virtually all BTC holders only care about the value of their bags, so the US could easily use this leverage to make these holders do anything they wanted. If your choice is, "use the US-approved fork and your net worth is $1 million; use the non-US approved fork and your net worth is $1.98", guess what everybody would choose.

What I see is that the US is just taking advantage of Bitcoin's popularity after it was established.  It makes sense that withdrawal of the US government will somehow shake the Bitcoin market but isn't this happen when China took their support off to Bitcoin years ago? 

Investors in China never held most of Bitcoin. US investors, and investors in US allies, do. Not to mention all of the companies that bring investment dollars into BTC are almost all American.

China has very little leverage over Bitcoin. The US has total leverage over Bitcoin.

Yes, the US is a large country, but there are many different countries in the world (both large and small)... The populations of these countries can use Bitcoin without any regard for the US government. 🙋

LOL, population isn't money. Most of the world's investment dollars for Bitcoin comes from the US.

In my opinion, institutional investors aren't needed for Bitcoin to thrive.  There are plenty of wealthy people in the world who would be happy to buy a decentralized global digital currency.💁

Take away the retail apps, major investors like Saylor, Musk, and Trump, take away the ETFs, take away the major wallet apps, take away all of the fintech companies that support the Bitcoin ecosystem and you'll have... a fork that won't be worth 1% of what the US-sanctioned fork is worth.

The US holds the value of BTC hostage, and since almost all holders of BTC only care about the value of their bags*, they could effectively control Bitcoin if they wanted to.

(* I get that many of the 1,327 people in the world who hold Bitcoin and actually don't care about the price of BTC are frequent posters here on bitcointalk, but we're not the real world here people!  ).

[Patikno]

Please stop saying, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments", because... it absolutely can, and to some extent already is.

The scenario the OP mentioned above is extremely unlikely to occur. If it were that easy, governments would have been able to control Bitcoin long ago.

In reality, governments currently cannot control Bitcoin at its decentralized level, and they can only regulate it centrally. Suppose a government were to launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin. Wouldn't they be hurting themselves? In that scenario, they would be attempting to crash the Bitcoin price, and their Bitcoin holdings would experience extreme volatility (if it occurred). Furthermore, the government would have to provide extremely expensive hashrate computing power, which would drain their funds. So, isn't that scenario highly unlikely?, and wouldn't they end up losing more than they gain? Regardless, I think the government would have to think thousand times before doing this, which would make it difficult to implement.

By the way, are you aware of the Monero delisting from major exchanges? , and are you aware that the delisting occurred due to government regulation? So, I am asking you, is Monero destroyed? You can see it, and I think you will understand what I mean.

[rat03gopoh]

China has very little leverage over Bitcoin. The US has total leverage over Bitcoin.

It would only take one sentence from their leaders to change this statement (a more plausible scenario, of course): "We will allow Bitcoin-related activities to resume under certain conditions." I don't need to explain much about how they have dominated the crypto market for years. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1544612321004189

[PepeLapiu]

In reality, governments currently cannot control Bitcoin at its decentralized level

You would have to define "decentralized". Surely you don't mean the handful of pools that control 90% of what goes into every block.

Surely, you don't mean the full KYC centralized handful of exchanges heavily regulated by government.

Surely you don't mean the devs at core who controlled what goes into 99% of the nodes until last year. And they still have a 75% near monopoly.

So what exactly do you mean by "decentralized"?

Maybe you mean the 90,000 nodes?

Nah, surely you don't mean those. The coretards tell us they don't matter at all and that only "economic nodes" matter. And when you dig into it, they are basically saying that only big centralized exchange nodes matter.

So, what part of bitcoin is decentralized exactly?

[legiteum]

Please stop saying, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments", because... it absolutely can, and to some extent already is.

The scenario the OP mentioned above is extremely unlikely to occur. If it were that easy, governments would have been able to control Bitcoin long ago.

Bitcoin has been defacto legal in the USA since the beginning, the the US government has never expressed any serious interest in shutting down Bitcoin. The US president owns a half billion dollars in Bitcoin, and the crypto industry is the #1 political donor in the US.

By the way, are you aware of the Monero delisting from major exchanges? , and are you aware that the delisting occurred due to government regulation? So, I am asking you, is Monero destroyed? You can see it, and I think you will understand what I mean.

The OP is not talking about "destroying" Bitcoin, it's talking about modifying it in a way that the US Congress wants it modified, i.e. controlling it. It is debunking the myth that it's impossible that Bitcoin could be controlled by governments. It can be, if they wanted to. They just don't want to right now.

As for Monero, this makes my point for me. Monero's market cap is ~$6B, which is 200x smaller than Bitcoin's. If the US declared the current fork of the Bitcoin codebase illegal, it could lose 99.5% of its value: there's no way any serious company or investor would follow the illegal fork and lose 99.5% of their money.

[pooya87]

Yes, Uncle Sam could tell the big miners based in the USA that they have to ban all Iranian UTXOs. Or tell then to accept only KYC'd coins. And the USA based miners would likely comply.

AFAIK what they banned (claimed to have seized, whether it was real or not remains to be investigated) was any coins Iranians had on centralized exchanges and in custodial accounts that fell under US jurisdiction. UTXO is not something you can link to people from any country.
As for miners, the US regime has been enforcing censorship laws on their miners for years with the fake concept of "taint" and other stuff. Remember MARA pool celebrated having censored transactions and mined regime approved block and then their stocks tanked hard? That was 5 years ago!

You are just stumbling upon a problem that Bitcoin has already addressed and fixed from day one: decentralization prevents censorship. That is why I keep saying 90%. A small portion of the network can always do weird things and go against the principles but the majority cannot.

The shittokens that the Epstein class of people you keep namedropping here created is not worth anything and nobody care about using that. If they could push for anything they would have done it for what they already 100% control not for something they can never control and will be so controversial.

Not to mention that the weak US regime has not even been capable of preventing the world from dumping the dollar which is far more important than your

I think you responded to the wrong thread here. Nobody here was talking about shittokens or Epstein in this thread....

I think you forgot what the thread was about yourself. The people you keep namedropping here are all in the Epstein files and are globally recognized as the Epstein Class.

What you are describing here (the centralized forked coin created and controlled by the US regime) is also the textbook definition of a shitfork similar to bcash and bcash-SV and hundreds of other copycat coins that forked out of bitcoin and then tried to convince people that their shitcoin is the "real bitcoin" and prevent people from using anything else.

Your account is moderately new so you may not know these things but this is not the first time someone comes up with these theories. They have tried it in the past too like in 2017 when bitcoin.com which is a major site in bitcoin world, started listing shitfork coin known as bcash as "bitcoin"!
What you are describing here is exactly the same as 2017 shitfork attacks only at a slightly larger scale but with the same exact doomed fate. In fact I'd say its failure could be much harsher than bcash since people tend to believe someone like Roger Ver when he was pretending to have "real bitcoin" more than the centralized authoritarian US regime that seeks supreme control and is not shy about admitting it either.

The OP is not talking about "destroying" Bitcoin, it's talking about modifying it in a way that the US Congress wants it modified, i.e. controlling it.

Aaah. That clarifies a lot about your whole topic here and explains why whatever everyone says in this topic gets past you.
That little information shows that you still don't understand what Bitcoin stands for and think centralized it and being controlled by a centralized authority is not equal its "destruction". But that's not correct. Bitcoin is Bitcoin as long as it is decentralized and is not controlled by a centralized authority. The moment that changes, it the moment it is destroyed and dead.

P.S. Here is something interesting to ponder about... If some day any regime takes over Bitcoin, whether it is US or North Korea, people would stop using it but it will not disappear. It may even be traded or invested in, just like US treasury bonds are being invested in or the US stock market...
This is the interesting part: this is a free world and a new decentralized cryptocurrency will come along and take over and dominate the market very quickly too because it doesn't need to go through the decade long adoption bitcoin went through. It will come along and in matter of months or maybe even a year tops, reaches Bitcoin level dominance and all the tax payers money the US regime wasted on a hostile take over of Bitcoin will be for naught.
This is why in my first reply I said they will not take over like what you explained. that would be too stupid.

[OcTradism]

What you are describing here (the centralized forked coin created and controlled by the US regime) is also the textbook definition of a shitfork similar to bcash and bcash-SV and hundreds of other copycat coins that forked out of bitcoin and then tried to convince people that their shitcoin is the "real bitcoin" and prevent people from using anything else.

Bitcoin is Bitcoin, it is unique and there will be only one Bitcoin project.

Any projects that were and will be forked from Bitcoin project's source code will fail and die. Their founders, team members will either abandon their projects after scamming people, getting some money because they have no ideas for development of their fork projects. In addition, they tend to enjoy their life, and wait for other opportunities of creating their other Bitcoin forks in the future. They will not waste too much time for development of their fork projects.

How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!!

[d5000]

They wouldn't need to buy a single sat. The US has legal dominion over most of the holders of Bitcoin, so they just order those people to do what they want. If CoinBase was faced with either shutdown by the US government or compliance, they would choose compliance.

You drastically exaggerate the US's influence here

US holders concentrate probably about 40% of the Bitcoins. See for example this study. In mining, it's dominance is about 35%, but it's institutionals like the Coinbase you mention who drive the number much higher than the US share of the world's GDP (around 25%). It's a lot but it's not most (with the exception that if you wanted to say a "relative" majority, where you would be correct, but that would mean the dominance is limited).

That's obviously because of the Wall Street dominance on finance. The US government may have a disproportionate influence on the ~2-3 million of BTC hold by the ETF and other financial companies.

But the catch is elsewhere: retail holders. The US dominates here too, but do you think the US Bitcoiners are the most loyal group of citizens regarding anything "the State" "orders" them?

I don't think so ...

You don't think thousands of products calling the US-approved network, "Bitcoin", and being forced to call non-approved fork(s), "something else" wouldn't have an effect on consumer investor adoption? Really?

Yes, because that change would be highly publicized and ridiculed in the whole world (at least among 96% of the world population). And thus (again except extremely unlikely scenarios like an authoritarian World Government ruled by the US) most people would know exactly what the "Real" Bitcoin is.

Most US Retail bitcoiners would happily embrace the "Peer to Peer Decentralized Coin" or whatever it'd be called on their local exchanges. And they would hate their government for the move to change the name. They may even vote the opposition in the next elections.

There are lots of very popular online crypto services in the world banned in the US  - and we 96% already have a good laugh about that. If they ban the "Bitcoin" ticker for the Bitcoin chain the US government would become a total caricature.

[legiteum]

What you are describing here (the centralized forked coin created and controlled by the US regime) is also the textbook definition of a shitfork similar to bcash and bcash-SV and hundreds of other copycat coins that forked out of bitcoin and then tried to convince people that their shitcoin is the "real bitcoin" and prevent people from using anything else.

Since you were there, can you verify for me that bcash was:

1. Backed by the major Bitcoin holders like Musk, Trump and Saylor?

2. Made legal by the US Congress as "Bitcoin", wherein anything else would be illegal to use that word to describe the fork?

3. Backed by every major broker, wallet, app, and the ETFs?

4. Were bcash's competitors made illegal by the US Congress?

If all of those things were true, then yes, color me surprise that "bcash" didn't take off.

But since none of those things were true of bcash, I'm not sure what this has to do with the OP...

The OP is not talking about "destroying" Bitcoin, it's talking about modifying it in a way that the US Congress wants it modified, i.e. controlling it.

Aaah. That clarifies a lot about your whole topic here and explains why whatever everyone says in this topic gets past you.
That little information shows that you still don't understand what Bitcoin stands for [...]

Bitcoin stands for people making money by buying Bitcoin low and selling it high. You are right, I am not a Bitcoin religious hard-core, but I am also like 99% of Bitcoin holders, too. Nobody cares about that hokey religious stuff anymore .

P.S. Here is something interesting to ponder about... If some day any regime takes over Bitcoin, whether it is US or North Korea, people would stop using it but it will not disappear.

Nope, there will always be that codebase sitting there on Github, so that code will live forever and ever.

But the money connected to the codebase will be long gone...

You drastically exaggerate the US's influence here

US holders concentrate probably about 40% of the Bitcoins. See for example this study. In mining, it's dominance is about 35%, but it's institutionals like the Coinbase you mention who drive the number much higher than the US share of the world's GDP (around 25%). It's a lot but it's not most (with the exception that if you wanted to say a "relative" majority, where you would be correct, but that would mean the dominance is limited).

That's obviously because of the Wall Street dominance on finance. The US government may have a disproportionate influence on the ~2-3 million of BTC hold by the ETF and other financial companies.

But the catch is elsewhere: retail holders. The US dominates here too, but do you think the US Bitcoiners are the most loyal group of citizens regarding anything "the State" "orders" them?

I guess there's no way to know exactly, but surely all of the major companies like CoinBase, Binance, etc. etc. and now all of the major banks and brokers who are all hawking Bitcoin, along with all of the ETFs. And then there's Musk, Saylor and Trump... and the Wilklevoss twins, and probably a bunch of other Americans who are incredibly influential. And of course the US itself exerts influence over many countries all over the world (and this is to say nothing of a standard created among, say, the EU+US for instance).

Remember that all that needs to happen is that the Proposal scares the market participants (very short list) into accepting their fork and taking 99% of the money with them. The US making the current Bitcoin fork illegal would at least drop the price by 90%, which would go a long way to scaring everybody into accepting it.

You don't think thousands of products calling the US-approved network, "Bitcoin", and being forced to call non-approved fork(s), "something else" wouldn't have an effect on consumer investor adoption? Really?

Yes, because that change would be highly publicized and ridiculed in the whole world (at least among 96% of the world population).

LOL, 96% of the population and 5% of the investment in BTC. This isn't a numbers game. The only thing that matters is money, not warm bodies. If you can point to major holders in other countries that actually could make a difference, then fine, but one billion peasants in upper China aren't going to move the market like one Michael Saylor can.

Most US Retail bitcoiners would happily embrace the "Peer to Peer Decentralized Coin" or whatever it'd be called on their local exchanges. And they would hate their government for the move to change the name. They may even vote the opposition in the next elections.

Or maybe they are CoinBase+Binance+others who helped write the legislation. This is how politics in the USA works. Retailers would be forced to choose--and if they proposal was one that made them more money, why wouldn't they choose it? Remember these aren't hard-core religious fanatics here, these are just companies who make money (and provide a centralized service for their customers I might add).

There are lots of very popular online crypto services in the world banned in the US  - and we 96% already have a good laugh about that. If they ban the "Bitcoin" ticker for the Bitcoin chain the US government would become a total caricature.

And banned coins in the US like Monero don't even have 1% of the market cap of Bitcoin. That makes my point for me perfectly.

Regardless, we're arguing about specific scenarios, but the OP's point was simple: a government takeover is absolutely possible, so stop saying that Bitcoin is magically impervious to the influence of major governments, because it's not. It's a product in the marketplace like any other.

[Smartprofit]

The US could easily control the market cap for Bitcoin by threatening to cut off almost all of it's major investors, and virtually all BTC holders only care about the value of their bags, so the US could easily use this leverage to make these holders do anything they wanted. If your choice is, "use the US-approved fork and your net worth is $1 million; use the non-US approved fork and your net worth is $1.98", guess what everybody would choose.

What I see is that the US is just taking advantage of Bitcoin's popularity after it was established.  It makes sense that withdrawal of the US government will somehow shake the Bitcoin market but isn't this happen when China took their support off to Bitcoin years ago? 

Investors in China never held most of Bitcoin. US investors, and investors in US allies, do. Not to mention all of the companies that bring investment dollars into BTC are almost all American.

China has very little leverage over Bitcoin. The US has total leverage over Bitcoin.

Yes, the US is a large country, but there are many different countries in the world (both large and small)... The populations of these countries can use Bitcoin without any regard for the US government. 🙋

LOL, population isn't money. Most of the world's investment dollars for Bitcoin comes from the US.

In my opinion, institutional investors aren't needed for Bitcoin to thrive.  There are plenty of wealthy people in the world who would be happy to buy a decentralized global digital currency.💁

Take away the retail apps, major investors like Saylor, Musk, and Trump, take away the ETFs, take away the major wallet apps, take away all of the fintech companies that support the Bitcoin ecosystem and you'll have... a fork that won't be worth 1% of what the US-sanctioned fork is worth.

The US holds the value of BTC hostage, and since almost all holders of BTC only care about the value of their bags*, they could effectively control Bitcoin if they wanted to.

(* I get that many of the 1,327 people in the world who hold Bitcoin and actually don't care about the price of BTC are frequent posters here on bitcointalk, but we're not the real world here people!  ).

I think you didn't read my post carefully. 🙋

I mentioned that in 2021, that is, five years ago, the price of Bitcoin was $69,000. Five years ago, there was no President Donald Trump, no spot Bitcoin ETFs, no Michael Saylor ambitions, no BlackRock acquisitions... In other words, there was no American investment in Bitcoin, and yet the price was $69,000. And that's a fact. Let's adjust the price for inflation over five years, and we'll see what the price would be today without the intervention of American institutional investors. I'm confident the price would be over $100,000.

When you write that the price of Bitcoin without the participation of American institutional investors would be 1% of its current price (i.e., $690), I find that a very strange statement.  Regarding the hard fork... If American institutional investors initiate a hard fork to create a new Bitcoin fork (an "American" Bitcoin), I think the American Bitcoin (the new fork) would be worth $690. A truly decentralized Bitcoin might initially drop in price, but then the price will recover, and then even rise. Because investors will sell American Bitcoin and buy truly decentralized Bitcoin.

Do you think the world is very fond of BlackRock and Donald Trump? Actually, no... For example, the British aren't thrilled that American funds are actively buying up real estate in London.

[legiteum]

I mentioned that in 2021, that is, five years ago, the price of Bitcoin was $69,000. Five years ago, there was no President Donald Trump, no spot Bitcoin ETFs, no Michael Saylor ambitions, no BlackRock acquisitions... In other words, there was no American investment in Bitcoin, and yet the price was $69,000. And that's a fact. Let's adjust the price for inflation over five years, and we'll see what the price would be today without the intervention of American institutional investors. I'm confident the price would be over $100,000.

That was then. Whatever forces that were propping up the price to $69k back then are long gone now, obviously. Now the price is based on a mainstream connection to US and western financial markets. Perhaps the whales all sold for $69k and the western financial markets absorbed it all. Regardless, now the thing that supports Bitcoin's price is access to these markets, not... whatever was around 5 years ago.

Last week Michael Saylor sold a few hundred BTC and the price plummeted by 15%. A US law crafted by lobbyists from the biggest Bitcoin brokers and players and backed by Saylor, Musk, and other big influencers would be a thousand times bigger event.

And meanwhile, the US-backed Bitcoin network would natively handle every single transaction on the planet, replacing credit cards and payment apps. Bitcoin would suddenly be used by almost everybody, every day. That's what changing the architecture would do, so it's not like this fork would be universally hated like everybody seems to think it would.

But this is all just an example. The OP's point was that Bitcoin can be controlled by governments, and it can be if they actually wanted to. They haven't wanted to so far, which is the only reason they haven't done something like this.

[pooya87]

1. Backed by the major Bitcoin holders like Musk, Trump and Saylor?
2. Made legal by the US Congress as "Bitcoin", wherein anything else would be illegal to use that word to describe the fork?
3. Backed by every major broker, wallet, app, and the ETFs?
4. Were bcash's competitors made illegal by the US Congress?
If all of those things were true, then yes, color me surprise that "bcash" didn't take off.
But since none of those things were true of bcash, I'm not sure what this has to do with the OP...

The principle is the same: A centralized shitcoin created from a copy of bitcoin's blockchain and source code controlled by a centralized entity.
The "backers" of bcash weren't some random dudes on the internet. It was the billionaire Jihan Wu, the owner of one of largest bitcoin mining pools and co-founder of Bitmain (you know, the major company that manufactures almost all bitcoin ASICs) + Roger Ver the owner of bitcoin.com and a scammer who some claimed owned 400k bitcoins + a lot of other big players.

Bitcoin stands for people making money by buying Bitcoin low and selling it high. You are right, I am not a Bitcoin religious hard-core, but I am also like 99% of Bitcoin holders, too. Nobody cares about that hokey religious stuff anymore .

I know, it is obvious that you are a centralization fan who says "let the government control everything we have" guy who is pro-censorship and surveillance too.
That's fine but majority of people aren't like that though.

[legiteum]

1. Backed by the major Bitcoin holders like Musk, Trump and Saylor?
2. Made legal by the US Congress as "Bitcoin", wherein anything else would be illegal to use that word to describe the fork?
3. Backed by every major broker, wallet, app, and the ETFs?
4. Were bcash's competitors made illegal by the US Congress?
If all of those things were true, then yes, color me surprise that "bcash" didn't take off.
But since none of those things were true of bcash, I'm not sure what this has to do with the OP...

The principle is the same: A centralized shitcoin created from a copy of bitcoin's blockchain and source code controlled by a centralized entity.

Sure, but the context is completely different, so the conclusions are therefore different.

For instance, Google would have failed had they started the company in 1978, long before the Internet because popular. Duh.

The "backers" of bcash weren't some random dudes on the internet. It was the billionaire Jihan Wu, [...]

As rich as he was, he was not the US government. This is not even remotely the same thing.

I know, it is obvious that you are a centralization fan who says "let the government control everything we have" guy who is pro-censorship and surveillance too.
That's fine but majority of people aren't like that though.

LOL, calm down, dude. You are letting your emotions get the better of you .

Obviously I'm not any of those things you said, but even more obviously, I seriously doubt our readers here want to read about "me".

But back to the subject of the OP...

Most (virtually all) investors in Bitcoin do so in order to make a profit. I really don't see why that should be controversial, although it's true that the implications could go against one's religion: Bitcoin is worth over $1 trillion because non-religious people buy it, i.e. "Number Go Up". The religion alone is worth 1/10000th of that at best.

[BlackHatCoiner]

What's next? You're gonna say the only reason why shittokens and shitcoins like bcash or bcash-SV aren't taking over bitcoin is because "they don't want to" ROFL.

Basically, he believes that the US government is God and can intervene in the global market to the extent that it can decide what is valuable and what not. By the same line of reasoning, how can you be sure that gold is durable and a good way to store your value, when the US government can confiscate it at any point in time and render it valueless? Historically, holding gold has been illegalized, and gold has been confiscated by all sorts of kings and governments; its value proposition hasn't changed nonetheless.

The real question we have to ask ourselves is why is this person so against the idea of Bitcoin? He's been a spirit of contradiction for over two years now. What's the motive?

[legiteum]

What's next? You're gonna say the only reason why shittokens and shitcoins like bcash or bcash-SV aren't taking over bitcoin is because "they don't want to" ROFL.

Basically, he believes that the US government is God and can intervene in the global market to the extent that it can decide what is valuable and what not. By the same line of reasoning, how can you be sure that gold is durable and a good way to store your value, when the US government can confiscate it at any point in time and render it valueless? Historically, holding gold has been illegalized, and gold has been confiscated by all sorts of kings and governments; its value proposition hasn't changed nonetheless.

Nope, it's not valueless, nor is Bitcoin even though it could be controlled by the US government if they felt like it.

Market value is determined by a bunch of things, but one of the biggest factors is liquidity: something you can't sell (or can't easily sell) is worth far less than something that is easy to sell. A rare Van Gogh painting might be worth $100 million in a highly publicized public auction, and yet that same painting--were it to be stolen, let us say--would trade for a tiny fraction of that on the black market because there are very few buyers.

The illegal fork of the former Bitcoin codebase we're talking about here would certainly be tradable, but it would be vastly less liquid, and thus far less valuable.

The real question we have to ask ourselves is why is this person so against the idea of Bitcoin? He's been a spirit of contradiction for over two years now. What's the motive?

Just shooting the shit, man. You learn a lot by conversing with people who don't necessarily agree with you on everything. Sometimes you learn that you were wrong.

And seriously, if I had some evil plan to "attack Bitcoin" or something, I wouldn't be spending my time writing to some random audience of about 47 people   .

[Myleschetty]

Naturally, if the fork BTC is create an get the attention of other countries, that's fine, but the use of bullying is out of the question.

Sadly, I would say the same thing only a few years ago. But we recently invaded Venezuela in order to steal their oil, so who knows what's possible now.

And keep in mind that countries like the US don't need to send actual missiles to places in order to get them to do what they want. They could just threaten things, both military and economic, or do sanctions, or tariffs, or whatever.

According to my understanding of international law, the use of force against another state is prohibited except in very specific situations. For this reason, the events in Venezuela are legitimate because the US and Venezuela have long maintained close diplomatic and economic ties as significant oil trading partners. They will undoubtedly take action to safeguard their interests, particularly if regard to oil.