Total BS: "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments"

[BlackHatCoiner]

The trading system has centralization issues but you exaggerate enormously. Bitcoin would be totally fine if all US exchanges went offline. And the ETFs do not count because there's physical delivery.

OK, it may be the first and last time that I'll have to agree with Legi more on this one. Bitcoin would certainly not "die" in a case where all the US exchanges were shut down, but considering the entire infrastructure is primarily American, and most liquidity is sitting on American capital, if those exchanges somehow disappeared, it'd certainly hurt the price for a very long time. Liquidity is what's keeping the bear market from turning into a -95% since ATH. If there's no liquidity, we should expect bitcoin to drop at those levels, for a long time.

[legiteum]

But even with self-custody, you still need to trade it somehow in order to use it for your own life. And self-custody has it's own problems, and one can easily "lose control" if your physical keys are lost or stolen.

That is OT. There's P2P trading and Bitcoin is made for self-custody.

At some point, in order for money to be useful for something, you need to trade it for something tangible. That's the whole idea.

And an asset that cannot be moved easily is also an asset that isn't worth very much, relatively speaking.

So you live in a shack in the middle of the forest

Opposition supporters in countries like Russia, Cuba, Belarus, etc. don't live in shacks. Much less those under pressure by the provincial "caudillos" I mentioned.

We were talking about the US going down the drain, as I understood it. We can talk about other countries that have serious problems today, but two things: 1) those countries probably don't amount to much of the Bitcoin market cap; 2) those countries benefit from a USA / western civilization that is still very much intact (networks, liquid markets, financial structures, etc.). Take the USA off the map the internet in general would not be the same, let alone Bitcoin. And you are talking about a catastrophe that would probably make whatever is happening with Bitcoin the least of your worries.

How? Again, governments can control anything they want.

No. Look at what happened in Bangladesh for example. Or some years ago in Ukraine, or the GDR, or the Soviet Union. Revolutions are possible. In addition, most authoritarian government's wet dream is not to be the second Hitler but instead a benevolent paternal figure. Like Atatürk for example. Or the Chinese government. Yes they have control. But scare tactics are often better than brute force for them.

Again, if you are seriously talking about civil war in the United States you are probably not talking about a civilization that has a working internet, at very least.

And governments have about 127 other levers they can pull besides the transfer of currency value. You don't see armies bombing the enemy's central bank, they go after energy, networks, food supply, etc. etc. Putting down a revolution involves... kinetic action, long story short.

When there's a working USA and banking system and all of the stuff, then other countries can leverage all of that infrastructure, but if you are talking about the US (and presumably the western world since it's all so interconnected), it's a completely different (and rather unthinkable) situation.

No. I'm talking about the US government transforming into something between Erdogan and Putin. Not Pol Pot or Hitler. MAGAs would perhaps even like that if the government is on their side.

If the US government was intact, then you could compare Bitcoin (or whatever it was they didn't want) to totally illegal things like child porn networks. Yes, they exist, even with massive government crackdowns, but they are extremely small because they are underground and cannot benefit from the scale you get from civilization. Maybe there would be a "Bitcoin" in this scenario, but it would be extremely small compared to what we have today.

Sure they can. If your transaction is going through the system, the transaction can be stolen or lost. You are adding a layer of software that can do whatever it wants to do with your Bitcoin.

Tell me how this works in the case of Ark.

Insofar as the L2 handles the transaction, then it... handles the transaction. That means the L2 exposes the user to all of its risks. Saying, "it doesn't handle the transaction because it hands the transaction to Bitcoin" is saying it handles the transaction. It means that if the L2 is compromised, then you are compromised. All L2s have this problem. It doesn't matter if the exposure is "only a few seconds" or even a few milliseconds, exposure is exposure.

The Ark protocol depends on an Ark Server. That's a technical system that can be compromised, etc. and needs to be scrutinized exactly as you scrutinize the L1. You can say that the Ark server is perfect because it has X, Y and Z--but then why use the L1 at all? You can't have it both ways with L2s.

[BitBrainers]

Yeah, I'll give you that, there's no law like that on the books and it's never been tested, so we're both speculating here. But say it passes. Congress names codebase X the only legal Bitcoin. The ETFs and Strategy and the brokers fall in line because they have to. What they're holding is keys to coins on a chain. A law renaming things in the US doesn't move those coins onto a different chain and it doesn't reach the miners and nodes and holders outside the US still running the original one.

So you get the regulated US side pointing at the legal fork, and the actual weight of the network still sitting on the chain the rest of the world runs. That isn't the US controlling Bitcoin. It's the US building a fenced-off version while the global chain keeps going without it. More like a capital control than a takeover. The fork history points the same way. Every contentious split, the value stayed with whatever chain the global market kept treating as Bitcoin, not the one with the most backing shoved behind it. A US law is heavier than anything BSV had. But it's still weight pushing on a network that doesn't only live in America.

You could say it gets down to semantics, but it's more than that: it's money. If the "hard-core religious fork" has a market cap of $1 million and the US government-approved fork is at $1 trillion, the market just answered the question for everybody.

And this is the way to look at this, not individuals, not population, not numbers of individual countries: follow the money. The US alone would control the bulk of Bitcoin's market cap, and they could easily influence far more of it. And the scenario here would be a herd mentality because people's #1 concern (outside of hard-cores in this forum for instance) would be the preservation of their investment in BTC. Any network targeted and outlawed by the US government is going to have limited appeal.

Follow the money, sure. But the money is already on the chain. A US law can rename what American entities are allowed to call Bitcoin. It can't move the coins, and it can't reach the holders and miners outside US jurisdiction who already own them. So the trillion doesn't jump to codebase X. It splits. US venues point at the legal fork, the rest of the market keeps pricing what it already holds. Two prices and a fence, not a clean handover.

That's the US capturing its own market. Real, worth taking seriously. Not the same as setting Bitcoin's global price by law. BSV had backing too and still died, because value never followed the name. Yours is heavier but it's the same test: a name doesn't move money unless holders actually migrate. A law can't make them.