Topic: Bitcoin decentralization debate - page 3. (Read 597 times)

if I were you and had a friend like that, in fact it is difficult to give an explanation, maybe I will leave it, after giving an explanation according to our understanding, and he doesn't want to open his mind then I think no matter how hard we explain it, the result will be nil. therefore we cannot force other people's thoughts to follow according to our thoughts even though we are right in their statement, anyway bitcoin with a decentralized system has not been legalized in the country, so there is no obligation to have to follow it

having an ability for everyone to see the banking laws is different to who gets to activate new banking laws.
having the ability to see everyone elses bank statements, but still control your own fund spending control is different to who sets the rules of what format of payments or financials tools can be used or not.

when you look at bitcoin history. you will see there has been many conflicts over new rules and every time there actually has been a small elite class of devs that do make the decisions and to activate new rules and new financial tools without needing the majority of users to upgrade first to vote/understand or accept the rules. the backward compatible trick means nodes dont need to be network ready to activate a new rule(that alone is a network security risk). thus new rules can be added without network readiness of majority. this means that a certain group which has dominated development has/can and will continue to change thing without mass consent (consensus) or readiness to verify new data types
this has been proven by their actual events of faking a 100%(unnatural but they managed it) compliance even before the actual network of nodes were even ready to understand and verify the new data.

certain people want others to just trust that devs are good hearted and 'just believe' in humans rather than actually scrutinise and verify code/data. however this has not played out well in the many conflicts where anyone not obeying the religion of core dev allegiance is to be treated as the enemy. thus giving ultimate control to core to be the sole proposer of new rules and sole brand to propogate the new rules without requiring majority users abstaining to vote out any potentially bad buggy/cludgy code

the block data is decentralised.. yes
users private key control of their own fund movement is decentralised.. yes
asic mining is decentralised.. yes

but the rule making decisions is done by half a dozen core dev maintainers who make the decisions and they are a central point of failure. their name 'core' is not by accident. nor is their REKT campaigns against anyone not in their allegiance group brand
we should always be reviewing and scrutinising them. if anyone tells you not to worry and just trust a dev, you are ignoring bitcoins main feature. verify, review and check

The majority of centralized things rarely have the ideal moment. Take into account other coins; occasionally, you'll hear or see news about their teams' personal conflicts, which will have an immediate negative impact on the project before they are resolved and the project is maintained. Has your friend ever observed a similar trend with bitcoin?

In fact, since conspiracy believers are difficult to persuade, you don't need to waste your time trying; all you need to do is do your best to convince your friend that Bitcoin is decentralized and then walk away if he doesn't believe you.

Your best bet would be to use National Banks as example.   Bitcoin, unlike National banks allows everyone to download/access the entire software & its very secure database that runs the Bitcoin system in order to be their own banks and jointly help in controlling & regulating the system, whereas Banks only allow few people, such as the banks heads, the access to entire bank database, in order to control and regulate their banks alone.

The ability to download and run the entire Bitcoin system by anyone anywhere in the World, to jointly & equally regulate the system with thousands of people who have exact copy of the system on their personal computers, and to fully control their money/bitcoins in the system is what makes Bitcoin decentralized. The opposite is the case for banks, as only few people are allowed to run & regulate the banks system on behalf of millions of people who have/own money in the banks.

No one anywhere in the world have ultimate control or power over the Bitcoin System thus decision can't be made centrally, unilaterally or by one/few people for the rest of the Bitcoin Network.. A proof to this is that it cannot be shutdown. It continues to operate in other places if a tyrant stops a host from running the system in one part of the world

Bitcoin really has value only when people are willing to accept it in the purchase and sale of goods or services. Bitcoin's decentralization and independence are strong points, but to really use it, we need validation from others.

Not everyone and everywhere accepts Bitcoin. Some countries have already accepted Bitcoin as a legal payment method, but others are still considering and discussing their approach to cryptocurrencies.

And yes, in order to have an effective discussion about Bitcoin, we need a basic understanding of it. Mastering the principle of decentralization, how money works in the Bitcoin system, is important to avoid misunderstandings and ensure an accurate view of it.

You don't have to convince anybody. Why do you want to convince him anyway? If one thing I learned in this life, that it is almost impossible to convince someone to do/believe something. The harder you try to convince your friend, the more he will think that you are retarded and he will hate you because of it. Is it worth to lose a friend over a financial debate? If you like your friend don't even talk about money when you are together. Talk about girls, vacations, music etc. Money is the #1 reason that makes people hate each other.

That "party" WAS Satoshi. He has left since Gavin Andresen announced that he was going to the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley.

Plus the network was always decentralized after that time when more and more full nodes started joining the network. Tell you friend to read this blog, https://medium.com/hackernoon/bitcoin-miners-beware-invalid-blocks-need-not-apply-51c293ee278b


Paraphrase Satoshi - "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry".

It's his problem.

You know, convincing a person about the decentralized nature of Bitcoin can be a challenging task indeed, especially if they're stubborn on a belief system thats inclined toward the idea of conspiracies. Conspiracy beliefs are, after all, so strong, so pervasive, arent they?

In fact, Bitcoin's decentralized, isnt it? Try telling him about the peer-to-peer transactions. You can explain, in simple words, how decentralization in Bitcoin works; maybe use some examples of other things in life that are decentralized but not necessarily linked to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a network, run by the community, like a community garden, but not really a garden, you know?

The more technical aspects of Bitcoin like consensus algorithms and the proof of work might be too much for him. Maybe try some diagrams or pictures; people sometimes understand better with pictures. Show him, but dont really show him, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin. Its really decentralized, isnt it?

> Bitcoin is decentralized and believes that there is a party or country behind it.

Bitcoins is decentralized, that's true. Nothing wrong with that. It's also anonymous, and also provides you functionalities to be your own bank. What else?

There is a party or group behind the development of Bitcoin? Who knows. I just know that Hal Finney was the one who developed Bitcoin using Satoshi Nakamoto as his pseudo name.

Op first of all you have to re-edit your thread and make some corrections because base on what you are trying to say there are mistakes found in the op. Go and re-read the thread and see the errors. Then when talk of the decentralism of bitcoin, we are talking about the devolution of central or authority control which allows the owners of the wallets to control their funds and that is true but the only part whales or major bitcoin influential people control is the price, now on that they could determine by when the price can go up and down through their purchasing power. Op leave your conspiracy theorist friend and let your investment power compel him to believe you. That is let your prosperity influence him to join.

Don't blame him much because he does not know anything and yet but willing to learn, such people cannot believe there is a way to achieve decentralization than the normal centralized way the government and other institutions controls us abd take custody of what belong to us


We don't know how much you also know about bitcoin to be able to teach someone to fully understand what you're passing across to him, i hope you understand that this aspect of teaching is not everyone that can do it perfectly to convince others the way we want except they just decided to take a look at what we are saying willingly from their mind.


Don't convinced him, time will do so, let him see such of your result than your words, he will change his thoughts by himself with time, though it might have been too late then for him.

If you really want to spend time arguing with him, maybe you can focus on this point first. If his fundamental beliefs can't be changed then it's really useless even if you bring miners or nodes decentralization and so on. It's kinda useless if he just says "well, there's nothing decentralized in this universe" every time you talk to him. On top of that, maybe his understanding of Bitcoin is already different from yours, so there's no middle ground to debate on.

I do agree with others that doing something like this is just a waste of time. The result probably won't change that much regardless of what method or argument you bring to the table.

Because certain trolls on the forum have peculiar definitions of the words "consensus" and "community" (and also believe it means they have to personally approve of any changes before they can go ahead), it's probably best to pin down what this means in practice.  

If you help secure the chain by mining or running a non-mining node to validate and relay transactions, you have a limited amount of influence over consensus.  The code you are running will help determine what the rules of the network are.  Developers only have influence over consensus if people decide to run any new code which allows rules to change.  If any developers were to write code with rule changes which didn't meet the approval of those securing the blockchain, users can simply choose not to run that code.  If no one runs code, it doesn't do anything.  

When anyone claims that developers control consensus, they clearly don't understand this fact.  Or, they do understand it and claim users are merely "sheep" and "fanboys" who run the code without thinking, because they have no real arguments.  Please ignore such obvious trolling.  Some people just can't accept when their ideas were weak and no one shared their view of what Bitcoin ought to be.

Some believe consensus means that everyone has to agree.  This is false.  If a majority of network participants decide to move on, they can and will leave those who resist behind.  If a small minority were able to block or filibuster proposed changes, it would give individuals too much power and pose a threat to decentralisation.  If anyone tries to tell you that changes to the protocol can only occur if they personally agree with it, understand that their mindset is dangerous and poses a serious risk to network governance.  Dictators have no power here and we must always be vigilant to ensure this remains the case.

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FTFY.

What you believe is what matters, not what someone is saying, have you done your own homework on Bitcoin? If No it's better you should do your own research, I have done mine and that's why I am able to know that Bitcoin is truly decentralized, privacy? Not really because privacy belongs to privacy coins like Xmr, Bitcoin is not a privacy coin it's a decentralized coin, there is a different between privacy and decentralized.

Like I've said, you only need to enlighten yourself, by doing your own research on these things, there is no greater understanding than seeking for one, not relying on what others have to say, they might be right or wrong, but it's left for you to find your own answer.

Exit the talk with your friend.

Let's say different. How can your friend convince you to keep educating him about Bitcoin?

If you are not convinced by your friend that your time spent to talk with him is not worthy, why should you continue to make any effort to talk with him?

In fact, your friend does not need you to understand that Bitcoin is decentralized. If he are not deeply in conspiracy, he will easily find facts with search engines.

By saying that he should understand what is the concept of decentralized.

And FYI, even if someone owns 21 million bitcoins still it is decentralized because he can control how he can use it but can never take control over how the network runs because it is entirely different and it's not based on how much stake one has like other shitcoins.

I won't waste my time by convincing anyone if they are not ready to accept the facts over conspiracy theories.

He is not wrong that a country or a group of citizens from a certain country/corporation is probably behind Bitcoin, with the motive to either control the people in the long term, or to bring freedom and alleviate us from the tyranny of central banking. Which one is actually quite hard to say right now.

Yes, Bitcoin is decentralized to an extent. There is still a power hierarchy within the ecosystem which gives more influence to those who either own more coins or have control over hashing power. It's not flawlessly decentralized though it is in the sense that the ledger can not be modified, and probably won't be able to be modified with the current power structure.

Though, to criticize bitcoin and to still use the fiat money system is quite contradictory. Fiat will always be worse than Bitcoin, even if there are ulterior motives behind Bitcoin that we are not aware of.

Whales who have a lot Bitcoin doesn't entirely mean they control 100% of Bitcoin price.

Mining companies which have a huge hash rate doesn't entirely mean they able to perform 51% attack or prioritizing their transactions to be included in the next block by paying cheaper fees.

Government which ban their citizen to not buy, sell or hold Bitcoin doesn't entirely mean they able to stop every citizen to not buy, sell or hold Bitcoin since they have an another option.

So, which part is look centralized and would stop Bitcoin? none.

I agree but that doesn't mean you have to ignore them, yes some of them are absurd on paper but when some of them are proven, we always end up regretting not believing about it. Remember the conspiracy that the US government is involved in funding rebellions in Central and South America? Turned out to be true and they're funded through drug trafficking, they even discredited the investigative reporter that uncovered the conspiracy and even staged his suicide. It's a bit of both though, either you're pretentious about your argument because you don't know how to properly argue your points and you end up berating the person who talks about those conspiracy thinking you're high and mighty or you're just blissfully ignorant.

Well, for such type of people, I do not give myself much stress trying to convince them, i will just allow him to wallow in his unbelieve, i believe he at least own a smart phone  and has some internet connection, allow him to do the research himself, if at the end of the day, he still wont believe that bitcoin is fully decentralized,, then that is his cup of tea, if his unbelieve is going to make him not to invest in bitcoin, that is his missed opportunity as well, we have many of his type on this forum today who are full or regret, simply because they came across bitcoin years ago when bitcoin was worth almost nothing, they had the resources to invest but didn't simply because they did not believe bitcoin will worth anything in the future, they came back years later to discover that bitcoin is now a currency with multi billions of dollars in market capitalization.

So just allow anyone who refuses to believe, at least, not like anyone is going to pay you if you find a way to convince him or any other person who have refused to believe.