Topic: The Myth of Cryptocurrencies Decentralization about to fade out? (Read 297 times)

Google, Amazon and Facebook are in cahoots with the US government, so they wouldn't do anything which the US government would not approve. If they would do their cryptocurrencies NOW they would jeopardize the USD, because they would get mass adoption and thus a value too huge not to endanger the status quo. But in future, things may change.

I believe that Google, Amazon and/or Facebook will not create their own currencies because of the regulatory burdens that would be placed on them as a result.

You are having a point here. But if you add this to the fact that as soon as Google, Amazon and/or Facebook will come forward with their own centralized currencies the sheeple will jump on their vagon, you'll have a nice picture of what's up to come.

I'll never touch government backed crypto, digital fiat, they can control and manipulate. The more community based a project and the fewer big players in a project the better. Will bitcoin become the new gold standard against which all other government cryptos will be evaluated?

In my opinion, the biggest threat of centralization is the popular practice of letting custodians, such as Coinbase and major exchanges, hold your coins. These entities control your coins more than any miners ever will.

There is no need to panic. Cryptocurrencies may not be as decentralized as you had hoped, but they can still succeed.

A person holding 1 million BTC has no more control over Bitcoin than a person holding 1 BTC, except for the fact that they could potentially kill it (and lose all of their money in the process).

Anyone with access to cheap electricity can mine profitably regardless of the size of their operation. Having a large operation does help because of economies of scale, but it is not clear that there is a problem.

Furthermore, the largest miners are mining pools, and they are not a threat to decentralization. Mining pools may consist of hundreds or thousands of participants who can join or leave at will. We have seen in the past that when a mining pool becomes a problem, the participants will leave and the pool will disappear.

The manipulation of markets by whales is a myth. Nobody has ever produced any evidence of this occurring in any meaningful way. It's a great story, but so far it is fiction and not fact.

Furthermore, pump-and-dumps are not done by whales (it would be far too risky). That belief is a myth perpetuated by a lack of understanding of how a pump-and-dump works. Pump-and-dumps are done by scammers running "pump groups". Who needs a whale when you have a thousands of victims following your "signals"?

Regardless, manipulation of markets has no effect on decentralization, except that manipulation could be used to kill a coin.

I think this is a real issue. A currency depends on the network effect to maintain its utility. If people choose centralized currencies over decentralized currencies, then the decentralized currencies will struggle to survive.

Why would people buy centralized coins from a bank though? Why would anyone want a crypto made and controlled by a bank?

Society is built on myths. Nothing is ever what it is supposed to be, and you realize it as soon as you learn how to look through the curtain of false narratives. Democracy itself is just a myth. And in the realm of cryptocurrencies, there too everything is just a myth. "Cryptocurrencies" are mostly just casino-coins, which are not adopted by people for their tech or for buying things with them but just for speculative games played inside the myth of what they are supposed to be. In the end, we discover that also decentralization is less and less real, and more and more just a myth.

The people around Bitcoin has been increasing a lot and we know that the rich would want to get richer and lower class gets just stays there. From what I understand Bitcoin is to prevent the middle men so that it would be peer-to-peer transactions, and those middleman are the banks, corporations, Etc. They were threatened by what Bitcoin is trying to do where there could be equal things when you have Bitcoin and it makes transactions easier. But the thing is, the banks are making their own and making themselves the controller again that's why I agree that almost the decentralization that Bitcoin is offering is fading away. Probably we need a new coin or something that could really make people equal and really decentralized to stay away from Middle Men.

We all know the theory: Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are good because they are decentralized, and so on, blah blah blah.
However, as times goes by Bitcoin & C. seem to be less and less decentralized, as big whales become ever bigger while they manage to swallow rising percentages of the coins' supplies, and as the serious mining is concentrating in lesser and lesser hands, those few who can afford gigantic mining farms with cheap energy cost.
Decentralization is thus becoming a myth. We all can see how the cryptocurrency markets can be manipulated by whales (with their infamous Pump & Dumps) much easier than other classical markets like Forex or WallStreet, a further sytmptom of an invisible centralization.
And now the news has arrived of countries willing to do their own cryptocurrencies. Venezuela has just launched the Petro, Iran is planning its coin and apparently so does Russia - and I'd bet many more countries will soon follow. These currencies are all likely to be centralized.
Moreover, banks will probably launch their own centralized cryptocurrencies, and so will corporations. The future looks like a place with more and more centralized cryptocurrencies in competition and less and less truly decentralized cryptocurrencies, as Bitcoin & C. end up in the hands of lesser and lesser people - the super-whales. Which will be the implications of all this?
Your thoughts about?