Topic: What if they centralized Bitcoin? - page 2. (Read 449 times)

Almost nobody uses Bitcoin in a decentralized way. The evidence from the market is that almost nobody actually cares about that.

The thing that makes Bitcoin have a higher price than other cryptocurrencies like Ether or Monera is the name, "Bitcoin". It's the same reason a t-shirt with "Fruit of the Loom" written on it cost $3.99 at Walmart and the same exact set of molecules goes for $350.00 if it has the name, "Gucci" on it.


As I've said before in The Anon Paradox, there are two kinds of "privacy" people want: privacy from civilians (including companies and criminals) and privacy from governments. Most people want and need the former, but only a tiny few people need to keep something so secret that even a direct government subpoena cannot discover it. Most people aren't interested in going against their own government.

Don't get me wrong, I started this thread as a thought experiment, but the arguments in favor are stronger than I thought they would be...

Please stop daydreaming. Please do not imagine something that is not going to happen anytime soon. Now if you want to say that Bitcoin is already getting centralized in some way, then yes. I agree with that. Bitcoin is getting centralized daily, and ETF approvals were the biggest step towards making it centralized. Even though ETF is good for investors, it does not fit with Bitcoin's principle.

Even though centralized exchanges and ETFs make it more centralized, the main core of Bitcoin and its chain is decentralized. As long as people care about privacy and most devs support privacy, we will have what we have right now.

Besides the mining, if bitcoin would somehow become completely centralized I would say that it would slowly die. Being completely decentralized is the main factor that makes bitcoin different from all the other altcoins (and shitcoins) out there. That is the reason people believed in bitcoin. If you remove that you're pretty much killing its purpose.

No problem,we will still be with bitcoin and continue the way they want it to be ,but i don't think it will deviate from its original purpose because bitcoin has saved a lot of countries and individuals from financial bondage which their traditional banks or financial institution always have made them go through.

The core devs of Bitcoin could change the code base any time they felt like it.

And yes, people using centralized apps and brokers is "wrong" according to the original religion of Bitcoin, but guess what: most people use Bitcoin that way today.

So maybe the religion is... dead?

And my hypothetical here is not "the government" (which government?) being the central entity that runs Bitcoin's servers, but the central authority that controls the code base now.



Bitcoin doesn't require identity, but it's not very private because there is a public ledger, and you can be subject to chain analysis.

But centralized products can offer privacy, and many people trust them to keep their privacy, like VPN providers, mixers, and so on.

The only thing these centralized entities cannot do is keep things from governments with valid subpoenas, which is not the kind of "privacy" most people need.



Correct. Most users use Bitcoin this way. You know why? Because they don't need to evade the government and they don't even want to try.

Bitcoin's goal was to solve a problem that only a few thousand people in the world actually have. Then millions of people started using it to solve a different problem, which was a meme investment instrument. Now almost all of Bitcoin's users don't care about "decentralization" one way or another--they just want the price of Bitcoin to go up.

I am hypothesizing here that some day, this is going to catch up with the core devs of Bitcoin, and they may well change the network to be a better product for their average user.

That's what is happening now, where more people prefer Bitcoin as an investment asset compared to digital currency. However, just because many people prefer to treat Bitcoin as an investment asset, it does not mean that Bitcoin loses its main purpose of being a decentralized transaction system, because in fact many people still choose to make transactions using Bitcoin since it is much easier, secure, and does not require identity.


Because many Bitcoin holders don't realize that when they store their assets on an exchange, they lose access to control over it. It does seem to make things easier for users, because they can trade and use their crypto assets directly from the application, but without them realizing it, the numbers in the application are only a representation of the assets owned by the user, while the real assets are in the exchange wallet. And because of this, users lose their access to fully control their assets and whenever the exchange wants they can use these assets without the user knowing.[/list]

Maybe the government should hunt down Nakamoto and force him to change some codes in the Bitcoin Network if possible, neutralizing the decentralized part and making it centralized, or the government should take over the whole mining hashrate and start attacking Bitcoin Network? I am just trying to give you what they could do. Unfortunately for them, it is impossible.

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What many people don't know is that Satoshi knew that all these is coming, he is a smart creator, Bitcoin itself is decentralised and untouchable at this point of time, the only way the power entities have left is a centralized exchange, and the Bitcoin investors and traders still can't do without centralized exchanges that's why I keep saying that using centralized exchanges to trade your Bitcoin is a wrong way to use a decentralized digital currency.

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Bitcoin is not perfect, it has its flaws but the decentralized part just work very well, there are other centralized coins out there and people are still investing in those coins, if the government want to take over they should go after centralized coins, Bitcoin is a peer to peer digital currency, if there is a way to make Bitcoin a centralized coin they would have done that already.

Well, I guess it depends on who you mean by, "we".

Based on what we can observe from the current state of Bitcoin holders, probably 90% or more of Bitcoin holders use an app or a broker or the ETF. In that case, they would not be able to tell the difference between centralized and decentralized since their holding is by definition centralized in any case.

Bitcoin is the most popular digital currency right now because it's name is "Bitcoin": people are buying a brand, or a meme.

I agree that for a small number of people, a centralized Bitcoin would be something they would not want, but the market seems to be saying that most people would actually want that very much.


That simply doesn't follow. Banks would do just fine with Bitcoin, and lots of financial institutions are already creating services around Bitcoin just like they do with sovereign currencies.



People already use physical cash to evade tax, as well as all kinds of other things.




Credit card transactions involve an exchange of personal data, which is undesirable for small transactions. (Even though it's actually desirable for large transactions, which is something I call the Anon Paradox).

I actually think consumers really want a payment mechanism that works just like cash, but in the digital realm. This is what many people thought Bitcoin would be, but it never worked because it's not geared to be mainstream. Right now there's no way to pay for things anonymously without resorting to slow/expensive/complicated cryptos.

If you're a president: Will you let people to use Bitcoin instead of fiat? the more people abandon fiat, the more chance banks will fall and it will affect the economy. Will you let your country to bankrupt as people use Bitcoin to evade tax?

If you're a citizen: Will you use Bitcoin for every transactions if it were fast and cheap (Layer 2)? when there are other payment method that offer promotions e.g. credit card, digital fiat etc?

Nobody says that Bitcoin is perfect(maybe with the exception of a bunch of delusional Bitcoin fanatics).
It's a fact that the current state of Bitcoin is different than Satoshi's vision about a peer-to-peer currency. I don't see this as a problem.
There are centralized altcoins with bigger supply and less scarcity. Are they better than Bitcoin? No. Did they achieve mass adoption? No.
A centralized coin with a simplified protocol would be basically "fiat 2.0" disguised as a crypto. Do we really need this?
Bitcoin was never intended to be a competitor of Monero. The transparency of the blockchain is a positive feature, because it creates trust among the newbies.

Well, Bitcoin is... whatever the core devs say it is. If they wanted to move Bitcoin to a centralized model, they could. It doesn't matter what it is today.


Consensus among... whom? I'll confess here that I actually don't know the details about how the Bitcoin core dev team decides what to do.



But if all you care about is the price of Bitcoin going up, and centralizing it could vastly increase it's accessibility, and therefore greatly increase it's price, then why would you be against it?

And if there are billions of dollars to be made in Bitcoin if the price goes up, why would you assume this could never happen?

That is why Bitcoin will remain decentralized forever, because the government don't have the capacity to make it valuable like the way it is now, that is making countries to begin to adopt it for their citizens to have access to it and to use it to boost their economy that is trying to collapse. Assume Bitcoin is a centralized currency, it would have be dead by now, because government officials that will be in charge to control the price of Bitcoin would have use it to grow their family wealth and gather all the wealth that will make them wealthy without considering others people using it in the country. The first country that made Bitcoin legal tender, tested the value of Bitcoin and it has created potential things in their country that is making foreign investors to use the advantage to grow their investment and bring development to the country also.

Nothing will happen to bitcoin because bitcoin will never become centralized, I have never thought of this and believe this will never happen. Don't waste time making assumptions and scenarios that will never happen. Instead, focus on doing your job well, spending your time earning money to accumulate as many bitcoins as possible. Because as the price of bitcoin increases, everyone will enjoy the profits they make, while you continue to needlessly doubt the future of bitcoin.

People have freedom to use their bitcoins in any way they want, investment, store of value, currency, payment method, gambling mean, whatever.

Again, there is freedom for people to choose what they do like where do they store their bitcoins.

Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto with a core idea, to give us private keys that help us to have our own bitcoin banks. With private keys, we actually owns our bitcoins. So if people decide to use centralized exchanges, they don't have private keys, and only have public addresses.

If they accept risk, they have freedom to store their bitcoins on centralized exchanges. We can not ask them to do anything and only can give them advice.

Reminder: do not keep your money in online accounts

Let's get to the point if Bitcoin is centralized, no one will use Bitcoin anymore or invest because they know it is centralized and anyone can easily manipulate the network or even the price.
So for me, it is an easy answer. Bitcoin has value right now because it is decentralized because if not, there are lot of alternative to use it.

It’s a fascinating scenario to ponder, but the likelihood of Bitcoin’s core developers moving towards centralization seems low, given their strong commitment to the principles of decentralization. However, in the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrency, never say never.

I think that changing its architecture to a centralized one would not be that easy - both technically and politically - and I'll tell you why: a change like this would require consensus and if consensus is not reached you'll get a hard fork, i.e. an altcoin, losing all the "magic" that comes with being the actual Bitcoin.

Then, I've seen during the history (alt)coins that - in a way or another - gave up PoW. The result was that their price went down the drain.


So no. In this scenario you will obtain an altcoin nobody would use because its price will be small and dropping to smaller and, sadly, most people are in for bitcoin not because it's a currency you can use for payments, but because it's "digital gold".

All you mention are facts, but it still doesn’t stop the major fact that Bitcoin is decentralized. The decentralization isn’t about what platform you hoard, trade, or pay Bitcoin in. It’s about how Bitcoin isn’t controlled or managed (in the way the bank has control) by anyone. I agree that Bitcoin can be slow and very expensive for transactions, but it was designed to be so. It definitely just happened to be so because Satoshi was focused on Decentralization than a direct competition with centralized Banks..

There are no banks in the world that offer instant (viz. sub-millisecond) transactions, and no banks that offer transactions for free, or pay you to transact with them. I don't know where you got that.

Of course, disregarding and ditching one of Bitcoins key features would not end well.

I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase "killing the Goose who lays the Golden eggs"*
making Bitcoin centralised would kill Bitcoin. Having a global network of groups and
independent people mining and hosting nodes gives Bitcoin its security, anyone can
decide to do this if they want, development is carried out through consensus, anyone
can propose a change or upgrade to the network.

all these go with centralisation so why would everyone involved "kill the Goose that lays
the Golden eggs"?



* wikipedia.org