The idea that Bitcoin has no leaders is a big lie that these regulators should be able to see through. You can take look at any of the well-known whales to see obvious evidence against that claim. They make the claim because it allows them to maintain plausible deniability while manipulating the market as much as they possibly can. I wouldn't trust anyone in finance who says they're not doing managerial work and direction; that work is required to make the stated goals work. It's about as big a red flag as when recruiters say "our company has no bosses and no management". It might fool some naive people, but those who are observant can see who's really in charge.
You might as well be talking about the boogieman. Who are these whales who control the market? Why were so many mega-whales selling at $27K and lower this year, when they could have sold at the top? Michael Saylor is one of, if not the biggest crypto holder right now, and the dude is clueless and currently underwater in his position.
Talking about whales is just superstition for people who can't find any alpha in the markets. It's an excuse for why you didn't know the price was going to go in a certain direction. You see it a lot in amateur trading Discords and subreddits.
>Talking about whales is just superstition for people who can't find any alpha in the markets. It's an excuse for why you didn't know the price was going to go in a certain direction.
Ah yes, the price predictoor, even more common in amateur trading Discords and subreddits.
Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project.
SEC and similar are likely granting BTC "commodity" status purely because it is so utterly controlled and unthreatening, completely divorced from its original intent of addressing the central banking charade, that any energy they can push into it is energy they won't have to deal with being directed to a legitimate decentralised cryptocurrency that actually works and over which no such control exists.
> Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project.
Core devs and exchanges do not entirely control the project direction. Non-backwards compatible changes cannot be made to Bitcoin without the miners AND node operators adopting the new client. It takes the cooperation of the devs, miners, and node operators to make a hard fork. "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier documents a bunch of failed hard fork attempts that were backed by a good number of devs, large miners, and large exchanges. They failed because the node operators were not on board.
I am aware of the official cover story. You appear to be unaware that it is a lie.
Look up the historical record. By what metric was the BTC chain allocated to the present by bitfinex? I'll give you a hint, hash power not only had nothing to do with it, it was explicitly said that it would be ignored in the announcement.
And reality flies in the face of what you just claimed, node operators had nothing to do with the metric. It's all just outright rigged.
> it was explicitly said that it would be ignored in the announcement
Can you elaborate or give references to how Bitfinex controls the Bitcoin blockchain in such a way that the gridlock between miners and core devs isn't what keeps Bitcoin conservative?
How is the network rigged in such a way that node operators have nothing to say? You're not referring to miner centralisation?
Special notice to "The incumbent implementation (based on the existing Bitcoin consensus protocol) will continue to trade as BTC even if the B2X chain has more hashing power."
This is exactly the opposite of the way it is supposed to work according to the white paper. Before this announcement the majority of exchange volume was firmly in the camp of allocating the BTC ticker to whichever chain ended up having the most hashing power after the fork. If you work through the game theory afterwards, this means that;
1) if you want to be able to liquidate tokens to cover mining costs as what had heretofore been recognised as bitcoin, you will need to mine what is being rubber-stamped by the bitcoin core node client software as bitcoin, regardless of what the majority of hashpower is mining. What you rationally believe is the correct path is absolutely irrelevant. Want to pay your bills? Rubber-stamp BTC.
2) This is completely the opposite of what was outlined in the white paper and had been the status quo until this point.
3) This allocates absolute power to define the canonical chain tip to the people who have merge access to the official bitcoin core repo, a group no larger than seven people. Disagree with these people about what bitcoin is? You're wrong. It doesn't matter how many nodes you operate nor how much hashpower you have. They choose. You follow or gtfo.
4) A large part of these people had a direct fiscal interest in keeping Bitcoin uselessly crippled in order to promote their own commercial products which relied on that crippling to maintain competitive advantage.
5) Leaked emails from others highlighted the role intelligence agencies played in the campaign to keep bitcoin uselessly crippled. These emails contained unsubtle threats.
6) the power to define what BTC canonically is according to the supermajority of exchange volume was from this point on allocated by fiat to the core devs. Futures in the competitive chain were shorted into the ground on bitfinex and in the sabotaged chain pumped enormously using USDT.
7) Tether who is responsible for the issuance of USDT is just corporate dress for bitfinex. They're the same party.
8) USDT is acknowledged as fake fiat, official court documents highlight that it has nowhere near full backing in actual USD. Prior to the sabotage of 2017 daily exchange volumes of USDT were nearly irrelevant to even just BTC volume letalone the total, roughly five percent was regular. These days it is approaching three hundred percent of BTC trade volume on a regular basis. Just blatant outright wash trading to control the price of BTC using indisputably counterfeit USD.
9) Even with all the above, when BCH forked away from the sabotaged chain it pumped to 0.5 BTC. Plenty of people knew what was going on and how badly broken BTC had been. But in the face of widespread and constant market manipulation, BTC presently maintains a relatively dominant position. Nothing like the 95 percent plus it used to have before the sabotage, but still frequently 45 percent plus. Given it is utterly broken and sabotaged, this is completely ridiculous.
And last but not least bitfinex the party responsible for the above situation across the supermajority of centralised exchange volume is invested in blockstream the party responsible for the sabotage and hijack of the bitcoin core codebase and the forcible implementation upon it of the pants on head retarded idea that the chain ought to be permanently limited to roughly the throughput of a fax machine when the original plan was always for it to be competitive with large traditional payment providers like Visa and Mastercard and the exact mathematics for how this could be accomplished were published in 2009 and unsurprisingly check out just fine and these methods are now active on practically every other non sabotaged and broken blockchain in production usage.
The above isn't even a close to complete record of just how crooked the BTC situation is or its impact on the broader cryptosphere, but it highlights the core problem of fiat allocation of the title to whoever spits out the most counterfeit at the rotten heart of this horrid little saga that most people either aren't aware of or desperately try to ignore.
What makes Bitcoin a commodity is that nobody can issue more Bitcoin, other then from mining, just like with physical commodities. The market can still be manipulated by the big players but that is besides the point. When more of an asset can be issued (created from thin air) then it is a security.
i'm not sure why people keep thinking that there is a hard limit to number of bitcoins that can be mined when the network can be updated to allow more coins to be mined.
Money buys you voting rights in some proof-of-stake implementations that give governance rights to stakers. Ethereum's doesn't do that. Its stakers have no more governance rights than miners.
They were talking specifically about the Proof of Stake model that Ethereum is working on moving to. They were saying that, while some proof of stake chains may use stake for governance, that the protocol for proof of stake intended for use in Ethereum, does not grant any governance roles.
Especially because mining is a business that you can fail at if you don't balance costs and income properly.
That's much preferable to proof of stake where early investors can just squat on their coins indefinitely with almost zero cost to maintain their authority percentage forever.
Except if the community at large doesn't like how a particular staker/validator is doing their job, the staker's assets can be burned in a hard fork that enjoys sufficient broad legitimacy. The capital can be outright destroyed. In contrast, there is no way a community in a proof of work system can burn a particular miners hardware if that miner becomes able to abuse the network. At most they could change the mining algo, but that wipes all miners out, and such a change can really only happen once.
In PoW miners buy physical capital and electricity, in PoS miners buy digital tokens. It's exactly the same, except PoS is less detrimental to the environment.
I'm saying they have massively different risk profiles.
If you want a different example that might be more obvious, "put it all on a single number on a roulette spin" and "invest in a big stock index" both have unknown rewards but they're entirely different ballparks too. (And no, those aren't supposed to map 1:1 to the coin scenario.)
I don't think I follow you. As far as I can tell, PoS is as much of a lottery as PoW. In PoW a player increases their chances of winning the lottery by spending real money on electricity. In PoS a player increases their chances of winning the lottery by spending real money on virtual tokens. The outcome should be the same, except that no electricity is wasted in the case of PoS.
At any point you can turn your tokens back into something else. And in theory the price is sufficiently stable or you wouldn't be doing anything with crypto.
Mining machines deprecate and electricity cannot be refunded. It's a production business, and that money is spent.
What is the equivalent of electricity being burnt in a PoS system? I am not seeing that cost. Not opportunity cost -- which also exists for mining Bitcoin -- but direct cost.
It depends on how it's implemented. PoS works by offering a randomly selected stakeholder the authority to update the blockchain. [1] One way this can be done is by requiring stakeholders to deposit a stake with a smart contract that charges negative interest. I don't know how current implementations of PoS work, but this doesn't look like rocket science.
It's true that in every field known to man, money buys influence, at least in some broad and hazily-defined sense of the word.
But the form of influence that can be bought in btc is not voting rights for what happens with the asset, not in any direct way. The distinction matters here.
Mining BTC doesn't get you voting rights at all. The core devs will still make pants on head retarded changes and the centralised exchanges will dutifully trade their trash output as if it were really bitcoin, mining just gets you the right to maybe profit on rubber stamping their trash depending on market conditions.
About five years ago they permanently restricted transaction volume to about 4 per second. After that I stopped paying attention because you couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration of their complete control than the fundamental destruction of the entire purpose of the project even existing.
You can always fork it and start your own teeny-tiny forked Bitcoin network and pretend like the Network Effect is irrelevant to liquidity, right?
Who needs liquidity?
The truth is cryptocurrencies are like anything else that is a network: The people who control how people connect to and participate in a network will effectively exert some amount of control over the network.
I’m sorry, but there is nothing magical about crypto-coin networks and blockchains.
If there’s one thing you can learn throughout history, it’s that power in networks have a tendency to consolidate and that networks have a tendency to break down and be replaced with new networks.
There is nothing inherently special about the Bitcoin network or any other crypto network that makes it immune from being controlled by either internal or external influence.
If you think there is: I’d appreciate you sharing what you believe are effective safeguards.
And bitfinex backs blockstream and the rest follow because they don't want to add to the confusion and tether prints billions into existence to signal fake assent to fundamentally idiotic changes like permanently limiting chain throughput to a fax machine or so whilst censoring any venue which dares point out the abject stupidity, insanity and corruption implicit in all of the above.
But yeah, sure, whatever. Definitely don't throw Brer rabbit in that there briar patch. Stick it to the man, use the obviously captured and sabotaged trojan horse.
What could possibly go wrong? Laser eye me up.
I cannot believe how far bitcoin has fallen. Utter clown world madness.
