Decentralized can have many meanings. What is important is that you can transact with anyone without a third party having any say. For that 99% of all coins could be in the hands of a single person as long as there would be enough left for others to use.
> Add this to the obvious fact that the vast majority of new bitcoins mined are from china, which due to the scale of processing power now has a monopoly due to capital barriers
As long as they do not collude to destroy or disrupt the network it has no relevance at all.
> This has become nothing more than a pyramid scheme that adds no value whatsoever to the world. Not cryptocurrency as an idea, but bitcoin's current iteration and implementation.
As Bitcoin is practically useless due to high fees and congestion, I agree. But not because the reasons you gave.
I understand the premise of decentralised transactions, it's just that if the value of the currency can be manipulated by small group, it is not removing the need for trust, just shifting it...
> As long as they do not collude to destroy or disrupt the network it has no relevance at all.
I thought the point of decentralisation was to remove the need to trust others...
> As Bitcoin is practically useless due to high fees and congestion, I agree. But not because the reasons you gave.
AGREE! 7tps vs Visas 4,000tps with a peak capacity of 56,000 tps...
I think there's different aspects to "manipulated".
Large holders or exchanges can always manipulate the price, this is true for cryptocurrencies, the stock market and other things as well. Cryptocurrencies is however much less mature and more easily manipulated, but I foresee it to stabilize in the years to come.
If we're thinking of the miners to manipulate the coin I think the real genius of Bitcoin is they are heavily incentivized not to. All miners are heavily invested in Bitcoin's success so it's in their best interest not to destroy Bitcoin's value.
> I thought the point of decentralisation was to remove the need to trust others...
To be clear: what miners can do if they collude is try to revert transactions or block new transactions. If this happens it would be obvious and Bitcoin's value would be severely damaged.
There is trust yes, but it's more trust in the incentives behind Bitcoin than to specific miners themselves.
Lightning Network will far exceed 56,000 tps.
I disagree here. Gold is very expensive to get into and out of on a percentage basis, also requires careful storage, and is more difficult to exchange (manual pickup/delivery or insured registered mail). And yet it is worth eight trillion dollars.
In addition, believing that Bitcoin is dead for transactional uses because of temporary issues may be a mistake. It is simply software after all, and there are now hundreds of billions of reasons for the developers and users to get it right. My thought is that the alt-coins are simply testing “improvements” to the core technology, and if any updates are sufficiently proven and begin to threaten Bitcoin they will simply be stolen by Bitcoin’s users and eventually co-opt the alt-coin’s value due to Metcalfe’s law.
The problem is uncertainty if your transaction goes through, because it's practically impossible to predict if the fee you just paid will be enough, and that Bitcoin cannot support more users.
Gold does not have these issues. Gold also has other usage but what is the use of Bitcoin if you cannot move it?
> In addition, believing that Bitcoin is dead for transactional uses because of temporary issues may be a mistake.
Agree. I should say that Bitcoin is practically useless right now when the fees and confirmation times are skyrocketing.
This is because you're not only competeing against the transactions in the mempool but also against future transactions which may enter after you make your transcation and before more blocks are found.
The idea that money should be distributed more broadly than 1000 people controlling 40% of it sounds really nice, but it is missing the level of formalism that Bitcoin brings to the question of money.
Haha. Where do you get that? If a random guy says you so, don't believe in him.