Why not both? Centralized where people trust, decentralized where people don't trust. In my interpretation, the Bitcoin white paper states that BTC is an answer to _the lack of regulation_ that allowed the fat cats to abuse the money supplies. It's kind of ironic, but to see crypto as purely anarchistic is to ignore that it is essentially _democratized_ money. Both: I use exchanges as well as cold storage.

I never understood. Where's the democracy here, exactly? A regular user cannot afford to participate in the decision making of the system in any meaningful way. In fact, today, most users don't even directly use it, instead relying on processors such as Coinbase. The "not your keys, not your coins" meme exists due to this. The original paper described a democratic system where people voted with their processors, but failed to take into account that people with more processors get more votes. I find it hard to argue that the system as it currently exists is more democratic than the currency emitted by the central bank of your country.

Arguably a lot of discussion is open to anyone (Bitcoin mailing list, Core github repo), where anyone is free to post their opinion on topics themselves.

It is not democratic as in "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority", but more a democratic in "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork".

People think "where the money goes, is where the miners go", but the blocksize wars showed that "where the users go, is where the miners go". Miners themselves don't decide on bitcoin rules, users do.

So I personally think that bitcoin is not necessarily democratic, but still highly people/community vs money driven.

This is a terrifying definition of democracy, "you don't get a vote but there is an informal and non-binding channel to lodge complaints."

That's not democratic at all!

Democracy can be defined as a popularity contest; democracy does not = good. When I and others say "democratized money", it's not to say it is identical to the definition of democracy as it pertains to a populous voting 1 person 1 vote. More like "money that is not controlled by a single source but rather as large a group as cares to participate who also have access to and knowledge of the tech".

Additionaly it's also different as in "the majority does not change my rules", they can be wrong in the long run and my rules become majority again.

When people say democratized anything, it comes across as meaningless marketing speak. I don't mean the traditional non-political use of the word (i.e., simply making something easily accessible to a lot of people).

It's basically trying to claim some good, without having to quantify or justify that in any way.

The US dollar is ultimately controlled by democratic institutions even if you don't count individuals using it as having any control. Therefore it is democratized money by the same vague handwaving.

> "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority"

is less terrifying to you?

What you're arguing for is "you have a vote (well you don't, but people much richer than you do) to force others to comply to a very small minority", how is that better than majority rule?

Well there are no votes, so you can't force anyone to run anything. You run what you like and hope others do as well. As I said miners follow users, not companies.

i urge you to compare this to any presently-existing monetary system or software project

It might not be "democratic", to me personally it seems fair as you are not forced to run the rules that are imposed by others. It might not be the wise decision, but the market will decide on the "better" rules.

Do you think the 'market' can decide anything if people aren't playing by the 'rules' in the first place? The free market model does not account for widespread fraud.

> "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork".

FWIW, that is also true for fiat. You can become an economist, or a journalist, or a politician, or a pundit, and try to convince your country to do economics differently. It's a tall order, but it's been known to succeed. If this seems harder than the equivalent for blockchains, it's only because cryptocurrencies have much fewer users, so your voice seems more powerful.

Good point. I think the subtle difference is that the traditional political democracy coerces the minority to use the system how they like it (ofc. not everywhere, maybe more on the money/legal tender side of things), whereas with Bitcoin there is no coercion by the majority. The majority would accept one set of currency, while others might use another, however markets will probably always decide on a winner when it comes to currency, which could feel as if you are "forced". Definitely a nuanced topic.

I can send Putin an email. If I'm sufficiently convincing he might decide to call off his illegal invasion of Ukraine. That doesn't change the nature of his autocracy.

I don't know if this is comparable.

Even if UN would finally vote to deem the invasion illegal (note: it apparently is not by the democratic votes of the UN), it probably wouldn't be stopped either.

I think comparing real world war scenarios with how consensus is found in decentralized open source protocols is a bit intellectually dishonest

well, honestly speaking, Bitcoin community looks to be committed to preserve 21million as max supply. That's a big promise and I love it.

> Where's the democracy here, exactly?

One dollar, one vote, just like the neofeudalists think the Founding Fathers intended.

> I find it hard to argue that the system as it currently exists is more democratic than the currency emitted by the central bank of your country.

Significantly less, as the central bank is usually at least accountable to the democratically elected government of the country.

> Crypto is an anarchist experiment

And, like every anarchist experiment before it, it failed. It continues to draw in new suckers every day, and that is a problem for society.

It doesn't matter if you didn't cause the problem. Because you live in that society, you still have to pay the cost to fix it or continue to take the losses from the problem existing.

It's the same with slavery, not educating blacks, and then not employing blacks in America. I had nothing to do with it. My family had nothing to do with it. But because I live in America, I have to either pay the cost to fix the problem or pay the ongoing cost of crime that the problem produces. Taking on the cost of problems others created is the cost of living in society, just as benefiting from the value that others create is the benefit of living in society.

The time to regulate crypto and cut our future losses was yesterday.

Every anarchist experiment failed?

The Internet's still around, buddy.

The Internet was created by DARPA and while it got a little wild in the 90s, neither its origins or current form in any way resemble anarchy.

Just because "The Internet"'s _mainstream_ may not resemble anarchy, this doesn't prohibit other parts to resemble anarchy. In fact there are a lot of examples active and thriving "on the Internet" fulfilling various definitions of anarchy.

Or it's infrastructure, or design, or all the corporate committees involved in managing it. Care to give counter examples?

p2p crypto trading, p2p mesh networking, self-hosting a website on some open-source hardware...

It's a protocol that's literally not centrally controlled. It's the definition of anarchy. Not "cosmetic anarchy."

The thing created by a US Government agency at the height of the Cold War is your example of anarchist success story?

Yes, because I'm not talking about "how it came into existence," I'm using the actual textbook definition of the word.

There is a LOT of -archy overhead to the Internet.

Sure, but I think that still fits a common definition of anarchy. The idea isn't "chaos," it's "hey, the thing still works even though there isn't a clear hierarchy."

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. That's like arguing "schools are anarchy, I see no hierarchy on the playground over there"

The Internet whose addresses are handed out by IANA? That Internet? Or are you talking about Web3 scamware?

>But because I live in America, I have to either pay the cost to fix the problem or pay the ongoing cost of crime that the problem produces.

The "crime" the problem produces allow a lot of white men to put their kids through college, fooling themselves into thinking they are stopping "bad guys".

If you dont keep them busy, they would create far more crime than you think black folk do. They might even start storming the White House.

To be fair to anarchists, it extremely often failed because of outside forces being violent towards them. Nothing in anarchy is inherently doomed to failure, and is a better demonstration of democracy than anything we have currently. (Because if there's anything an anarchist loves more than voting, it's one more voting round).

Calling cryptocurrencies "anarchist" is walking on the corpse of actual anarchists and taking a big, steaming shit on them. Anarcho-capitalists have nothing to do with anarchy and are just kids whose bedtime reading was, regrettably, Ayn Rand.

I guess people think Mad Max rather than "everything is run by tiny councils" when they think about anarchists.

Anarchy is defined as absence of government and authority, with unlimited personal freedom as a consequence. This is fine if you're living alone, but in groups, you have unbounded externalities. Tiny councils are tiny governments.

If you let your own ignorance define anarchy, sure.

Anarchists simply want every single thing to be voted on by the people, whether through referendum or randomly picked representatives. Anarchists agree that there should be governing bodies (merely that they shouldn't be the ones we have right now, and that they should be more representative and prevent the formation of a political class) and that authority should also be granted by these governing bodies _and_ revokable by the same. Hence, there is nothing an anarchist loves more than voting. It does not prevent living in groups, just that there are no leaders in that group.

By saying it is defined as an absence of government and authority, you're either thinking of ancaps (which are a bad right wing joke made up of said Ayn Rand readers), or dogshit propaganda fed to you. Read a bit.

> Read a bit.

Reading a bit:

1 a : absence of government

2 a : absence or denial of any authority or established order

Merriam Webster

Redefining anarchy to mean democratic government is a new one.

Last I checked, the Zapatistas are still around.

The FLDS cult is still around too and for about twice as long. Its mere existence doesn't make it a successful experiment.

Then you should clearly define "success". So far as I can tell, the Zapatistas did succeed in building the society that they wanted and kept it going for several decades now. Are you claiming that they aren't meaningfully anarchist?

Rest assured that the regulations are coming because the crypto simply did a speed-run of unregulated securities market and repeated every fraud or scam that the traditional markets went through over the history.

In the process, huge fortunes were created and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). Congrats to them but there's nothing anarchist left in crypto, they even end up consolidated and centralised. No interesting business models or financing came out of it except for ransomware.

The silver linings might be that the crypto regulations can be made with the current technology and globalisation in mind, hopefully.

Exactly, it's bizarre to read about the wildcat banking era in the US and why the Fed was created while simultaneously looking around at the rate of mainstream crypto scams and institutional failures nowadays.

The Fed sure isn't without its issues, but it was created to solve the exact problems that we're now seeing proliferate via the crypto space.

I don't think this is correct.

The FED was created in 1913 for a very specific reason - to counter the Panic of 1907 by creating a banker of last resort.

It did nothing to curb the banker speculation that led to the panic of 1907

Witness LTCM, Web bubble, Subprime crisis, all fueled by banks willing to lend and overextend themselves beyond margin. The 1913 ACT did not change that one bit except make the speculators never "lose"

The FED did nothing to resolve speculation, if anything, bubbles are worse and now they are worldwide thanks to them and their low rates.

in my town in the 19th and early 20th centuries there were numerous bak runs where local people were wiped out. we collectively decided to take steps to make that much much less likely to happen

> Witness LTCM, Web bubble, Subprime crisis, all fueled by banks willing to lend and overextend themselves beyond margin.

This was addressed under Glass Steagall by creating the FDIC and ushering in the fractional banking system, which kept commercial and investment banking separate and imposing liquidity requirements and a review system on banks. This legislation was later repealed during the Clinton administration and was largely seen as one of the key mistakes that led to the 2008 crisis.

That doesn't mean that the Fed is failure now and should be completely done away with. The runs we're seeing on crypto exchanges are very similar to what the Fed was created to avoid.

> This legislation was later repealed during the Clinton administration

Repealed by congress which was controlled by GOP at that time.

Regulations are coming? On a fully public ledger?

You understand that BTC, ETH, and every derivative non-privacy-coin is exactly what the regulators have been salivating for, right? Why regulate a non-repudiable chain-of-custody that mathematically proves your serfs'/slaves' assets that you can seize at will?

> libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power).

You should re-examine the GOP, particularly the tickets on today's ballots. This ain't your grandfather's GOP.

It’s always amusing to see crypto people claiming that mathematics can’t be regulated. Just like they can’t regulate chemistry, right?

Well, actually it’s always the peoples behavior that is regulated. Obviously no one can stop you mixing chemicals in private but they can totally tell you what you can and can’t do in public with it. The same thing goes for crypto, you can calculate block hash all you want but they can intervene if you engage in a business deal with someone else.

Oh and regulation doesn’t mean ban, necessarily. It means rules on how you deal with it so that the risk of unwanted consequences is reduced. You can expect to have rules on how you keep the money if you run a stablecoin for example.

Didn’t the US regulate use of a Bitcoin mixer this year? There are more reporting requirements for US citizens and entities.

Regulations aren't exclusive to the US.

Many parts of the world e.g. Australia are heavily regulated in the financial sector and will not be looking to water them down just because its 'crypto'.

> the crypto simply did a speed-run of unregulated securities market and repeated every fraud or scam that the traditional markets went through over the history.

I think the whole endeavor may end up strengthening the traditional economy - crypto space repeating centuries of fraud in a decade is effectively a booster shot - suddenly it's obvious why all those laws ended up in the books in the first place.

> and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power)

In a sense, they've discovered a novel way of attempting to gain power - I don't think many people expected someone could wish a parallel economy into being and leverage that to for political gain.

That experiment already failed to be honest.

Cryptocurrencies were prophesized to get rid of banks. Instead exchanges reinvented banks with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits.

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be in wide circulation just like USD, eliminating the need for fiat on/off ramps. Instead we got these centralized corporations and endless KYC/AML surveillance with none of the regulation and government backing.

Real cryptocurrency is what you have in your wallet. How many of us hold our own coins? Pretty much everyone keeps "their" coins at the exchange...

Only about 10% (2M) of bitcoin are on exchanges: https://www.coinglass.com/Balance

You also have to take the ~4M estimated coins with lost keys into account.

If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%.

It could be less, but it's not that much. People say often that "most" coins are held on exchanges, which is far from true.

> If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%.

That was never going to happen, too much institutional money and index funds have been super focused on trading rather than the tech, and their are ETFs that have paper BTC that can move the price at will, just as much as if a whale decides to do so--it wouldn't even take MicroStrategy's stash, it could just be Laszlo wanting to get some stuff out of cold storage and clear a couple days because the tx fee is low.

Also most of those HFT bots need to have liquidity on hand so this is part of the system, what is noteable is how little it takes to move the market these days: less than a 500 coin sell off on an exchange like Bitfinex gave us >$1000 swings. Which if you trade is what you want as volatility is where the money is made.

MTGOX taught us very early to never trust exchanges and this was after the capital controls in Cypus that made us all on edge at the time, and yet it took multiple GOXXINGS to learn (the last one still hasn't been resolved and the Japanese govt has been dragging it's feet for nearly a decade now). People who buy and keep them on exchanges are going to have to learn why self-ownership is a critical part of this ecosystem.

People may have lost untold millions/billions having sloppy OPSEC when handling BTC, but so did Turing [0] and he did it for the same reasons we have just so it's clear and goes to show how it's not a fringe idea to have self-sovereignty over one's finances, especially in uncertain times like war (and in his case peace time as they castrated for being gay despite his efforts in breaking the U-boat cryptography) and I doubt you will doubt his genius in cryptography: proving it's just as common for the super genius as it is from the layman.

This is why we have always encouraged doing small sums until you can replicate the process and then transfer the whole amount with several contingencies in place should anything happen. It's not easy or perfect, but neither is physics and we can still have re-usable first stage rockets when it was thought to be impossible.

0: https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savin...

No need to keep bitcoin on exchange when you can speculate on futures with far more liquidity and leverage on BitMex...er, FTX....er, Binance.

No, there's still Monero and ZCash. And most holders do have their own non-custodial wallets. Or at least wallet seeds from intermediaries like MetaMask.

The speculative frenzy with FedCoins like BTC and ETH will obviously fall to baseline, but the true use case for cryptocurrency still exists.

The coins have failed because the exchanges failed and people use them incorrectly. Got it.

The coins have failed at the moment because prices have crashed. No one was complaining about coins failing when prices were soaring.

I guess I needed a /sarc tag. The coins aren't failing. And I'd disagree that the success or failure of a cryptocurrencies isn't directly correlated with "price".

No one who was holding coins was paying attention to anyone who was telling them that the coins had failed. Do you remember 'have fun staying poor'? It was used to shut up anyone who said anything critical.

The coins failed because exchanges shouldn't even have been created in the first place. Bitcoin should have been as easy to use and ubiquitous as the US dollar. As we all know, cryptocurrency turned into stocks instead.

If not exchanges, what entity would you suggest as a way to change crypto into fiat?

Using the most successful fiat currency the world has ever known as a goal seems a bit lofty. In your view, how much time should it have taken to have been successful?

That's my point. There should never have been any need to exchange crypto into fiat. Bitcoin should have been as ubiquitous as USD. Everyone using it, pricing things in it, transacting with it, holding at least some amount of it. Exchanging for fiat should have been as easy as getting change from a store.

Like Athena, it should have been birthed as a full adult wearing armor.

"too soon to say"

> Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way

What exactly makes it remain that way?

I don't say this as a cheap "gotcha": what's the governance structure that makes it an anarchist experiment, specifically, and not just a free-for-all?

Nothing. And that is the problem with anarchism. For some, the lack of a centralized power structure is the goal. For others, it's an opportunity.

Ha! One massive feudal lord just crushed another and all the serfs lost their money. This isn’t anarchy, it’s a monopoly

I wouldn't be so sure. The monopolist had a $100,000,000 theft last month, [1] after a $1 billion dollar loss from LUNA in the summer. [2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.htm...

[2] https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-so...

But still, they’ve consolidated themselves in the monopoly money system, so the monopoly money they lost doesn’t matter if they control the board

> a big government supporter such as SBF

A supporter or another crook LARPing as pro-regulation because it makes some people ignore red-flags?

Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin.

Fact is that saying a lot of vague "pro regulation" things doesn't likely subject you to any additional regulatory scrutiny, it's a free move even when you are waste deep in the cookie jar. But some people are going to notice it and consider it evidence that you're all above board.

> Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin.

Whom are you alluding to?

Craig Wright. It's refreshing to encounter someone who hasn't seen that scammers circus.

In the latest season we find Wright trying to steal literally billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin while constantly yelling that everyone who doesn't support him is a criminal. If he weren't financially ruining people with vexatious litigation it would all be pretty funny.

An anarchist experiment that plays into capitalism's worst instincts and rapidly encountered "please give the money back to the rich people" when the first big ETH theft was pulled off.

Anarchism should be about dismantling hierarchies. Crypto has further entrenched owners against the rest.