"What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."
The Satoshi paper is very short , simple to read, but brilliant. That it’s so short and yet somehow preempts the “gotchas” that frequently get brought up as attacks on bitcoin speaks volumes about Satoshi’s foresight.
Unfortunately it’s very difficult to have level headed discussions about the topic on this site as there’s a small army of reactionary grumps who reflexively downvote pro-crypto sentiments regardless of their merit. Just an unfortunate artifact of being on a big “upvote” site like here or Reddit that certain topics are verboten .
No? It has been enormously successful over the last 14 years. Adoption is occurring exactly how you'd expect for a new form of digital gold/money that is outside of state control.
> Not only is it volatile making it a poor choice of currency
It's still very early in the life cycle of a new form of money. The market is still figuring out how to price it. That's not a problem inherent to Bitcoin itself. Also, the volatility is a side-effect of growth, which is a good thing if you're saving your wealth in Bitcoin. There isn't a stock or asset on Earth that has seen the type of price appreciation that Bitcoin has, that hasn't also had enormous volatility. Apple, Tesla, Amazon, you name it. You can't have price growth without volatility.
Bitcoin's volatility is been compared to stocks, indexes, and assets here: https://ecoinometrics.substack.com/p/ecoinometrics-bitcoin-i...
It's on par.
> most people transact via trusted third parties for a variety of reasons
How do you know this? Do you have a link that analyses proportion of on-chain transactions that are done through a third party and done by a peer? Not sure how you could possibly know this.
Also how could you account for off-chain transactions through the Lightning network? There's some custodial services on LN too, but plenty of people and businesses roll their own nodes, which is incredibly easy with self-hosting solutions like Umbrel, Start9, RaspiBlitz etc.
> The concentration of mining in a few large entities also points to effective centralization of the protocol.
I assume you're talking about mining pools? There's essentially zero barrier to changing pools. If a pool is found to be misbehaving people will leave the pool and they'll decimate their market share. There's no incentive for pools to fuck up like that. Pools are just an abstract grouping of hash that has no structural impact on the network's distributed nature. Bitcoin's hashrate is physically distributed all over the world, which is what matters. So no, it's not centralized.
And if it is... show me the consequences of that supposed centralization. Can you show any evidence of transaction censorship by mining operations or mining pools? If so, were the censored transactions eventually processed by other miners/pools?
Genuinely curious.
Every other crypto project is a product/service created by a company or "foundation". There's a business plan (i.e. pump and dump), CEO, marketing team, PR etc.
Think of it as the difference between TCP/IP as the base layer protocol for the Internet vs. all the dot com companies/services that have come and gone over the years... except many of those dot com companies actually provided useful services to people.
Bitcoin is more akin to TCP/IP, whereas crypto is more like those dot com companies, except crypto doesn't provide anything useful to anyone, except shitcoin founders who need retail investors to pump and dump on as exit liquidity.
That's the difference.
> Bitcoin is more akin to TCP/IP, whereas crypto is more like those dot com companies, except crypto doesn't provide anything useful to anyone,
When you say crypto here do you mean cryptography, cryptocurrencies, or a subset of smart contract based projects? All currencies, whether bitcoin, shitcoins, or USD are ultimately pump and dump schemes the all meet the technical definition of a Ponzi scheme
What company are you talking about exactly?
> When you say crypto here do you mean cryptography, cryptocurrencies, or a subset of smart contract based projects?
Now you're just being obtuse. I'm obviously not talking about cryptography.
> All currencies, whether bitcoin, shitcoins, or USD are ultimately pump and dump schemes the all meet the technical definition of a Ponzi scheme
Yes, money is based mostly on trust. I trust Bitcoin's monetary policy more than any other, and for good reason.
Lightning Labs. The founders were heavily involved in the debate over increasing block size that led to a hard fork. I have no idea if they honestly thought the network Das better off with a smaller block size, but after successfully fending off a block size increase they created a company to develop a lightning network implementation.
> Now you're just being obtuse. I'm obviously not talking about cryptography.
That doesn't actually answer the question. Are you referring to cryptocurrencies as a whole lot a subset of smart contract protocols?
But you're making an error if you're lumping Bitcoin in with "crypto".