And with it's ASIC resistant POW it's arguably more decentralized than Bitcoin (and almost all other) POW based cryptocurrencies.
I hate to ask you that, but you're trolling, aren't you?
As long as some suckers are trading actually liquid assets for the instruments on the sabotaged chain, it is economically rational for the miners to mindlessly rubberstamp the rules of the chain.
Which is exactly what we have.
Former Bitcoin Cash developer Amaury decided he wanted a subsidy to himself. He forked, forming his own extremely minority coin, Bitcoin ABC (now eCash) which pays him 8% of everything mined. Despite being very conclusively rejected, and the chain having undergone attacks, eCash still retains some value, and Amaury still gets to pocket a percentage of everything that gets mined.
The underlying code for that is the same as for BTC. So at any time, if the cabal thought cratering BTC would be worthwhile if they got to pocket enough of what remained, they could do it with complete impunity. All it'd take is the agreement of a very few people and a viable exit plan.
That's an interesting thing I didn't realize until not very long ago. If setting fire to 99% of the ecosystem allows you to pocket a fraction of the 1% that remains, and that works out well enough to not have to work again -- that's a very favorable tradeoff for a lot of people.
Foundry + AntPool alone make more than 51.7% of the hashrate. Next are F2Pool, ViaBTC and Binance with about 10% each.
So this "decentralization" requires what, the agreement of 2-5 parties.
Realistically, if the pools wanted, BTC core could be replaced because the software is mature and the big pools can trivially hire somebody to work on it if they had a need to.
The big exchanges probably also have some say.
But guess who doesn't? Anyone else. People running their "full node", or just random joes using the system don't really have a vote.
It's a very much top-down system with a few fat cats sitting on the top, and none of them were even elected, and quite a few are effectively anonymous.
Don't be disingenuous. Bitcoin Cash didn't exist prior to 2017, when it forked from Bitcoin.
By this logic, the U.S. dollar is millennia old, since it grafted onto an economy that used older currencies still on its adoption.
Shares in a ponzi scheme aren't worthless, but the only use case for running one is fraud.
Why do you think Wall Street is lobbying with crypto?
If you meant something else, I don't understand your question.
Quick, how do I:
1. Pay for groceries with crypto? Is the transaction cost higher or lower than with current systems?
2. Take out a loan to buy a car with crypto?
3. Get a mortgage for a house?
4. Get a huge loan to buy a container ship for my company?
Do you even <<know>> what the "global financial system" does, besides work with currencies (which is more or less the only angle covered by cryptocurrencies)?
2. I sold a car for ~30k USD in Germany 2 weeks ago. I wish the guy would have been able to pay in crypto, because bank transfer didn't work out (because of money laundering law between unrelated banks due to the higher amount) and he ended up paying in ... cash (yes, the irony, so much about money laundering). And now, I had to open a new bank account which will be able at some point to accept the money. It's not just time consuming, but all this is not free obviously
3. Well, that's a good point, since loans are created out of thin air... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/under...
Crypto people love to point out these obscure experiments as if "it's happening". My BTC sits in a wallet.
3. Why is that bad? How else would you expect a loan to be created? Comments line this reveal an underlying ideology.
I worked for a blockchain startup, and it had the exact same concept listed here:
> Due to the nature of the Lightning Network's dispute mechanism, which requires all users to watch the blockchain constantly for fraud, the concept of a "watchtower" has been developed, where trust can be outsourced to watchtower nodes to monitor for fraud.
However... we were constantly discussing this. Was the network truly decentralized in this case? Watchtowers basically concentrate power in a handful of nodes, you're back to oligarchy.
Which means... why bother with blockchain and cryptocurrency anymore? What's the point?
> 2. I sold a car for ~30k USD in Germany 2 weeks ago. I wish the guy would have been able to pay in crypto, because bank transfer didn't work out (because of money laundering law between unrelated banks due to the higher amount) and he ended up paying in ... cash (yes, the irony, so much about money laundering). And now, I had to open a new bank account which will be able at some point to accept the money. It's not just time consuming, but all this is not free obviously
He could have just... warned his bank?? Also, what's with the jab against cash, yes, it can always be used for money laundering, it's not like, God-forbid, cryptocurrencies being used for the same reason, see sock-puppet transactions, anonymity....
> 3. Well, that's a good point, since loans are created out of thin air... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081415/under...
Yeah, and what's wrong with that?
For the rest, there's no reason you couldn't do any of those things in a legitimate working peer to peer cryptocurrency in principle, regardless of the fact that at the moment people don't and the structures you engage with instead are staples of tradfi.
They do many things, but the ones I want to avoid the most are their mechanisms of control in the global economy. The fact they can lock your bank account and deny you access to global trade because you said something or did something they don't approve of is utterly unacceptable and this alone is enough for me to aim for their destruction.
Ok... let's see how a mortgage would work.
A smart contract for the initial loan?
Regular payments into the smart contract as the monthly installments?
What happens in case of default?
> They do many things, but the ones I want to avoid the most are their mechanisms of control in the global economy. The fact they can lock your bank account and deny you access to global trade because you said something or did something they don't approve of is utterly unacceptable and this alone is enough for me to aim for their destruction.
How exactly do cryptocurrencies prevent this?
Assuming you live in a world where everything happens mediated by decentralised ledgers and no central source of enforcement or power, an entity is dispatched to repo the house and auction it in order to pay out the initial smart contract financiers. It's a long way from here to there, I know, but there's no "impossible" about it.
> How exactly do cryptocurrencies prevent this?
Because you hold your keys and you get to decide what is broadcast on their behalf on the ledger, not a custodian. There is no central point to pressure or capture in order to execute the same attack as above in tradfi.
Yes, there is, the person (software system?) with the bat that's actually enforcing the smart contract in real life.
That's not the same as denying access to global markets, as long as legitimate cryptocurrencies maintain liquidity with global markets, that attack can be ruled out if you self custody. It doesn't rely on any physical state, it relies on you using a centralised service of custodial account management where a third party can direct that entity to deny service to you, or that service can independently decide to deny service to you. There's no centralised service to attack in a proper peer to peer system, they can't stop you interacting with the market.
It's the present day, not some future. You need real world enforcement of real world states.
I just realized! Cryptocurrency bros are pure function bros. Everything is pure and has no side effects!
Except for the fact that the world is a <<result of side effects>>. All that's nice about computers has to do with them printing to screen/paper, sending across the network, etc...
Similar story with money. All we care about is that effects they have on real life.
> that attack can be ruled out if you self custody.
Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.
That's a fair criticism to the extent that any theoretical decentralised ledger process pipeline touches the real world, but the extent to which they do touch the real world, and the benefits available from each of them, varies enormously.
> Which puts a huge target on your head for any kind of real world malicious actor.
If the choice is between that and having a bank and its chain of dependencies as a tyrannical real world dictator, I'd rather have to deal with that target than be trapped in that tyranny. That risk can be mitigated, it can be compensated for, structures can be erected to address it.
If you're slave to a tyrant, you're simply immediately subject to whatever their whims are. That is completely unacceptable, even if it does theoretically reduce some risk for some people sometimes.