> Bitcoin can not be controlled.

> The world's top Bitcoin mining pools mainly come from China, with five pools being responsible for more than half of the cryptocurrency's total hash.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/731416/market-share-of-m...

They dont control anything. If they left the network would readjust difficulty after 10 minutes and continue on the same way.

Seriously educate yourself. You're being the guy in the op comment.

It's not about them leaving the network, it's a matter of whether they could be coerced by an authoritarian government to alter transactions.

They cannot alter transactions, only deny/duplicate them. Their node would be blacklisted by those working around censorship.

Guys cmon its really childish the boring same issues thrown around when theyve been answered and addressed a million times.

For a forum of "hackers" most are just hacks.

I don’t think that answers the question. Denying transactions is certainly an issue. If it is true that the majority of mining power is in China, only a minority is outside of it. What mechanism does Bitcoin have for a minority of nodes to deny the transactions of a majority of nodes?

Majority of verification nodes are not in China.

No single jurisdiction approaches anywhere close to majority, with #1)USA@21% †

†: https://bitnodes.io/

The "verification" nodes don't do anything to prevent censorship by miners.

The threshold isn't quite 50%+. If one of the 49% nodes mines a block with a would-be censored transaction, the censoring notes have to make an economic decision to try to mine a replacement block and then a second block on top of that to rewrite the chain. At 100% this is easy, but at just 51% it's a costly gamble that will frequently fail at a huge dollar cost.

A block costs $200k at current prices. At just over 50% of the network, you are gambling at least two blocks to force a rewrite.

Finally a comment that is informed thank you

>The "verification" nodes don't do anything to prevent censorship by miners.

Absolutely agreed; however, eventually some non-hostile miner will randomly generate an acceptable `nonce` [entire point of hashing/energy-usage] which DOES include the censored-by-some transaction.

An additional function of the node-verification network (which uses essentially no energy, relative to mining) it to maintain the entirety of `mempool`, which is where unaccepted transaction-attempts live until mined into a block [which is then "accepted/denied" by same node-pool].

tl;dr: as far a probabilities go, unless you own exactly 100% of mining pool, it is impossible to censor a tx from the node's mempool; all you can do with <100% is DELAY transactions.

They can’t alter them? Can’t they do whatever they want if they collude to execute a 51% attack?

no, txns are cryptographically impossible to alter. The 51% problem is simply a double spend problem.

I am US-based and run one of ~8,000 global bitcoin verification nodes (i.e. not a miner). No majority of these nodes are based in any specific country †.

You should probably better educate on bitcoin protocols/mining before you go spouting off unfamiliar stats.

†: #1)USA #2)Germany #4)France #5)Netherlands #21)China (via bitnodes.io)

OTOH, Bitcoin can be subject to liquidity crises which no entity could intervene to resolve.

Is that true? I don't doubt it but can you describe what that would look like in practice?

Sure, any currency can experience a liquidity crunch. This is a macroeconomic phenomenon. The main purpose of a central bank's massive currency reserves are to provide liquidity in the event of a liquidity crunch.

For simplicity imagine that there are just a few institutions that hold the majority of Bitcoin. Now imagine all of them are incredibly over leveraged on risky financial assets that suddenly all go to zero. Each of these institutions needs to suddenly pay off massive debts that they can't afford, and they start to spend their full Bitcoin reserves to pay. Investors notice the institutions are going belly up and simultaneously try and withdraw all their bitcoin deposits. There simply aren't enough Bitcoins to go around and the financial institutions holding bitcoin collapse.

When this happens in normal currency markets, the Federal Reserve steps in and provides a bail out of temporary liquidity to cover some of the debts involved for long enough to calm down investors so that everyone isn't simultaneously trying to cover massive debts with the same insufficient supply of currency. This is an absolutely critical part of modern macroeconomic stability. Every liquidity crisis that has happened would have been massively worse if not for this "monetary stimulus."

> One of which there will only ever be 21,000,000.

This is a good property of something you want to be scarce, but it's a terrible property for money, whose purpose is to exist in the correct amount to keep stable money velocity in a growing economy. (Or a shrinking one.)

We can divide bitcoin into smaller pieces,

All it takes is 100% node concensus (e.g. a hard-fork for any non-agree-ers).

Hell, with Entirety-Approval, we could also increase the 20.99999999 limit (it's just a concensus-node rule; all that's needed is agreement).

As the operator of a node for over a decade, now, I do foresee a day when 1 Satoshi [i.e. 0.00000001 BTC] is no longer the smallest divisible unit... one day, perhaps beyond my lifetime, there may be mille- and eventually even nano- Satoshis.

One can continue Dreaming™

There's a very simple change to the reward function that fixes this: make block reward proportional to difficulty. There's a real implementation called Ergon. I wish everyone wasn't so poisoned against it now that it was possible to talk about interesting ideas without sounding like all the scammers.

The original people who were involved in Bitcoin had gold bug mentality and that directly created the early adopter advantage that makes Bitcoin so unfair.

Except anyone can start a parallel chain, e.g. DogeCoin. The only thing that makes BitCoin special is that it was the first and is still the most well known. It's value is entirely based on network effects and speculation. It's a speculative store of value which can be digitally transfered for a modest fee.

Fiat has the force of the state behind it. This has pros and cons, depending on perspective and use. As a currency, it's superior in many ways. As a store of value, it's in many ways inferior to BitCoin... Until it's not.

Bitcoin is too volatile to be a store of value and too slow and expensive to be useful for transactions. It is public so it is not even great for illicit transactions.

> Fiat is weak money

Try explaining that to the IRS when they ask for taxes in dollars.

> Bitcoin is a force of nature

Asteroids are also a force of nature. That doesn’t make them good.

> Try explaining that to the IRS when they ask for taxes in dollars.

If Bitcoin became the most recognized and popular currency, it is conceivable that tax authorities like the IRS might start accepting taxes in BTC. Of course it would require legislative changes, and lots of effort and work put into valuation and conversion, collection and storage, auditing and compliance, and public education.

Good lord.