Bitcoin has lost its decentralization

Bitcoin began as a decentralized network because that was its only chance of surviving back in the day. In 2010, digital currencies were pretty much illegal, so having a central authority or even a small group of known people would have made it too easy for the authorities to shut it down. Now that digital currencies are legal, you’d think that’s a win for Bitcoin, but honestly, it’s not really decentralized anymore in any real sense. So how did we end up here? It all comes down to profits. Bitcoin was once a way to transfer value, but nowadays it’s mostly seen as a speculative asset. Basically, 99% of Bitcoin users are just in it for one thing: making the price go up. Think about this: what if there was a major proposal to overhaul the Bitcoin code, like the idea I mentioned in another thread? This would make Bitcoin faster, cheaper, and run on trusted servers instead of using proof-of-work. Most people on this forum would probably push back against such a change, but what if big names like Michael Saylor, CoinBase, Binance, Donald Trump, Blackrock, and some ETF companies all got on board? If they all decided to back this new version of Bitcoin, ignoring the old one completely? Imagine if about 60% of Bitcoin’s market value, and 90% of its marketing power, supported this shift. The rest of the market would just have to adapt to what these leaders decided. It wouldn’t even be a choice.

So you saying that Bitcoin was made decentralized because digital currency were illegal and having a center would have painted a target? I believe I'm the one not understanding your sentence since I want to believe you smarter than that. Remember what happened with Bitcoin Cash? And what happened? Bitcoin isn't proof of stake where how much you own determine consensus Ever heard of Full node users? Lol to have a choice was the reason Bitcoin was created so stop confusing it for centralised currency. Yeah because the codes and consensus are just there to make it look fancy Price control isn't same as controlling Bitcoin. True and complete decentralized is not easy to find in a centralised world we are today But Bitcoin is the closest thing we have to a decentralised money. Price may be centralised Mining may be centralised Doesn't mean Bitcoin itself is centralised. Bullet in itself can't kill Margarine can't kill Doesn't mean a loaded gun can't. Stop tying Bitcoin to just price.

Yes. Before Bitcoin, there were other projects like it, and they were shut down by various governments. Then several projects started to solve the problem by using a disconnected federation of actors--i.e. peer-to-peer--in order to create their networks. These networks were easily taken over by 51% attacks, so in came Satoshi's architecture with Bitcoin, e.g. the proof-of-work concept. Today, since digital currency is essentially legal, it no longer needs this and many very large businesses out there (ETH, SOL, XRP, etc.) have products that are essentially controlled by a single entity with no problems at all. I remember there was absolutely nothing remotely like the scenario I am describing. Bitcoin cash was a small group of developers with a tiny (and unidentified) stake in BTC. I'm saying that it is. Since 99% of Bitcoin holders only care about the price, anybody who controls the price controls the actions of 99% of Bitcoin holders, and thus controls Bitcoin. As a side note, I would warn people here that Bitcointalk, as much as we love it, isn't the real world. Many people here hope the price of BTC goes lower so they can afford to buy a lot more coins, because for them owning Bitcoin is an end in itself. For the other 99.9% of the world, however, they want BTC to go UP in price so they can sell it and buy nice things or feed their family. For most, Bitcoin isn't a fetish, it's an investment.

It was made decentralized because of the financial crisis An alternative. They are legal doesn't mean they don't face same issues centralised system face Relying on a third party Having no control over your funds and hoping that they would implement integrity. Coinbase were in support of larger size as well as some exchanges. Since majority of people that use Coke (cocaine) abuse it Does that change the fact it can be used for anethestic? There's no magic button to click that the price would go up Even if we scream Bitcoin to a million dollar We understand that the it has to be true to its code and that's the trust.

Bitcoin holders have no say in the protocol. Miners do. This is not proof of stake. This is proof of work. Miners decide which block to mine, which chain to follow. Not holders.

Um, what? That couldn't possibly have anything to do with the PoW architecture, that's for sure. And given that Bitcoin is now a mainstream investment just like the rest, it makes even less sense now. Can you, um, clarify that? I don't understand what you are trying to say here. The people who have actual control of the Bitcoin code base is the Bitcoin core development team--although anybody could fork them if they wanted. While I could probably include the two US companies who currently execute the majority of the hash rate in my small list of companies who'd have to agree to the change. I would imagine those companies would go where the money is though. Regardless, my point that Bitcoin isn't defacto decentralized anymore still stands. A small group of companies/individuals could agree to change it however they want, and the US government could compel them to agree to any change as well.

Bitcoin is still decentralized and will always be because that is an intrinsic property of bitcoin. I perceive that you are mistaken decentralization of bitcoin with privacy and anonymity, if my guess is right, then you are right to a large extent because recent happenings have shown that the privacy and anonymity can no longer be trusted. This is the reason for the creation of mixers and other tools that ensure bitcoin remain private and anonymous but that doesn't seem to sit well with the authorities which is why you see the crackdowns on such infrastructures.

A forked Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin; so if all these figures agree to the changes, they're essentially opposing the pure Bitcoin protocol, which has been so closely guarded against ideological and philosophical changes. It wouldn't be a problem for us if they were more acknowledging the new "Bitcoin" entity. Ultimately, they would put their idealistic views on Bitcoin into practice, and more forks would likely occur.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "decentralized" is. If you mean Bitcoin is not controlled by any identifiable group of entities, then it's not decentralized. If you mean it's technical architecture splits its computing among servers that are not near each other, then it is. Bitcoin has never been private nor anonymous... The Bitcoin codebase gets updated all of the time, and the last rev was released only a few weeks ago and all major important players accepted it. Every new rev of the Bitcoin codebase is a "fork" in the Github sense. I agree that lots of people might have other opinions about what Bitcoin should be, but the point of this thread is that they don't matter, only the small group of people who control most of the supply of Bitcoin actually matter. They are a very small group of people, and they are the ones who realistically controlled the future of Bitcoin. Everybody else opinions don't really matter.

Not really. If that would be the case, then we would have a new altcoin each time, when the new client version is released. Which is not the case. If you run a full node, then you can see different client versions, used by different peers. And they all follow the same chain. In practice, only when consensus rules are changed, then we can have some "potential forks", and only if new rules are activated by some minority (which is why soft-fork enthusiasts usually want to get 90% miner support, to not end up in a minority fork, which could quickly turn into an altcoin). It is more complicated than that. If you assume, that one group can control everything, then who it is, exactly? Developers? They can release a new version, but it can be rejected, and it takes time for people to upgrade. A lot of them still run the old version, it takes months to upgrade, and if they would release something incompatible, then the new version would be in a minority, and would quickly lose. Also, Bitcoin Core is not the only client in use. Miners? They can push the chain forward, but they have to stick to the rules. If they would want to stop halvings, or do other things they would want, which would be incompatible, then their blocks would be rejected by the rest of the network. Mainnet is not signet, where miners can control everything. Whales? They can control their own coins, and nothing else beyond that. By having thousands of BTCs, you won't force some other coins to move in a certain direction, if their owners won't make a valid signature. It is not a Proof of Stake, where whales can control new coins, by staking the old ones. It is, if you use it correctly. Of course, many people for example reuse addresses, and then, it is normal, that if you can connect a single address to a single person, then you can trace the whole history. However, this is not how the system was designed. By default, the client will use a different address each time. If it would be fully transparent, then you would see real people's names, instead of addresses. But even chain analysis companies cannot do it that well, a lot of time they simply guess, because the transaction "looks like that". Historically, a lot of ways to identify individuals were proven to be ineffective, for example when people assumed, that all inputs of the same transaction are owned by the same person, then CoinJoin broke that assumption. If you think, that Bitcoin is transparent, then good luck finding out, who sent what to whom in transactions like that: https://mempool.space/pl/tx/9074d3eb88bc87b8bfc636b0b6d62e8a1bd756cbd8e450ceb7256e4e8fa3e909

Bitcoin hasn't lost its decentralisation. I think where you you are pointing at is how centralised platform are more preferred to decentralised platforms. The increasing number of individuals using centralised platforms is alarming after the preaching of cryptocurrency goal is to be decentralised. You won't blame them cause decentralised platforms haven't created ease of use. And centralised platforms are winning everyday. You're right about individuals adopting bitcoin just to make profit. No doubt. Bitcoin is slowly or maybe it has and it's becoming an asset controlled by the wealthy. It's heartbreaking. Even if the wealthy someone controls the price. It will always go up. In the sense that, there is a fixed supply. That scarcity alone creates more value than any other thing.

What I meant was that every new rev of the Bitcoin core by its team is a new version of the software. It can be adopted by the major players or not. Also, wallets choose nodes, and that decision basically dictates what rev of the software is running. If your BTC is worth $150k on one wallet and $1.98 on another wallet, guess which one the user will choose? Correct, and the question would be, which is the "altcoin" and which is Bitcoin? The US government along with top Bitcoin-holding cronies could dictate the answer to that question. That's what I'm saying here. If you want to say, "the community" wouldn't accept it, perhaps the way to say it is, "the community" would be those individuals and companies because small holders will never matter. I put the partial list in the OP, but it includes major and influential holders like Michael Saylor and Donald Trump, brokers like CoinBase and Binance, the ETF companies, the major minors who own >60% of the hash rate, and a few others. If the US government got to those people--which would be pretty easy--then Bitcoin would do whatever those people said because they would dictate whether you are going with the bulk of the market or not. Again, all of these people are in the ecosystem for one reason: to make money. Threaten that, and they will do whatever the government wants. And yes, the whales don't "have to" do anything, but imagine a Whale can be worth either $1,000 or $1 billion. Guess which one he will choose? I guess it depends on what you mean by "correctly". If you use it the way Satoshi envisioned, it's very intentionally not anonymous because it's an open ledger. Obviously there are tools on top of Bitcoin that can change that equation, but that's not Bitcoin. And yes, it's not like people's names are on the chain, but chain analysis is pretty good--and good enough to make it so you cannot be sure. And the way most people use Bitcoin is easily tracked if somebody wanted to. I'm pointing that out too (and point it out a lot ), but I'm also trying to make people think about what they mean by "decentralization". If you mean, "it runs on a bunch of servers in geographically separated data centers", then yeah, Bitcoin is "decentralized" but then again a lot of things are like that. The original definition of "decentralized" in the context of Bitcoin was a network that could not be easily controlled by the US government because there was no central legal entity or small group of entities to prosecute. By that definition, Bitcoin is no longer decentralized.

If your claim that minority Bitcoin holders who have the majority stakes, or wealthy oligarchs could call the shots, or have a final say on Bitcoin consensus, because they could determine the price of Bitcoin, which consequently makes Bitcoin centralized, they would have done that by now. Ofcourse, they tried in the past but the market has proven time and time again that Bitcoin ideals by far matter more than the number of people who control majority stake. Besides, the market is in its current state because people tried to attribute the recent bull run to wealthy people, so the market moved against that sentiment to prove them wrong. The price of Bitcoin is tied to a factor beyond human control and fundamentals such as decentralization, transparency, immutablity, censorship resistant, privacy, trustlessness, permissionless, deflation, etc.. Everyone is subject to these factors, and anyone can obey the factors to get the price move to the extent of their loyalty and alignment to the factors.  Decentralization is maintained in this regard since anyone can do that to get the price move unlike having the minority with major stakes calling the shots. This statement was proven right on Steem Network which was taken over by a big investor, in similar manner you described, but the majority or community protested the decision and ended up creating Hive from steem. The price of Hive overtook steem and almost doubled it. Unfortunately, the minority with major stake on Hive could not resist the temptation of steem even after several warnings, and the price nosedived but probably still higher than the price of steem. What happened is that certain people/things failed to realize or deliberately ignored the fact that a crypto network, if unique, will derive its value from strong fundamental like decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance, trustlessness, permissionless, deflation, etc. Tying the value only to stake will crash the price or create a bubble that will eventually burst

I am very impressed on your distinctive definition of decentralisation and how you used that you make a sharp point. But with all that, there's one thing that still holds the decentralisation definition correctly which is having a market cap of 21 million and that can't be unchanged. Even if the US government has somehow have a strong hold and control of bitcoin, that does not change the fact that it is of strong value based on its scarcity.

Bitcoin forking will change it into another shitcoin and it is not bitcoin so we can't say what it is going to be or even if it becomes centralized will not make bitcoin centralized because it isn't even bitcoin at all. With the evolution of KYC, it loses the anonymity but it was not supposed to be a privacy coin in the first place.

I don't think they've had any reason to. Also, I think this situation is fairly new, as the Bitcoin market has matured greatly in the past few years. ETFs are still relatively new for instance. [quote[ The price of Bitcoin is tied to a factor beyond human control and fundamentals such as decentralization, transparency, immutablity, censorship resistant, privacy, trustlessness, permissionless, deflation, etc.. [/quote] It has nothing to do with any of that. Bitcoin is valuable because a lot of people buy it. Most investors in Bitcoin aren't exposed to any those factors you listed since they invest in Bitcoin through a broker or an app or the ETF, and all they care about is Number Go Up. As we discussed in another thread, you could centralized Bitcoin's architecture and the price would probably go up, not down--and the price is the only thing anybody cares about. I get that many people here literally hope the price of BTC goes down because then they can afford more Bitcoin, which they buy as an end in itself, but that's not most investors. Absolutely correct. While I can imagine the US government and/or the big players making technical changes to Bitcoin in order to grow their bags, they will obviously not want to change things like the 21M cap because that would make them lose money. If you think of Bitcoin as a private casino it starts making more sense  . What codebase is or is not "Bitcoin" will be determined by what network the majority of holders use to recognize their keys. Hence if the US government and/or key Bitcoin holders and companies decided a certain codebase is "Bitcoin", then that will be Bitcoin and every other codebase will be the shitcoin. And imagine, for instance, that the US passed a law saying that you cannot call a codebase "Bitcoin" unless it's the one they have blessed. Indeed, if a company created a coin and called it "Bitcoin" and used the Bitcoin symbol, they would be prosecuted by... the US government (among others). (This shows how silly the notion that a pile of code could be more powerful than governments always was).

Let's say if US government or the majority of the Bitcoin Cash holders define that BCH is the new bitcoin will that make it Bitcoin? Hell NO, the bitcoin we use today will remain as it is and any changes in the code level will result into forking that means a shitcoin and if 99% of the holders consider that as bitcoin then it is their problem but AFAIK the bitcoin we use will remain the same.

It won't make it Bitcoin in your own mind, but unless you secretly hold 90% of BTC, that doesn't amount to anything  . You will always be free to use the fork that the US makes illegal, and you can even play around with it among your friends. Heck, you might even get a lot of people here on Bitcointalk to join you. But when $1.399 trillion of Bitcoin's $1.4 trillion is using the US-sanctioned fork, and the US allows that fork to call itself "Bitcoin" from a trademark standpoint (and makes your fork a trademark violation), then it's not going to matter how "you" or anybody else here feels is Bitcoin.

I think you misunderstand Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s long-term “number go up” effect is not random. It comes precisely from its decentralized nature and strong monetary properties It does not depend on marketing from BlackRock or any other institution. BlackRock came when it understood Bitcoin. Saylor came when he understood Bitcoin.If they forked Bitcoin and created their own new shitcoin, it would just be another shitcoin, like Ethereum or XRP, which would  trend toward zero against real Bitcoin in the long run.

TF are you saying? How many forked coins have we had from Bitcoin? How many are recognized today? Do you even understand what it means to be decentralized? If the us government had the kind of power you are insinuating, they would have done it long ago. You can't control Bitcoin because you own majority of the mining rigs out there, you can't control Bitcoin because you own majority of the coin, you only control price. No group of companies or the government can change anything in Bitcoins protocol even if they wish.