Bitcoin over the next ten years

I'd really like to hear everyone's personal takes on this without the influence of so-called experts. So, here's my somewhat negative perspective: since the government and big institutions are getting involved, it feels like we're starting to lose the essence of decentralization and privacy. I’m all for Bitcoin's price going up and more people adopting it, but it seems like the motivation behind that rise is kinda messed up. A lot of new folks joining the scene are just in it for the profit, not because they care about a decentralized network. It's subtle, but you can see it happening. I noticed during the exchange shutdown how many so-called privacy advocates on X were actually scams. They made up a big chunk of the chatter. We all thought that with more mainstream attention, people would really get to know Bitcoin, but nope. Most don’t seem to understand it at all. We're making excuses, saying things like KYC exchanges or ETF approvals won’t lead to worse situations. But once you start compromising, that's usually the first step toward full acceptance. As the saying goes, humans are political beings. Wherever you have a group, there’s politics involved. I bet that extends to the developer community too. Do you really think the government will just sit back and let developers create protocols that don’t align with their interests? I doubt it. I get that miners and full nodes are there to check things and that open-source processes and peer reviews make sneaky changes harder, but we can’t ignore the fact that developers hold some power (especially since there aren’t that many of them). Sure, we’ve managed without government support so far.

You have already stated the facts very clearly, based imao now adoption has been dominated by institutions and we can't prevent it anyway. After Bitcoin continues to attract global financial attention everything becomes a target both in terms of business and for political purposes. Back to the developers whether they will be lenient with government regulations as experienced by Tornado Cash developers or continue to maintain censorship resistance. Oh one more thing to know, like it or not, the fact is that we are currently on our last defense.

Owing to the current adoption of bitcoin, we can say that majority of investors are not interested in knowing much about what bitcoin really is and why it was created in the first place. Their intentions are only driven by the fact that they can double their investment over a couple of years. Like I've said before in some other similar discussions, we take a look at people buying shares in the ETFs, they don't care if what they own isn't BTC so long they make profits. Fact is government has never been an advocate for decentralised, so it's obvious that the current surge of interest feels fundamentally compromised because the driving force is speculative greed, not a commitment to decentralisation, which is what bitcoin truly stands for..

No, bitcoin privacy does not run by who is adopting it or how they are accepting it, be it institution, government or private individuals does not determines bitcoin privacy, this is what determines bitcoin privacy. the wallet you usep2p mode of exchange usedhow you run your privacy and understand it.the  way we reveal our own identity to third parties Here are further solutions to the privacy needed. wallets for security and privacy Bitcoin Core Passport Electrum Sparrow Bluewallet wallets security and privacy mega threads https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5509759.0 Open Source Hardware Wallets https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5288971.0 while for the lovers of exchanges, you can use these: decentralized exchange https://bisq.network/ https://hodlhodl.com/ You can see there's no way government could deprive of your privacy in any of these, except we by our own self render them access, this is more of the bitcoin network itself and not their investment, bitcoin national reserve or even ETF that can take our privacy from us. How do they get across to a decentralized network, developers and community, impossible.

Privacy starts to fade once the government steps in with regulations. What usually follows is that institutional investors take more control, making the market less volatile. We’ll be moving away from the original ideals, but in return, the market becomes more stable and adoption grows faster. The thing is, this isn’t what many of us envisioned in the beginning. We thought we were building something outside government control.. decentralized, private, and free. That’s the core idea of decentralization, and now it feels like we’re slowly drifting from it.

No matter how government try to influence the market with their position, the core definition of bitcoin and her decentralization cannot be tarnished. If government try to build something by inviting a developer to draft out a unique feature that will drive users toward feeling unsafe about their investment, i think such cannot be possible because every transaction will reflect onchain which can be traced and tracked for public visibility. Government are only be able to build centralized platform where your portfolio are controlled, minimum and maximum amount of withdrawals are imposed on your assets, kyc verifications are occurred for their own benefits and many more but at the end every waves of transaction are reflected onchain for public awareness, thats what government is not happy with, thats their point of weakness. Institutions are only influencing the market price to favour them, but at the same time favours the holders too as well, so its win win for everybody not only big ventures.

Who do you think fund the Bitcoin Core's developers? it mostly came from centralized institutions https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/who-are-bitcoin-cores-developers Of course they can influence the developers decision because when they really need money and the donation from people aren't enough. Privacy is just a word, regulations already exist since a long time ago. Whenever someone buy or sell their coins, they will also link their bank accounts, not via cash or anonymous payment processor. You need to have an anonymous payment processor if you want privacy.

This is the main source of all problems. People stopped caring about a lot of things and forgot what mattered. We keep seeing it in different topics like the Ordinals Attack which many falsely said preventing this abuse is against censorship resistance. It sometimes feels like people nowadays just want Bitcoin to exist and its price to go up. Nothing else matters to them. Here is an example. Just go back 5-10 years in topics and see how people were concerned about mining/hashrate concentration in China and how that was a potential threat. And that was during the time when Chinese miners were freely mining without being forced by the Chinese government to attack Bitcoin. And that's an important distinction. Today a lot of hashrate is concentrated in the USA and the US based miners are ordered by the US government to attack one of the main principles of Bitcoin by censoring transactions, and yet nobody is concerned about it! You don't even see any topics on this 24/7 attack anywhere! I dare say that it is not about the people not caring about these things anymore but it is that they don't even understand the problems to care about them! In any case, Bitcoin is still the most decentralized payment system but centralization is slowly creeping in...

The sad truth many Bitcoiners are trying to run away from is the fact that privacy and decentralization are now becoming less of a priority. How many people are actually transacting Bitcoin without the help of exchanges? Were exchanges in the picture before? Certainly not. All people want from the government right now is to be allowed to use Bitcoin in peace, without any form of restrictions. Whether the government becomes a central authority is the least of their problems. Decentralization is gradually becoming history, and we can't stop the government and institutions from getting involved with Bitcoin.

I share some of your concerns. Bitcoin is indeed becoming more institutionalized, and many new entrants are really coming just for the sake of profit, ignoring the philosophy of decentralization. However, this is an inevitable growth stage: mass adoption always requires compromises. The main threat is not the loss of decentralization technically (miners and nodes remain protected), but a change in the culture of the community. If privacy and independence cease to be values, Bitcoin risks becoming just "digital gold" under the control of institutions. Governments will push, but open source and a distributed network are serious barriers. It is important that the community does not forget the original principles. As long as there are those who defend them, there remains a chance to preserve the essence of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like an independent entity or Nation with its own rules/law. It'll be like treason in an actual Bitcoin Community to attempt to change or weaken the rules to suit hostile foreign forces. We already pass that phase and are now in the phase of consolidation. We are holding strongly to our power and authority over Bitcoin which we earned after a fierce battle that started around 2020 or early 2021, and probably lasted about two to three years. It was a battle against globalist governments/entities who attempted to fully capture and centralized Bitcoin. The battle was won but not ordinarily. It was extraordinarily won through superior arguments and other means. After that battle, the power and authority over Bitcoin resided with the Bitcoin community and individuals who promote and uphold the rules, principles, ideals or values of Bitcoin , and no entity, force, or human with evil intention against Bitcoin can take this away. Governments or institutions are free to own or use Bitcoin. This is all they can do. Any attempt to change or weaken the fair rules of the Bitcoin system/network will be considered an attack and the attacker will be punished. The ideals of Bitcoin such as decentralization, community consensus, transparency, immutability, privacy, anonymity, censorship resistant, etc are all good when applied correctly. It's bad or evil to change to contrary ideals like centralization, no privacy, etc. Those who attempt to turn Bitcoin into evil system will definitely face justice. It's very impossible for them to succeed probably until Bitcoin serves its real purpose, which is to help protect people and their assets during choas, anarchy or societal breakdown. My advice to you when using the word "Privacy' alongside Bitcoin, especially in a non-crypto space like Twitter, is to try to combine it with Transparency.   Better to promote Bitcoin using transparency and privacy-friendly together than just using privacy. Scammers are known to thrive in the dark, and they tend to dislike transparency. So, using the word Transparency with privacy could give people the impression that you maybe harmless and have no problem with being transparent about your public activities but only concerned about revealing information that are meant to be private .

It is no surprise. It is like normies entering the crypto space. Everyone heard of the possibility of making profit and now everyone has flocked to crypto which should be good but they do have the wrong idea. They want to be involved with crypto but not with decentralization. Some people still do not trust crypto that does not have any authority over it. This is why a lot of people tend to go for ETFs instead so they do not have to worry about holding coins on their own. We did survive without govt support before but I think we have gone past the point where we can reverse things. It is like we have opened the pandora's box already. Bitcoin is too big for the government to just ignore it.

This is a truth which many of us ignore that whenever there is announcement from government regarding use of Bitcoin in the country, it means government has issued regulations on use of Bitcoin and these regulations are about government control over use of Bitcoin. We have to accept this fact that decentralised Bitcoin is not in interest of governments but the centralised one. This is also a reality that jumping of institutions into Bitcoin (like Bitcoin ETF) has also increased price of Bitcoin. In other words we have to sacrifice decentralisation and privacy for more volume and market cap of Bitcoin.

I think the people care about decentralisation but the culprit is the government and they form the large majority of people joining second to institution if you compare the amount of hodling, the individual hodling never gets close to it. And the government also manipulates exchanges to dine with KYC exchanges, collects taxes which is away to regulate the system. How many decentralised exchanges exist and how many centralised system exist, the government is part of the soft landing given to btc contrary to the high level decentralised system. US is a big influence regarding to anything concerning btc and with the Trump regime that is reserving bitcoin, we are likely to see more loose end to bitcoin decentralisation.

Governments throughout the world will take their good time in accepting bitcoin even from a grey perspective while playing a shadow war on projects doing crypto related work to negatively affect its development. You just have to accept this. We as bitcoin users have to bring in more people in the regular use of crypto, show them that beyond money laundering people are using crypto for their daily tasks, spending it just like fiat money. The more people think about being paranoid about privacy and turn towards mixing services the more the government will crack down upon those. The craze of privacy in bitcoin is the reason why the government does not like accepting the use bitcoin. I think whatever direction we are heading to, it is a good one having watched bitcoin over the last eight years whatever development happens to make the use of bitcoin easier for the common folk is good for me.

Decentralization wouldn't mean much if it passes through a centralized system. Take a bird for example, the wings is decentralization which helps it fly Now imagine despite having a wing it's placed in a small cage(centralized system) close to its size. Would the wings mean anything? No An interesting take but if this was the case No scammer would have gotten free with their actions. Bitcoin doesn't have to be sold for Fiat, it can be exchanged for goods or service. Besides privacy doesn't mean full ghost, if you convert to Fiat nobody knew you had it before or where it came from. Privacy and Transparency don't work together. It's either is private or transparent for all to see. Privacy is supposed to be a right not something that scream I swim in darkweb. With patience I believe we could have gotten all this and it wouldn't feel this inorganic.

Is that really happening? Could you please provide a source of that info? I would like to read more on it. What you have mentioned is very true as people don't even understand the rising problems these days. On the other hand, why haven't you created any topic on this incident? I don't mean to criticize your or anything but wise people like you should open such discussions as it will enlighten others about the real problems.

OFAC-Sanctioned Transactions Being Censored The above shows evidence that transactions were censored though by F2pool this I was aware of.

I think you don't get what @OP is concern about.  I agree at the current state Bitcoin network is fully decentralized, @OP's concern is what if the government pressure the developer to put a centralized protocol to Bitcoin network.  I can't deny that it is highly likely to happen when the government is fully into Bitcoin. We know that the government wants to control, so when the government is heavily invested in Bitcoin, there is a possibility that they might require the developer to make adjustments for them.  We can take this as an example.

If the merchants accept it, the government will likely know and regulate it. Do you mean cash? you be private in digital, but you no longer private in real life. F2Pool is a global miner https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin Here's where the US based miner censor Bitcoin transaction https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/mara-pool-and-bitcoin-mining-censorship-2021-05-07 If we sum Foundry USA, MARA and LUXOR, they own 39.07% of the current total hash rate https://hashrateindex.com/hashrate/pools