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Comment by hall0ween | Hacker News Reader

I'm no crypto expert here, admittedly. Isn't the point of decentralization to avoid this level of control?

It's like the crypto 'investor' response is "Decentralization...that's not so important. What we really want is sheer, unaltered speculation."

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Bitcoin has continued clearing transactions throughout, just as it always has since its creation.

Crypto != Bitcoin.

> Crypto != Bitcoin

Please explain your reasoning.

I'm not the parent poster, but I believe the explanation is:

1. "Crypto" as a space includes a lot of things like Centralized Exchanges, which are really just like unregulated banks. 2. "Bitcoin" the network is a subset of the crypto space and was not in any way impacted by whatever the latest scammy CEX decides to do.

Thanks!

You can print more crypto. You can't print more Bitcoin.

You could make a competitor to Bitcoin, and thereby print money that way, but it takes energy. It takes energy to make new Bitcoins. And people can't use their energy for two things at once, they have to pick one. Only one blockchain can (in the long term) maintain and secure a position, the one with the longest proof-of-work chain. The others won't remain stable.

Mathematics takes time and energy. The more Bitcoin secures itself the more the other crypto gets pushed out of the mining market.

Except, of course, all the forks that have happened, and thus all the "old bitcoin" that no longer trade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks

Nothing prevents being decentralized and continuing that route but it requires more knowledge , it is harder , still has risk and crypto would not be as large with out the central players. Centralized and regulated crypto exchanges keeping the ability to have decentralized wallets is the best of both worlds. That is the way this is going barring making it illegal to hold your own wallet or sending decentralized payments which certainly isn’t an impossible scenario.

Centralization is required because not enough people are willing to spend real dollars, so no large organic P2P market exists (especially for majority of the altcoins). Instead you need central authority to make dollars, which is what all these exchanges do. They try to mask this behavior as best they can, but their purposes it to create dollars so that liquidity can be provided for those who want to cash out.

The decentralised technologies are still groundbreaking and trustworthy. But you can’t market that, so it doesn’t get adopted. The lowest common denominator goes for the stuff that’s heavily advertised, like centralised exchanges (scams), stablecoins (scams), and leveraged retail investing (scam). If Tom Brady got paid to make an ad, surely that means the product is trustworthy?! You can’t fight human stupidity.

That's not the point. It's the beard.

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