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Comment by mufti_menk | Hacker News Reader

Why don't they just say that and outline their criteria for decentralization

Because the SEC does not make laws, it only enforces them. Congress makes laws, the court system interprets and establishes precedent.

Because it's nonsense and if you wanted to actually lay out the criteria for this, it would be obvious. You'd have to start with "Who defines what BTC is" and the answer would be "one guy with commit access to the bitcoin core repo" and all pretense of "decentralization" disappears in a puff of vapour.

If "one guy with commit access to the bitcoin core repo" pushed a change that wasn't in the interest of miners and heavily invested groups, why would they install it?

That's not a whole lot better.

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.

Because if they're not using the same node software as the exchanges, they can't trade with other people trading the BTC instrument. The exchanges allocated the BTC ticker to "whatever the bitcoin core node software says it is" and that is defined by the one guy who has commit access to the bitcoin core repo.

If the exchanges can't trade BTC mined by miners, they will do whatever miners do.

Wrong, because even if the exchanges pick a chain that is completely ridiculous in terms of rules, say they permanently limit the tx throughput for the entire world to 3, or something absurd like this, and the exchanges and users who can see how absurd this is sensibly opt out of mining or transacting on that chain, the profit for defecting is great, because mining is a zero sum game.

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.

We even have a proof of this in the wild!

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.

Right, this and BTC both, although Amaury's proposal was less insultingly stupid than the proposal that split BTC (I require an 8% of the coinbase donation to continue optimising this chain vs I require this chain be completely dysfunctional and useless, and force the intermediaries back into it for it to be of any utility at all, when the entire original purpose of the ledger was to disintermediate them)

Anything other than bitcoin is centralized. (BTW, ETH is PoS so it's inherently centralized despite the number of validators.)

So, if I want to create a decentralized cryptocurrency what should I do? Name it "Bitcoin"?

It is impossible to create a decentralized cryptocurrency because it has already been created.

So, the fact someone created something means you can't create another thing of the same nature.

I hate to ask you that, but you're trolling, aren't you?

No. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952101

That is a silly argument. Guess you also think there only exist one fiat currency because it already exists one so there can't be two of them?

That is the silliest point of all, because the concept of fiat currency is inherently associated with its plurality (given that fiat currencies are born out of countries, and there are many countries), but cryptocurrency, as a concept, came to existence to destroy all fiat. And the only way to do that is via 1 single cryptocurrency: the very first, the only one. And this is better understood once you understand this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0300 (which is not activated yet, and might never be; but once you understand its purpose, you will understand this HN thread)

Moreover, anything running on code coming from a source-code repository that has majority influence from one organization is actually centralized

How do you know what software people use? How people run asic miners? Is it supported by vanilla bitcoin too?

Even Monero?

Of course not, Monero is as decentralized as they come.

And with it's ASIC resistant POW it's arguably more decentralized than Bitcoin (and almost all other) POW based cryptocurrencies.

I thought it's the opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com