By dominant media narratives you mean a self evident train of scams and security incidents? There's no conspiracy or undue effort to make crypto look bad, that happened in a decentralized manner.
Because a bunch of bad people jumped on the bandwagon to exploit others.
Bitcoin != “crypto”
Bitcoin was the original and it’s still here. And it will continue to be here.
The goal of bitcoin is not to “make money”. Bitcoin is money. A new kind of money. One that no central entity can control. One of which there will only ever be 21,000,000. No one can print more Bitcoin. Unlike fiat, which the government and the ruling class use to screw people over right in front of their faces all in broad daylight.
Bitcoin can not be diluted. Bitcoin can not be inflated. Bitcoin can not be controlled. Bitcoin can not be stopped.
Fiat is weak money. Fiat is bad money. Bitcoin is strong money. Bitcoin is good money.
Bitcoin is a force of nature.
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."
> 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...
Seriously educate yourself. You're being the guy in the op comment.
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.
No single jurisdiction approaches anywhere close to majority, with #1)USA@21% †
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.
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.
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)
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.)
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™
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I would have participated more in the discussion but HN is telling me I’m posting too fast so I’m guessing a moderator didn’t like some of my harsh tone.