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by not_a_terrorist 3129 days ago
Your reply contains several errors, but I will pick one.

> D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized.

Not only you, but this whole thread is missing one critical word: incentive.

Miners are incentivised to play ball, as trying to play games will result in the rejection of their hashing work. Wherever they are, it does not matter (up to a point, ie geographical risk repartition). But in actuality, we know there are miners all over the planet, and that there are thousands of them.

Parenthesis: by the way, non-mining full nodes add precisely ZERO value to the network, and they actually slow it down. Before you guys start yelling, please see reference at the end of my comment for details. That's another urban legend purported by Bitcoin Core. Anyways, don't get me started.

OK, back to miners: yes, as time will pass, there will be mining consolidation, it's inevitable. But it will not matter. In addition to miners, there will be large service providers (thousands of them) who will be -incentivised- to run either small mining nodes (more secure) or non-mining nodes (less secure) for verification of their own transaction. That alone will be more than enough to ensure the security of the network.

From the start, Satoshi was predicting the apparition of large mining server farms, no farther than in the very FIRST email he wrote to the world!!

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/#...

quote: At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.

Bitcoin Network Topology Description (provides visual explanatino as to why non-mining nodes are totally useless, and even detrimental.

https://fr.scribd.com/document/359522859/Bitcoin-Network-Top...

3 comments

I find it amazing that there’s any reasonably intelligent person left in the world who can so dramatically underestimate the wanton interventionism of the Chinese government.

Every packet in and out of that country is monitored. The state can and will impose any arbitrary regulation on any corporation at any time. People literally disappear if they start making too much noise.

And now, entities within the country are amassing a substantial and effectively unassailable combined position in a major new asset class and possible alternative monetary system, and you think the Chinese government WON’T one day manipulate that to their own advantage?

>Parenthesis: by the way, non-mining full nodes add precisely ZERO value to the network, and they actually slow it down. Before you guys start yelling, please see reference at the end of my comment for details. That's another urban legend purported by Bitcoin Core. Anyways, don't get me started.

I would have thought the point of bitcoin is to be a currency and not just a way to fund wasting electricity.

Miners add zero value by design. Mining only exchanges physical resources like energy into equivalent bitcoin. If people are willing to buy bitcoin for $7000 then that means miners are willing to spend up to $7000 worth of energy to obtain a single bitcoin. It's the buyers and sellers of bitcoin that have added the value.

The world would have been better off without wasting resources on server farms full of specialized hardware computing sha256 over and over. Shame on him!