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At what point are the miners/network considered the centralized institution? Are corporations considered “decentralized institutions” in the world of bitcoin e

At what point are the miners/network considered the centralized institution? Are corporations considered “decentralized institutions” in the world of bitcoin enthusiasts? After all corporations are made up of decentralized shareholders that can vote for and change the directors. If that doesn’t fit...what about a credit union? Like bitcoin there are no “owners/shareholders” of credit unions they are simply comprised of members.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> At what point are the miners/network considered the centralized institution? Very much this; I'm fairly sure that if there is an organization that wants to direct / control btc, all they have to do is open up their (real money) wallet and get the majority mining capacity. If they first drop the value of BTC by selling or whatnot, miners / automatic miners will switch to more profitable currencies so the total hashes / second will lower, making a hostile takeover easier.
- jsutton 8y ago
  You make it sound so easy, just open up your wallet and get the majority mining capacity! Tell me, how would someone with near-unlimited money go about doing that? Will they just conjure up the hardware needed to make 15 Trillion hashes per second?
- blackbrokkoli 8y ago
  In theory yes, but as the other answer states, you would raise an immense amount of money WITHOUT the public realising who would than just abandon whatever mining-based Crypto we're talking about
blackbrokkoli 8y ago
Not sure if representative for "bitcoin enthusiasts", but here is how I see it: As the written word spread in Europe after BC, it layed an important cornerstone for democracy and changed the world for good. Noone would argue with that, right? Ok, so let's look at Europe from 500BC-1300BC. Corrupt monks forging official documents, under some goverments up only about 60-80% of the were real. Monks were people of god, so noone really investigated. For a long time, the emperor would sign with a simple line, because he couldn't actually write. Wow, how is that more valuable than spoken word?! Where is your democracy? Women can't read, poor can't read. Knowledge is stored exclusively by the church. Turns out writing things down is actually a really backward philosophy! Or is it? And that's where we're with Crypto right now, IMO. I'm not saying this is as revolutionary as writing, not even close. I'm not even saying it will turn into a good thing. BUT I really like the underlying idea, the concept, of it. Of course there are greedy shitheads, companys taking advantage, fraud and projects which are uterly useless. But yet I didn't came across an argument which convinced that the concept of non-centralizing via blockchain can't work. So, to actually answer your question, I think we shouldn't mix up the discussion about the philosophy, potential and future of Blockchain with individual cases like "is this pump and dump worse than 2008 greed of banks" (which is also an important discussion, but a seperate one). Does that make any sense?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Personally, I'd be fine with all that if not for the elephant in the room - the superlinearly growing, unbounded energy upkeep required to support cryptocurrencies. That one single reason alone outweights all the potential benefits you allude to.
  - blackbrokkoli 8y ago
    This is only true for mining-heave cryptos and is already massively improved in newer projects, but yes, atm it's bad
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Given that PoS is still not adopted in a meaningful way, I feel those differences are merely constant factors, they don't change the trend. But I might be wrong about that, I'm not up to date with bleeding-edge cryptocurrency developments.
- will_brown 8y ago
  My comment shouldn’t come off as all bad/anti-blockchain. While modern view has corporation as these evil centralized entities...the first “stock corporations” were a welcome invention, allowing distribution of risk and a share in profits. I personally love the idea of an immutable and distributed ledger. And while bitcoin may have been helpful as an example of a potential use for a blockchain, it has failed to fulfill the intended use of the creator (peer 2 peer digital currency). I think in a lot of ways because while blockchain itself may have some democratic characteristics, the example of bitcoin as a currency is anything but democratic. Bitcoin is something bought and sold, the inventor(s) have 1,000,000 and new comers will be hard pressed to have equal power. Then again the way democracy is used as a term and romanticized is kind of a joke to me. From the fact the US is often called a democracy (it’s not it’s a constitutional republic), to the idea it took women about 2,500 years to get the right vote, to the realities of democracy only works until it doesn’t then might is right (see the democratically elected parties: taliban, hezbollah, hamas).

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

> At what point are the miners/network considered the centralized institution? Very much this; I'm fairly sure that if there is an organization that wants to direct / control btc, all they have to do is open up their (real money) wallet and get the majority mining capacity. If they first drop the value of BTC by selling or whatnot, miners / automatic miners will switch to more profitable currencies so the total hashes / second will lower, making a hostile takeover easier.

jsutton 8y ago
You make it sound so easy, just open up your wallet and get the majority mining capacity! Tell me, how would someone with near-unlimited money go about doing that? Will they just conjure up the hardware needed to make 15 Trillion hashes per second?
blackbrokkoli 8y ago
In theory yes, but as the other answer states, you would raise an immense amount of money WITHOUT the public realising who would than just abandon whatever mining-based Crypto we're talking about

blackbrokkoli 8y ago

Not sure if representative for "bitcoin enthusiasts", but here is how I see it: As the written word spread in Europe after BC, it layed an important cornerstone for democracy and changed the world for good. Noone would argue with that, right? Ok, so let's look at Europe from 500BC-1300BC. Corrupt monks forging official documents, under some goverments up only about 60-80% of the were real. Monks were people of god, so noone really investigated. For a long time, the emperor would sign with a simple line, because he couldn't actually write. Wow, how is that more valuable than spoken word?! Where is your democracy? Women can't read, poor can't read. Knowledge is stored exclusively by the church. Turns out writing things down is actually a really backward philosophy! Or is it? And that's where we're with Crypto right now, IMO. I'm not saying this is as revolutionary as writing, not even close. I'm not even saying it will turn into a good thing. BUT I really like the underlying idea, the concept, of it. Of course there are greedy shitheads, companys taking advantage, fraud and projects which are uterly useless. But yet I didn't came across an argument which convinced that the concept of non-centralizing via blockchain can't work. So, to actually answer your question, I think we shouldn't mix up the discussion about the philosophy, potential and future of Blockchain with individual cases like "is this pump and dump worse than 2008 greed of banks" (which is also an important discussion, but a seperate one). Does that make any sense?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Personally, I'd be fine with all that if not for the elephant in the room - the superlinearly growing, unbounded energy upkeep required to support cryptocurrencies. That one single reason alone outweights all the potential benefits you allude to.
- blackbrokkoli 8y ago
  This is only true for mining-heave cryptos and is already massively improved in newer projects, but yes, atm it's bad
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Given that PoS is still not adopted in a meaningful way, I feel those differences are merely constant factors, they don't change the trend. But I might be wrong about that, I'm not up to date with bleeding-edge cryptocurrency developments.
will_brown 8y ago
My comment shouldn’t come off as all bad/anti-blockchain. While modern view has corporation as these evil centralized entities...the first “stock corporations” were a welcome invention, allowing distribution of risk and a share in profits. I personally love the idea of an immutable and distributed ledger. And while bitcoin may have been helpful as an example of a potential use for a blockchain, it has failed to fulfill the intended use of the creator (peer 2 peer digital currency). I think in a lot of ways because while blockchain itself may have some democratic characteristics, the example of bitcoin as a currency is anything but democratic. Bitcoin is something bought and sold, the inventor(s) have 1,000,000 and new comers will be hard pressed to have equal power. Then again the way democracy is used as a term and romanticized is kind of a joke to me. From the fact the US is often called a democracy (it’s not it’s a constitutional republic), to the idea it took women about 2,500 years to get the right vote, to the realities of democracy only works until it doesn’t then might is right (see the democratically elected parties: taliban, hezbollah, hamas).