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Bitcoin has less foundation- or team-based leadership that have plagued other crypto projects. This leadership (eg Ethereum foundation) gives crypto projects th

Bitcoin has less foundation- or team-based leadership that have plagued other crypto projects. This leadership (eg Ethereum foundation) gives crypto projects the air of legitimacy, but also the impression, as Hinman put it, that some managerial work and direction is expected, tipping the scale towards security. If the network becomes decentralized to the point where no one party has sway over its direction (even a good one eg the move to proof of stake), only then can you consider it a commodity, at least in Hinman’s view. Not only does this make sense but it also further speaks to the strength of the bitcoin project, specifically Satoshi’s decision to not be a public figure/BDFL. I doubt this security-commodity issue factored in specifically, but it was really a brilliant and largely unprecedented move that aligns with bitcoin’s political philosophy as well: no leaders.

hnthrow1010 4y ago
The idea that Bitcoin has no leaders is a big lie that these regulators should be able to see through. You can take look at any of the well-known whales to see obvious evidence against that claim. They make the claim because it allows them to maintain plausible deniability while manipulating the market as much as they possibly can. I wouldn't trust anyone in finance who says they're not doing managerial work and direction; that work is required to make the stated goals work. It's about as big a red flag as when recruiters say "our company has no bosses and no management". It might fool some naive people, but those who are observant can see who's really in charge.
- tboyd47 4y ago
  If there are "leaders" in Bitcoin, it would not be the whales. It is not Proof of Stake where money buys you a voting right.
  - kinakomochidayo 4y ago
    There's a difference between governance PoS and consensus PoS (Ethereum). There are also several variations of PoS.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Money buys you voting rights in some proof-of-stake implementations that give governance rights to stakers. Ethereum's doesn't do that. Its stakers have no more governance rights than miners.
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      Except Ethereum is planning to eliminate miners and move to proof of stake.
      - drdeca 4y ago
        They were talking specifically about the Proof of Stake model that Ethereum is working on moving to. They were saying that, while some proof of stake chains may use stake for governance, that the protocol for proof of stake intended for use in Ethereum, does not grant any governance roles. Just like, block proposal?
  - konschubert 4y ago
    In Pow, Money buys you mining capacity which is voting rights.
    - shanusmagnus 4y ago
      It's true that in every field known to man, money buys influence, at least in some broad and hazily-defined sense of the word. But the form of influence that can be bought in btc is not voting rights for what happens with the asset, not in any direct way. The distinction matters here.
    - tboyd47 4y ago
      Tell that to the BCH investors
    - etherael 4y ago
      Mining BTC doesn't get you voting rights at all. The core devs will still make pants on head retarded changes and the centralised exchanges will dutifully trade their trash output as if it were really bitcoin, mining just gets you the right to maybe profit on rubber stamping their trash depending on market conditions. BTC has no mining. Only rubberstamping.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      But you have to trade it away to buy the machines. That's very different from giving power to the people holding lots of coins.
      - anonporridge 4y ago
        Especially because mining is a business that you can fail at if you don't balance costs and income properly. That's much preferable to proof of stake where early investors can just squat on their coins indefinitely with almost zero cost to maintain their authority percentage forever.
        yokem55 4y ago
        Except if the community at large doesn't like how a particular staker/validator is doing their job, the staker's assets can be burned in a hard fork that enjoys sufficient broad legitimacy. The capital can be outright destroyed. In contrast, there is no way a community in a proof of work system can burn a particular miners hardware if that miner becomes able to abuse the network. At most they could change the mining algo, but that wipes all miners out, and such a change can really only happen once.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- erdewit 4y ago
  What makes Bitcoin a commodity is that nobody can issue more Bitcoin, other then from mining, just like with physical commodities. The market can still be manipulated by the big players but that is besides the point. When more of an asset can be issued (created from thin air) then it is a security.
  - empraptor 4y ago
    i'm not sure why people keep thinking that there is a hard limit to number of bitcoins that can be mined when the network can be updated to allow more coins to be mined.
- lend000 4y ago
  You might as well be talking about the boogieman. Who are these whales who control the market? Why were so many mega-whales selling at $27K and lower this year, when they could have sold at the top? Michael Saylor is one of, if not the biggest crypto holder right now, and the dude is clueless and currently underwater in his position. Talking about whales is just superstition for people who can't find any alpha in the markets. It's an excuse for why you didn't know the price was going to go in a certain direction. You see it a lot in amateur trading Discords and subreddits.
  - itsoktocry 4y ago
    >Talking about whales is just superstition for people who can't find any alpha in the markets. It's an excuse for why you didn't know the price was going to go in a certain direction. Ah yes, the price predictoor, even more common in amateur trading Discords and subreddits.
    - lend000 4y ago
      Well that is sort of the point of such groups ;)
- gesman 4y ago
  Manipulating the price is not the same as controlling the project direction.
  - etherael 4y ago
    Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project. SEC and similar are likely granting BTC "commodity" status purely because it is so utterly controlled and unthreatening, completely divorced from its original intent of addressing the central banking charade, that any energy they can push into it is energy they won't have to deal with being directed to a legitimate decentralised cryptocurrency that actually works and over which no such control exists.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - majinuub 4y ago
      > Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project. Core devs and exchanges do not entirely control the project direction. Non-backwards compatible changes cannot be made to Bitcoin without the miners AND node operators adopting the new client. It takes the cooperation of the devs, miners, and node operators to make a hard fork. "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier documents a bunch of failed hard fork attempts that were backed by a good number of devs, large miners, and large exchanges. They failed because the node operators were not on board.
      - etherael 4y ago
        I am aware of the official cover story. You appear to be unaware that it is a lie. Look up the historical record. By what metric was the BTC chain allocated to the present by bitfinex? I'll give you a hint, hash power not only had nothing to do with it, it was explicitly said that it would be ignored in the announcement. And reality flies in the face of what you just claimed, node operators had nothing to do with the metric. It's all just outright rigged.
- eric_cc 4y ago
  Can you give a good example of how one of bitcoin’s “managers” changed bitcoin recently?
  - etherael 4y ago
    About five years ago they permanently restricted transaction volume to about 4 per second. After that I stopped paying attention because you couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration of their complete control than the fundamental destruction of the entire purpose of the project even existing. So there's that.
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      so you lost the blocksize war, that doesn't mean "they" have control over the whole project
      - etherael 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=etherael#31924953 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=etherael#31924953
    - potatototoo99 4y ago
      You can always fork bitcoin and throw whatever hashing power you want at it. PoW gives you that.
      - kinakomochidayo 4y ago
        You sure can, until the Bitcoin Core supporters tell people that the fork is an attack on Bitcoin, and crypto media spreads that lie.
        etherael 4y ago
        And bitfinex backs blockstream and the rest follow because they don't want to add to the confusion and tether prints billions into existence to signal fake assent to fundamentally idiotic changes like permanently limiting chain throughput to a fax machine or so whilst censoring any venue which dares point out the abject stupidity, insanity and corruption implicit in all of the above. But yeah, sure, whatever. Definitely don't throw Brer rabbit in that there briar patch. Stick it to the man, use the obviously captured and sabotaged trojan horse. What could possibly go wrong? Laser eye me up. I cannot believe how far bitcoin has fallen. Utter clown world madness.
Alex3917 4y ago
How is this any different than something like GRIN? I'm not involved in either community, but at least superficially they certainly look similar.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  GRIN does not move more than $1B USD per hour?
  - Alex3917 4y ago
    I meant in terms of not being a security, rather than being a commodity.
- tromp 4y ago
  If anything, Grin looks more commodity like than Bitcoin, with no artificial cap on supply, and no financial reward for its creators.
mtoner23 4y ago
while it may be smart from a securities/legal/tax persepctive it also dooms bitcoin to be a useless coin. Transaction speeds abysmal and the energy usage is absurd. These could never be changed
- chromatin 4y ago
  Lightning Network is a layer 2 network on top of Bitcoin that is governed by smart contracts at the base layer and has transaction speed of seconds. It's increasingly used in place of base layer transactions for small to medium sized amounts (e.g. US$1 - $1000). Anything on the order of US$10k+ can reasonably transacted on the base layer, and when I am spending that much I don't mind a 10 minute confirmation time.
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    I'd sign the title of a property over after 3 confirmations on the base layer. Lightning looks cool too, haven't had a chance to use it yet.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
If Ethereum can be changed from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake on a "whim", how is it not centralized in some capacity?
- DennisP 4y ago
  That's quite a whim. It's been the plan since 2014.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Oh, so totally not centralized if there is a central plan. Totally no central group of committers so no centralization, totally no lead developers speaking at conferences providing direction and leadership. Got it. Decentralized.
- mixedCase 4y ago
  On a "whim" in so far as miners agree on the change.
  - 0des 4y ago
    And that change took years for everyone to standardize and design and then agree on to activate.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Miners have no say in it. They "only" participate in the on chain consensus while the switch to PoS is governed by the underlying social consensus of what code to run.
- kreetx 4y ago
  Define whim, and how does it relate to being centralized? I don't think there is anyone forcing the miners to keep another Ethereum classic running.
- kinakomochidayo 4y ago
  It was supposed to transition to PoS from the beginning.
DennisP 4y ago
Bitcoin has a single popular client. There are people who work on that client. Ethereum has five execution clients, developed by independent teams, and another five proof-of-stake clients, also developed by independent teams, plus an open community of researchers where anyone can participate. The Ethereum Foundation funds some of this, but not all of it. If the various teams don't agree to do something, it won't get done. You can verify for yourself that no one party is in charge, simply by listening to the public dev calls.
- 0des 4y ago
  > Bitcoin has a single popular client. False.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    > Although there are many different implementations, the original implementation, Bitcoin Core, is by far the most popular, and it is used as the reference implementation https://river.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-core/ https://river.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-core/ Since it is the reference implementation, other clients have to follow its lead. And that's the lead of a fairly small group: > Over the years, the code has had more than 800 contributors. However, only seven people serve the role of “maintainers” nowadays. https://bitcoinist.com/who-funds-bitcoin-core-developers-here-are-the-facts/ https://bitcoinist.com/who-funds-bitcoin-core-developers-her...
  - yokem55 4y ago
    Bitcoin-core is currently about 97% of bitcoin nodes. Geth is about 80% of ethereum execution layer nodes. But the bigger difference is cultural - alternative clients are a core part of ethereum's development culture and is actively supported and nurtured. This is complete with social campaigns to get folks to switch away from majority clients to prevent situations where a bug in one client could cause big issues in the network. The same kind of environment is not present in bitcoin land.
    - kinakomochidayo 4y ago
Melting_Harps 4y ago
> Bitcoin has less foundation- or team-based leadership that have plagued other crypto projects. It's designed that way, but it has been attempted before: under the guise of that name, no less. I just saw Charlie Schrem on a live stream a while ago, and he strikes me as the person who best represents those conmen. Many have falled by teh way side, others in to utter irrelevance, and then imbeciles like Bruce Fenton refuse to go away and still clings onto his 'foundation status' as though that gave him any legitimacy as he runs for office. I'll just say this: Bitcoiners, especially early adopters, don't have any tolerance for these pseudo-thought leader BS, and nothing irks us more when someone tries to speak on behalf of the community. We vote with our hashing power and our nodes, nothing else matters. We may disagree about specific things, like LukeJRs refusal to let go of his smaller block idea, but the truth is this is a cohesive unit it that is bound by self-interest as much as is its about a central ethos: it's the most resilient community I've ever been a part of and I value it most because of it's refusal to be co-opted despite its MANY attempts, even by people who calling themselves a 'chief scientist' and was 2nd only to Satoshi--who I will remind you appealed to the community to not 'kick the hornet's nest' and then did exactly that in regards to using BTC to fund Wikileaks. > even a good one eg the move to proof of stake You lost all credibility here.

hnthrow1010 4y ago

The idea that Bitcoin has no leaders is a big lie that these regulators should be able to see through. You can take look at any of the well-known whales to see obvious evidence against that claim. They make the claim because it allows them to maintain plausible deniability while manipulating the market as much as they possibly can. I wouldn't trust anyone in finance who says they're not doing managerial work and direction; that work is required to make the stated goals work. It's about as big a red flag as when recruiters say "our company has no bosses and no management". It might fool some naive people, but those who are observant can see who's really in charge.

tboyd47 4y ago
If there are "leaders" in Bitcoin, it would not be the whales. It is not Proof of Stake where money buys you a voting right.
- kinakomochidayo 4y ago
  There's a difference between governance PoS and consensus PoS (Ethereum). There are also several variations of PoS.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Money buys you voting rights in some proof-of-stake implementations that give governance rights to stakers. Ethereum's doesn't do that. Its stakers have no more governance rights than miners.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Except Ethereum is planning to eliminate miners and move to proof of stake.
    - drdeca 4y ago
      They were talking specifically about the Proof of Stake model that Ethereum is working on moving to. They were saying that, while some proof of stake chains may use stake for governance, that the protocol for proof of stake intended for use in Ethereum, does not grant any governance roles. Just like, block proposal?
- konschubert 4y ago
  In Pow, Money buys you mining capacity which is voting rights.
  - shanusmagnus 4y ago
    It's true that in every field known to man, money buys influence, at least in some broad and hazily-defined sense of the word. But the form of influence that can be bought in btc is not voting rights for what happens with the asset, not in any direct way. The distinction matters here.
  - tboyd47 4y ago
    Tell that to the BCH investors
  - etherael 4y ago
    Mining BTC doesn't get you voting rights at all. The core devs will still make pants on head retarded changes and the centralised exchanges will dutifully trade their trash output as if it were really bitcoin, mining just gets you the right to maybe profit on rubber stamping their trash depending on market conditions. BTC has no mining. Only rubberstamping.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    But you have to trade it away to buy the machines. That's very different from giving power to the people holding lots of coins.
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      Especially because mining is a business that you can fail at if you don't balance costs and income properly. That's much preferable to proof of stake where early investors can just squat on their coins indefinitely with almost zero cost to maintain their authority percentage forever.
      - yokem55 4y ago
        Except if the community at large doesn't like how a particular staker/validator is doing their job, the staker's assets can be burned in a hard fork that enjoys sufficient broad legitimacy. The capital can be outright destroyed. In contrast, there is no way a community in a proof of work system can burn a particular miners hardware if that miner becomes able to abuse the network. At most they could change the mining algo, but that wipes all miners out, and such a change can really only happen once.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
erdewit 4y ago
What makes Bitcoin a commodity is that nobody can issue more Bitcoin, other then from mining, just like with physical commodities. The market can still be manipulated by the big players but that is besides the point. When more of an asset can be issued (created from thin air) then it is a security.
- empraptor 4y ago
  i'm not sure why people keep thinking that there is a hard limit to number of bitcoins that can be mined when the network can be updated to allow more coins to be mined.
lend000 4y ago
You might as well be talking about the boogieman. Who are these whales who control the market? Why were so many mega-whales selling at $27K and lower this year, when they could have sold at the top? Michael Saylor is one of, if not the biggest crypto holder right now, and the dude is clueless and currently underwater in his position. Talking about whales is just superstition for people who can't find any alpha in the markets. It's an excuse for why you didn't know the price was going to go in a certain direction. You see it a lot in amateur trading Discords and subreddits.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >Talking about whales is just superstition for people who can't find any alpha in the markets. It's an excuse for why you didn't know the price was going to go in a certain direction. Ah yes, the price predictoor, even more common in amateur trading Discords and subreddits.
  - lend000 4y ago
    Well that is sort of the point of such groups ;)
gesman 4y ago
Manipulating the price is not the same as controlling the project direction.
- etherael 4y ago
  Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project. SEC and similar are likely granting BTC "commodity" status purely because it is so utterly controlled and unthreatening, completely divorced from its original intent of addressing the central banking charade, that any energy they can push into it is energy they won't have to deal with being directed to a legitimate decentralised cryptocurrency that actually works and over which no such control exists.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - majinuub 4y ago
    > Project direction controlled entirely by core devs and the centralised exchanges that bless their output as "bitcoin" regardless of the fact it directly contradicts the original consensus mechanism for the project and the changes implemented by said devs fundamentally broke the utility of the project. Core devs and exchanges do not entirely control the project direction. Non-backwards compatible changes cannot be made to Bitcoin without the miners AND node operators adopting the new client. It takes the cooperation of the devs, miners, and node operators to make a hard fork. "The Blocksize War" by Jonathan Bier documents a bunch of failed hard fork attempts that were backed by a good number of devs, large miners, and large exchanges. They failed because the node operators were not on board.
    - etherael 4y ago
      I am aware of the official cover story. You appear to be unaware that it is a lie. Look up the historical record. By what metric was the BTC chain allocated to the present by bitfinex? I'll give you a hint, hash power not only had nothing to do with it, it was explicitly said that it would be ignored in the announcement. And reality flies in the face of what you just claimed, node operators had nothing to do with the metric. It's all just outright rigged.
eric_cc 4y ago
Can you give a good example of how one of bitcoin’s “managers” changed bitcoin recently?
- etherael 4y ago
  About five years ago they permanently restricted transaction volume to about 4 per second. After that I stopped paying attention because you couldn't ask for a clearer demonstration of their complete control than the fundamental destruction of the entire purpose of the project even existing. So there's that.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    so you lost the blocksize war, that doesn't mean "they" have control over the whole project
    - etherael 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=etherael#31924953 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=etherael#31924953
  - potatototoo99 4y ago
    You can always fork bitcoin and throw whatever hashing power you want at it. PoW gives you that.
    - kinakomochidayo 4y ago
      You sure can, until the Bitcoin Core supporters tell people that the fork is an attack on Bitcoin, and crypto media spreads that lie.
      - etherael 4y ago
        And bitfinex backs blockstream and the rest follow because they don't want to add to the confusion and tether prints billions into existence to signal fake assent to fundamentally idiotic changes like permanently limiting chain throughput to a fax machine or so whilst censoring any venue which dares point out the abject stupidity, insanity and corruption implicit in all of the above. But yeah, sure, whatever. Definitely don't throw Brer rabbit in that there briar patch. Stick it to the man, use the obviously captured and sabotaged trojan horse. What could possibly go wrong? Laser eye me up. I cannot believe how far bitcoin has fallen. Utter clown world madness.

Alex3917 4y ago

How is this any different than something like GRIN? I'm not involved in either community, but at least superficially they certainly look similar.

mistrial9 4y ago
GRIN does not move more than $1B USD per hour?
- Alex3917 4y ago
  I meant in terms of not being a security, rather than being a commodity.
tromp 4y ago
If anything, Grin looks more commodity like than Bitcoin, with no artificial cap on supply, and no financial reward for its creators.

mtoner23 4y ago

while it may be smart from a securities/legal/tax persepctive it also dooms bitcoin to be a useless coin. Transaction speeds abysmal and the energy usage is absurd. These could never be changed

chromatin 4y ago
Lightning Network is a layer 2 network on top of Bitcoin that is governed by smart contracts at the base layer and has transaction speed of seconds. It's increasingly used in place of base layer transactions for small to medium sized amounts (e.g. US$1 - $1000). Anything on the order of US$10k+ can reasonably transacted on the base layer, and when I am spending that much I don't mind a 10 minute confirmation time.
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  I'd sign the title of a property over after 3 confirmations on the base layer. Lightning looks cool too, haven't had a chance to use it yet.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

If Ethereum can be changed from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake on a "whim", how is it not centralized in some capacity?

DennisP 4y ago
That's quite a whim. It's been the plan since 2014.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Oh, so totally not centralized if there is a central plan. Totally no central group of committers so no centralization, totally no lead developers speaking at conferences providing direction and leadership. Got it. Decentralized.
mixedCase 4y ago
On a "whim" in so far as miners agree on the change.
- 0des 4y ago
  And that change took years for everyone to standardize and design and then agree on to activate.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Miners have no say in it. They "only" participate in the on chain consensus while the switch to PoS is governed by the underlying social consensus of what code to run.
kreetx 4y ago
Define whim, and how does it relate to being centralized? I don't think there is anyone forcing the miners to keep another Ethereum classic running.
kinakomochidayo 4y ago
It was supposed to transition to PoS from the beginning.

DennisP 4y ago

Bitcoin has a single popular client. There are people who work on that client. Ethereum has five execution clients, developed by independent teams, and another five proof-of-stake clients, also developed by independent teams, plus an open community of researchers where anyone can participate. The Ethereum Foundation funds some of this, but not all of it. If the various teams don't agree to do something, it won't get done. You can verify for yourself that no one party is in charge, simply by listening to the public dev calls.

0des 4y ago
> Bitcoin has a single popular client. False.
- DennisP 4y ago
  > Although there are many different implementations, the original implementation, Bitcoin Core, is by far the most popular, and it is used as the reference implementation https://river.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-core/ https://river.com/learn/what-is-bitcoin-core/ Since it is the reference implementation, other clients have to follow its lead. And that's the lead of a fairly small group: > Over the years, the code has had more than 800 contributors. However, only seven people serve the role of “maintainers” nowadays. https://bitcoinist.com/who-funds-bitcoin-core-developers-here-are-the-facts/ https://bitcoinist.com/who-funds-bitcoin-core-developers-her...
- yokem55 4y ago
  Bitcoin-core is currently about 97% of bitcoin nodes. Geth is about 80% of ethereum execution layer nodes. But the bigger difference is cultural - alternative clients are a core part of ethereum's development culture and is actively supported and nurtured. This is complete with social campaigns to get folks to switch away from majority clients to prevent situations where a bug in one client could cause big issues in the network. The same kind of environment is not present in bitcoin land.
  - kinakomochidayo 4y ago

Melting_Harps 4y ago

> Bitcoin has less foundation- or team-based leadership that have plagued other crypto projects. It's designed that way, but it has been attempted before: under the guise of that name, no less. I just saw Charlie Schrem on a live stream a while ago, and he strikes me as the person who best represents those conmen. Many have falled by teh way side, others in to utter irrelevance, and then imbeciles like Bruce Fenton refuse to go away and still clings onto his 'foundation status' as though that gave him any legitimacy as he runs for office. I'll just say this: Bitcoiners, especially early adopters, don't have any tolerance for these pseudo-thought leader BS, and nothing irks us more when someone tries to speak on behalf of the community. We vote with our hashing power and our nodes, nothing else matters. We may disagree about specific things, like LukeJRs refusal to let go of his smaller block idea, but the truth is this is a cohesive unit it that is bound by self-interest as much as is its about a central ethos: it's the most resilient community I've ever been a part of and I value it most because of it's refusal to be co-opted despite its MANY attempts, even by people who calling themselves a 'chief scientist' and was 2nd only to Satoshi--who I will remind you appealed to the community to not 'kick the hornet's nest' and then did exactly that in regards to using BTC to fund Wikileaks. > even a good one eg the move to proof of stake You lost all credibility here.