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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

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.

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.