>which is peer-to-peer, permissionless, censorship resistant, borderless, neutral and open All of this is false. Every word of it. If that's what you heard fro

>which is peer-to-peer, permissionless, censorship resistant, borderless, neutral and open All of this is false. Every word of it. If that's what you heard from an MIT course then what that professor is doing is shameful. Here, let's go through it. - Bitcoin isn't peer-to-peer or permissionless and it never has been. The network is de-facto run by mining pools who have exclusive permission to determines who gets to write to the blockchain. In order for two users to send payments to each other they must go through the miners and must pay them fees to gain permission. Peer-to-peer would be if the two users directly sent messages to each other to exchange funds, but that isn't how Bitcoin works. The core design of it intentionally has middlemen and gatekeeping built in. - Bitcoin isn't censorship resistant or borderless. Have some articles: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916 https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/eu-issues-bitcoin-crypto-ban-on-russia-with-new-sanctions https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/eu-issues-bitcoin-crypto-ban... https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/08/politics/fbi-north-korea-hackers-30-million-axie-infinity/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/08/politics/fbi-north-korea-hack... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-seizes-1-billion-bitcoin-tied-silk-road-rcna171 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-seizes-1-billion-bi... - Bitcoin isn't neutral. The political leanings of bitcoin have been known for a very long time. Satoshi intentionally put political statements in the whitepaper and the genesis block. The early adoption by wikileaks and silk road wasn't a coincidence, they had a very specific goal they had in mind. - Bitcoin isn't open. The code itself is available on github but only a small number of people have commit access. A random person can't just go in and start modifying the bitcoin code at will. The best you can do is try to fork the network and launch your own token, which has happened a lot of times but none succeeded at causing the system to actually become open. >The rest of the applications that are built on this idea may be "useless" as the author believes, maybe not. I don't know that and I don't think anyone can be sure. I can say for sure that it's useless because every single positive claim I've ever seen about it has been completely false.