Newsflash: bitcoin software solution and you can always change the code.

There are only ~4k listening nodes. This means only 4k nodes are sharing their state with other nodes. The rest, ~40k non-listening nodes, don't matter in regarding to the bitcoin network. Node count history also shows there was at maximum ~23k listening nodes back in 2018 and fell down to 4k nodes. This metric shows decreased interest in bitcoin decentralization.

Haha, FYI not every other solution is built on bitcoin fork ;) ... Especially solutions which utilize BFT algorithms are built from scratch. Replicated state machine, what you describe, is not new and certainly not invented by bitcoin. Other solutions are using it too. Including non-blockchain related solutions and it been in use way before bitcoin existed. Little news flash, anyone can run soft-fork on their node and it doesn't need to be accepted widely. Nodes that use soft-fork upgrade will understand it other node's won't. The main difference with hard-fork is that soft-fork won't split the network (e.g. BIP16).

You're disillusioned if you think software which can be changed any moment has better "value-store" properties than metal which requires neutron stars to merge to create new.

You just don't see it but in reality bitcoin is controlled by very few.

So is bitcoin. No matter how you look at it, in the end bitcoin is software solution and people decided to give it value. Software has bugs. Last year a severe mining-inflation bug was discovered that retained in the code for 2 years. Btw they didn't have proper CI (continue integration test) until last year. This is worrisome information for so called "store-of-value" (bullshit if you ask me). They still don't have proper consensus mechanism about how new code is accepted to the existing code base. Usually, PR is purposed and than with not much debating of the community it is accepted or rejected. Also bitcoin core repository is totally controlled by one single company - Blockstream. If you know a bit about how software is developed and you concern about decentralized systems, you should be worried too. Oh, and FYI most don't know that bitcoin's max 21 million limitation can be lifted in a soft-fork (upgrade not requiring everybody to upgrade their node's software). Here is the source code, you figure out the math: https://github.com/bitcoin/bit...

Bitmain & Blockstream have the control over bitcoin. You just don't see it (or don't want to see) because you listen what maxis have to say and you don't look at the data.

I'm not talking about PoS (proof of stake). I'm pointing out byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) and probabilistic byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) solutions. BFT is not PoS. PoS is PoW without mining but using stacking or minting to define next block. Both PoW and PoS have ultimate design flaw and that's concentration of power by utilizing financial stake. To put in layman's terms, the more rich miner or minter is more control over network he has. In the end, in both solutions you trust a rich man to not betray the system. Just a reminder here, we already have such financial systems (banks and other financial institutions including governments) and it doesn't require so much energy.

You're confusing miners with governance. Miners provide security and confirm transactions. They advance the chain. And in practice have ultimate power to censor any transaction they want or rewrite the recent history state. To have a full node it doesn't mean you can do much about if you're transaction is prevented from being included into block or chain was reorged and you're transaction was thrown out. So on the network they have all the power they want. What you're referring is governance. Users could decide to fork or move to another network and this in theory has effect to reduce miner's influence over current network. In practice miners will move to new network too.

By the way, the links you've posted are from bitcoin maximalists. Jimmy Song is know bitcoin maxi and wannabe developer. Unplug yourself from resources like this.

That's ignorant narrative by bitcoin-maxis. You're blinded by their echo chambers. There are already technical solutions that solves BGP efficiently and cheaper than bitcoin. Just for example what I'm talking about. There are blockchain solutions (I don't want to promote any) that have on-chain governance, block generation and confirmation distributed geographically to more than one node (in bitcoin the most powerful miner defines next block), deterministic fair transaction ordering and censorship detection (in bitcoin miner defines which transactions goes in block), faster block generation etc... For example, this is a paper published recently about fair transaction ordering and censorship resistance based on PBFT : https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/2...

Data doesn't show this, buddy. Majority of miners are located in China and that's a fact. Over the years there have been many attempts to distribute mining operations globally but all have failed. So as long as bitcoin depends on PoW algorithm it'll be geographically centralized to China.

Bitcoin is not the only solution solving the 2 generals problem and certainly not the first one. There are many other solutions that solve this problem more efficiently, better and cheaper. For example solutions that use variation of PBFT algorithm. Bitcoin is narrative of OGs trying to pump and keep there bags valuable. Sooner the markets realize this the better. After that happens we can talk about global financial revolution where competitive efficient solutions have value and crap gets dismissed.

Bitcoin is not geographically decentralized, since at the moment there are still 80% of all mining pools and miners located in mainland China. https://coin.dance/blocks/allh... https://www.blockchain.com/cha...