Until now whenever weve needed to transfer money weve had to rely on a third party, whether it be a bank, a clearing house or a payment network. Bitcoin offers, for the first time, a method for transferring value and making payments from anywhere to anywhere, in real-time, without any intermediary.
^ Bitcoin is powerful because it is borderless and permissionless.
This is not true, and people keep repeating it at a concerning rate. The reality isn't quite so snappily summed up, but it's wildly different from this presentation, and that makes it very dangerous misinformation.
I agree but not in the senstionalist sense that you like to put it.
So, bitcoin is permissionless? I don't see how it's possible to sensationalise such a basic fact. Bitcoin holders can be prevented from spending their bitcoin by a majority of miners: that's just plain statement of facts.
I used the term 'permission-minimized.' How many times has someone been prevented from spending their coins? None that I am aware of. It's just another theoretical attack that doesn't work in practice.
Either it is or it isn't. This is the exact issue I'm trying to draw attention to. It is a big assumption to make that the pressure for miners to conform to government edicts will not increase in step with bitcoin's influence on world finance. By the time that happens, and without an alteration in the barriers to entry for mining or the miners ability to control transactions, then mining centralisation will become even more entrenched.
How are you going to feel if a future mining majority decides that Austrianism is no longer fashionable any more, and Keynesianism is back? 500 BTC superwhales could end up with something closer to 500 dollars.