Why would China not ban bitcoin? How does bitcoin help China in ANY way even if they wanted to use it?
They have 1 billion fucking people and bitcoin doesn't scale to service a small town with one gas station, let alone China. This thread is mostly a giant echo chamber of technically illiterate people, so they don't know Lightning Network can't function in a decentralized manner whatsoever (not that bitcoin itself functions decentralized either). Before he became a scammer and disappeared, people who actually know what they're talking about like Death&Taxes mentioned problems like this but didn't go into any details as to why, and I've expanded on this issue 10x more than he ever did recently:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg28305541#msg28305541Even if every crypto was heavily centralized and functioned as a digital central bank, it'd still be far more decentralized than traditional CBs are, simple by virtue of being interchangeable instantaneously. Don't like what the miners on the Bitcoin network are doing? Or the major stakeholders? Flip over to another crypto in the blink of an eye. You do not have this option with government and CB controlled fiat currencies.
And luckily cryptos are not centralized and will be further decentralized as the mainstream starts adopting them.
You're also completely neglecting the fact that a bunch of centralized hubs can very well coexist with a decentralized base layer, while also completely ignoring the fact that this is just the first solution for the current very real problems with scaling. In the future, just like exchanges, something like LN might very well end up returning to full decentralization.
And there's more to crypto than just Bitcoin, which renders your argument regarding China entirely redundant.