Quote from: betswift on Today at 01:23:53 PM

Quote from: Mastercon on May 25, 2025, 04:30:51 AM

Reality is in this current time and for foreseeable future if you store a meaningful amount of wealth in bitcoin it’s better off with multiple custodians that self custody.
People buying bitcoin ETF aren't looking to use it as money and neither are most Bitcoiners. Bitcoin smiles upon those who help themselves. Decentralization is faster in practice... if you're really trying to move large amounts of money, then you can remove the process of vetting trusted third parties with Bitcoin, thereby saving loads of time, days, weeks, even. Wild isn't it? How they will adopt crazy ideas about Bitcoin that are blatantly not how it functions because they wish it functioned like that to make the cool stuff they want to do easier. I suspect a lot of this comes from traditional development environment norms where you can dictate the software users are using. One aspect to the trilemma is that we can build the new financial system on top of Bitcoin. On chain does not necessarily need to scale to achieve that. The LN shows us that we can achieve speed and security at the cost of some centralization and that this is an acceptable trade-off. The base layer needs to be decentralized and secure.

They want everything centralized..And the more opportunities they see, the better for them.

Unfortunately, if we want BTC to flourish, we will need them to allow it to become mainstream and used, otherwise, there will be loopholes, but no real usage of BTC as an alternative.

"They" may prefer to see bitcoin centralized, however decentralization is necessary for bitcoin to be used as medium-of-exchange.

It's a balance of dependencies. Store-of-value is a necessary pre-requisite for medium-of-exchange, and likewise store-of-value depends on usage as medium-of-exchange.

Why is this?

b/c value isn’t created in a vacuum:

- If bitcoin is only a medium of exchange but nobody wants to hold it long term, then it won’t store value—people will only pass it on and dump it (Monero here as an example)
- On the other hand, if it’s only treated as a store-of-value without meaningful usage in exchange, then its value is fragile, because markets are thin and demand depends on pure speculation

The two reinforce each other. Store of value is naturally centralizing imo, but decentralization is what gives bitcoin value as medium of exchange.