Despite the bitcoin price being down ~70% from the highs, total lightning capacity remains healthy and is reaching all-time highs! This is the key fundamental/long-term metric to watch for bitcoin in my humble opinion. IF lightning emerges as a successful layer 2 payment solution, bitcoin will achieve the crypto "trifecta" - Decentralization: bitcoin is already the most decentralized cryptocurrency and its not even close - Security: bitcoin is already the most secure cryptocurrency with no NETWORK hacks or downtime in over a decade - Scalability: This is where bitcoin made a sacrifice. It's not scalable, at the base layer, to facilitate the necessary payment throughput (as critics will always remind ya, which is fair). IF lightning continues to be built out and makes payments feasible, that would "solve" the area that bitcoin sacrificed to achieve the other two - decentralization and security. From there, what would feasibly stop this train?? Food for thought ... Also this isn't to say the BTC bottom is in I have no idea if it is or isn't. This is more about the long-term fundamentals of the network.
This narrative is so old, played out and BS. Decentralization: BTC is literally dominated by whales, CEXs and Mining pools. The trading is fully dominated by centralized entities. The PoW system is literally designed for centralization, since it is an arms race, and only the big players will prevail. Security: Two inflation bugs and shit spaghetti code that the community refuses to get audited. Scalability: Purposefully designed to be terrible in this regards and is now forced to slap on band-aids to pretend as if BTC can ever function as a payment system. Lightning Network is nothing more than an off the chain database. Any crypto can use it, but none do, aside from BTC, because what is even the point? It literally defeats the purpose of the trustless distributed ledger. There literally is no way to verify the validity of the transactions posted by the lighting node operator.
Use the lightning network with your own node and you'll find the answers to many of your uninformed concerns I recommend an Umbrel node
The irony is lost on you. There's no Bitcoin "community". There's no budget for audit. Stop thinking like other crypto projects Bitcoin is decentralized Forced? lol Bitcoin is decentralized ------ If you ever spend some time running a Bitcoin node, making some transactions, running a LN node, making some transactions, trying out different versions of the Bitcoin core, using some utilities to query the network, all with your own "servers", you might get a moment of clarity You keep talking about Bitcoin whales as if they have more privilege on the Bitcoin network. A whale that has 1 Million bitcoins on his wallet has no more relevance than a Bitcoin pleb running a full node with 0 satoshis on his wallet If you want to argue a mining pool can censor a transaction, please provide a txid of such
You can keep pretending that BTC is decentralized or you can look at reality, such the trading activity, which is fully dependent on centralized exchanges. Such as ownership concentration, and I might be off here, but the last figure I remember is that less than 2000 wallets control over half the supply. And such as the basic math behind the mining design, where centralization is basically programmed as the hardware requirements will squeeze everyone else out aside from the biggest players. Miners, who control the hash power, also have the voting power when it comes to making changes to BTC. Along with a small group of devs. At the end of the day, noone really gives a crap about decentralization in crypto, aside from BTC maxis, who scream it as if it's some world saving feature of BTC, while they continue to rely on centralized entities to onramp/offramp, as well as trade, yet consider DeFi blasphemy. Lightning Network has been around how long? And yet has laughable adoption, aside from BTC maxis screaming left & right how great it is. They keep proclaiming record volumes on Lighting nodes and all that, but, none of that is actually verifiable. It can all be wash trading volume for all anyone knows, as it is an off the chain database.
We'll have to agree to disagree, but you did not address your concerns on what whales can do on the network that make them special? You also did not give an example of how these centralized miners are harming the network, like give us an example of a failed txid Let's be specific say you're in Russia or Iran or North Korea and you open up your Metamask to send some Eth out, would you experience a problem? If you open a Bitcoin wallet from same locations and tried to send Btc out, would you experience a problem? Changes on the network are done through a process, any changes to the Bitcoin protocol have to be submitted through the github process PR, BIP and implemented by the users, full node, and majority of miners signaling support, you can google Tap root implementation, the whole timeline While you're at it, you can google Bitcoin UASF... Anyway, Bitcoin nodes can run a version from 2016 or the latest one released a few months ago. The Bitcoin network will accept them Try the same thing on Ethereum and you create a fork, because the Ethereum protocol has changed a few times, with the last major one being EIP-1559 I'm sure you understand the above but you try to obfuscate and confuse the uninitiated Hence, we'll agree to disagree