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Comment by tdurden | Hacker News Reader

> By your logic, people using coinbase to hold their coins aren't holding bitcoin

Exactly, they aren't. Coinbase owns the private keys, thus the bitcoin.

I completely agree. That why the money on my bitcoin debit card is only a fraction of the total amount of bitcoin I own, and I put money on the card when I want to. Because I understand the risk of putting bitcoin on an exchange, and am prepared to accept that risk for that amount, for the convenience of being able to spend my bitcoin whenever I choose.

What you're promoting is a totally centralized cryptocurrency vision for the vast majority of the world, where the very rich and large institutions alone get to use their private keys with any frequency.

It utterly contradicts the title of Bitcoin's white paper:

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Nodes are peers. If you don't own one, especially if you can't run one, and you don't use it to secure your transactions on the blockchain, you aren't one.

You skipped right over the peer part, even though the word is used twice, and started talking about the cash part.

If you don't control your own private keys, you don't have any control of your own money. Satoshi certainly did not think using light clients while controlling one's own private keys contradicted the principle of "peer-to-peer electronic cash".

No matter how you try to spin it, you can't make a future where the vast majority can't control their own private keys sound consistent with Satoshi's vision, or rewrite the public statements Satoshi made about how Bitcoin should scale.

You need to learn how bitcoin works and what a node does.

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