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That's correct, there's effectively no difference

It very may well be. I don't own any BTC and I had limited awareness of Blockstream until you mentioned it. I feel that this would make a stronger case for it being considered a security, though, no? And yet on September 27th 2023 Gensler reiterates Bitcoin is not a security:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbrett/2023/10/01/sec-chair...

I feel we're getting a bit into the weeds, though.

Is your stance that Bitcoin is a security and that remarks made two months ago by the Chairperson of the SEC are misguided?

Or is it that Bitcoin is not a security, but Ethereum is? If so, is that for technical reasons or just due to how it's discussed and marketed?

Blockstream afaik hired a few devs and paid them to contribute to bitcoin core, first I’m hearing about a hijack of the repository

Seems to me that one can make an argument that the following people, named in bitcoin/src/kernel/chainparams.cpp, control BTC:

        vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.sipa.be."); // Pieter Wuille, only supports x1, x5, x9, and xd
        vSeeds.emplace_back("dnsseed.bluematt.me."); // Matt Corallo, only supports x9
        vSeeds.emplace_back("dnsseed.bitcoin.dashjr.org."); // Luke Dashjr
        vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoinstats.com."); // Christian Decker, supports x1 - xf
        vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.jonasschnelli.ch."); // Jonas Schnelli, only supports x1, x5, x9, and xd
        vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.btc.petertodd.org."); // Peter Todd, only supports x1, x5, x9, and xd
        vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.sprovoost.nl."); // Sjors Provoost
        vSeeds.emplace_back("dnsseed.emzy.de."); // Stephan Oeste
        vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.wiz.biz."); // Jason Maurice

Those are the seed nodes for finding peers in the network when you're starting Bitcoin for the first time, and there aren't other known peers. Sure, you could ask around for additional peers through other channels.

Btw, I couldn't find these on the newest version, so I'm not sure how they do it now.

Bitcoin along with most cryptocurrencies (broadly priced in it), is controlled by a small cartel of deeply entrenched miners and large wallet stakeholders who were involved early on and have constantly consolidated their positions both over infrastructural custody, that is, mining, and control of liquidity.

There's a staggering amount of illegal mining that is never accounted for in the economic models used to determine how much control these folks have over liquidity; this entire conversation is just broadly discouraged and for whatever reason seems to have attracted very little interest even from the crypto critics out there.

The number one weapon the crypto cartel uses to shut down dangwrous critical turns developing in the story, is their ability to move the last trade price almost at will, completely opposed to any building critical narrative in order to undermine it, knowing full well that the sympathy of the media reliably lies with "number go up", not "number made up." And they can do this because they're sitting on an enormous warchest of unsold coins mined when prices were far cheaper, which they can use to fund their operations while they throttle back current coinbase sales at current prices to prop up the price.

There's a lot of problems with your post, but I'm going to focus on the one that bamboozled me the most.

> illegal mining

What exactly is "illegal mining"?

2022: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2455120/thousan...

2023: (much smaller scale than above but still stealing over USD $150000 a year in electricity)

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2569745/crypto-...

This time around the authorities estimate that they've only found 1%, not 10% as they had before, of the illegal mining done in their country.

100 million baht in 2 years? So about $1.5m USD in a year.

That's not exactly "staggering" or significant in the context of the Bitcoin network. Unlikely that such operations have any meaningful control over the network or liquidity, even if it's just 1% of what's known.

You seem to think that these sorts of operations are somehow connected in a large coordinated cartel the controls the industry, but given that they're illegal, isn't it far more likely that these "black market" operators are fairly small by comparison to the legitimate players in the US?

The mining ban in China a couple of years back gave us a pretty good indication of the size of the legitimate industry in that country, and it absolutely DWARFS the biggest of the illegal examples you gave.

Interesting way to word it too, "illegal mining". They're just stealing electricity. If they used that stolen electricity for heating, you wouldn't call it "illegal heating", would you?

So you read the article, as well as the quote that I put above and therefore you know that this is estimated to be only 1% of the illegal mining done in _Thailand_ alone, and this in just the past couple of years when visibility of cryptocurrency has been well established even in non-tech circles.

It's been happening ever since crypto mining, especially Bitcoin, existed. Long before most anyone knew what mining was, or knew to look for it being done stealrhily on someone elses's dollar ...or baht. I didn't say I condone stealing electricity for any purpose, but there's a particular hypocrisy with crypto people who claim that mining costs chase the hash rate and difficulty adjustments ensure that everyone has a fair shot at winning a coin base. Obvious nonsense.

It's hypocrisy that crypto people, who like to think of themselves as some sort of sophisticated financial visiinary class, are so hopelessly naive that it would never even occur to them to consider that being rationally self interested will inevitably and swiftly devolve into outright theft, and the obfuscated consolidation of power favors the venal corrupt and those who are willing to benefit from wholesale theft, which is why such people are entrenched at the center of this so-called decentralized system.

this logic would apply to literally every facet of human existence if it were true; your argument has devolved into "people would make more money if they were engaged in criminality and didn't get caught, therefore everyone eventually devolves into a criminal."

the papers studying the amount of black market activity in Bitcoin have consistently shown Bitcoin to be cleaner than the economies in virtually every country on the planet, except for the occasional ultra-clean tiny european state.

literally every bitcoiner since the first roll-out of the Silk Road and the resulting senatorial attacks on them, have been ultra-interested in exactly how much of their hobby is black market and how much is criminality. literally every single one of them is heavily invested in knowing more about the nature and extent of bitcoin criminality. to say that it didn't occur to them that self-interested criminals are operating in BitcoinLand is .. stupid.

ChainOfFools is tilting at windmills.

> crypto cartel [...] ability to move the last trade price almost at will

I think there is lots of manipulation, but could you elaborate on how you can, for example, pump the BTC price up when you hold lots of BTC, but no USD? Leveraged futures on crypto-only exchanges?

Miners are the only source of continuous downward pressure on the price, there are other sources of course but miners are nearly clockwork steady sellers, so the market gets accustomed to this effect. all they have to do is let up a tiny bit. the standard narrative is that they can't afford to do so because of the balance between diff rate adjusted mining costs and market price of the mined coin. What I'm pointing out is that because of the massive amount of head start they had from a decade of largely unpoliced mining wherever they found an "opportunity" to do so, legally or not, (as well as continued theft of resources to mine even today), they have plenty of extra reserves to use to cover costs, (assuming that they even pay market cost in the first place - see also: corruption) selling coins at today is prices which were mined at one, two, three+ years old cost rates or less.

This is not even getting into the circus known as tether, which I believe is a significant factor but actually quite a bit of an over-stated red herring serving (along with constant exchange clownery) as a distraction away from the much bigger influence that is the enormous subjective control miners have over the order book price of the coin.

No one controls Bitcoin, because it's a protocol. Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation, but there are others, and anyone can create new implementations if they wish. Also, the Bitcoin Core maintainers can't just change something on a whim, because users would then switch to another fork. Maintainers (or miners or other groups) can't force their changes on users, because everyone can decide on their own which version of the software they want to use.

The protocol development happens through BIPs (Bitcoin improvement proposals): https://github.com/bitcoin/bips

BIPs are discussed for years, before (and if) they are implemented, and basically everyone needs to agree on them, because no one wants to fork the blockchain, which could be devastating.

This is completely false, what's your source? Also, it has never been the case. I recall that at some point around 2015, about 4/9 persons with commit access to the github repository (please note that this is a far fetched attempt to find out a metric for "controlled") were co-founders or employees at Blockstream, but right now I am not sure there are more than four or five, out of ~30.

Sources:

https://github.com/orgs/bitcoin/people

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35907/bitcoin-no...

No.