RE: Re: @practicalthought
"Even if Bitcoin is in the hands of the government (no proof of that)..."
It isn't any single label that defines the enemy of freedom. Government is just one mechanism of control, after all. Blockstream is owned by AXA, which is controlled by a Bilderberger. Bilderberg isn't the government. It's a mechanism for controlling governments, arguably worse than government itself.
This is publicly verifiable information, which I recommend you undertake, to prevent being tricked into thinking BTC is free from being controlled by the banksters that are the real enemy of freedom.
Decentralization, continuing to develop as new cryptocurrencies are created, does indeed inevitably and ineluctably reduce centralization and monopoly. No single decentralized mechanism does that, so BTC alone does not do that. It is, as you point out, the myriad decentralized alternatives to centralized mechanisms that do that in toto.
Thanks!
Doesn't matter if they control the development of Bitcoin.
The network won't allow them to do 99% of the things that they want to do with it.
As long as they can't create inflation out of thin air that alone makes it a thousand times better than fiat. It isn't easy to push forks on the Bitcoin community. Who cares who the dev team is? It's not changing. Bitcoin is the most censorship resistant coin of them all, for better or worse.
It is by controlling transaction fees that they effect inflation. It doesn't matter if BTC tokens can't inflate when the cost of transacting in BTC is inherent to using BTC, and they can control transaction fees. Blockstream controls transaction fees, and thus BTC inflation.
Further the derivatives market is a mechanism to control the price of BTC irrespective of inflation, just as PMs and other assets are manipulated to artificially depress their prices, enabling other players than the specific entitites that control Blockstream to affect BTC, opening that market and increasing the real value of BTC to them for those purposes.
You aren't wrong about BTC and censorship AFAIK, but that merely demonstrates that there is no censorship proof mechanism extant today. This is why we need mesh networks and open source hardware before we can have secure and censorship free speech.
Thanks!