Comment by arcanemachiner
10 hours ago
> With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts like what happened during the beyond reckless banks in 2008
It is not beyond imagination that the most popular Bitcoin blockchain (and thus, the label of being the "real" Bitcoin) could change at some point in the future.
"Bitcoin" is not immune from the implications of political fuckery.
By what mechanism? The whole point of bitcoin is that you can’t force a consensus change. This is enforced by the algorithm and the laws of thermodynamics.
If, for whatever reason, all the mining power switches to the other chain, it will become the de facto "Bitcoin".
I don't know what the specific mechanism would be, but I would bet that it relates to the billions of dollars backing the current ecosystem, and the interests of the people behind them. If the right event or crisis comes along, then people could be compelled to switch over to something else.
I'm sure there's someone out there still mining blocks on that chain with the exploit from 2010, but that's not where the mining power is. If the right series of events occurs, the miners will switch.
If literally 100% of miners switched, leaving zero on the original chain, then people will have no choice since it won’t do any more transactions.
But if, say, a mere 99% of miners switch, it’s far from a given that people would follow. Having more mining capacity makes the chain more secure, but it’s not that big of a deal.
Bitcoin has forked a few times it's creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bitcoin_forks The determining factor for which fork is successfully is bases on the Bitcoin node runners and miners choosing which fork they devote their resources to.
Governments around the world are 100% attempting different plans to destabilize or destroy Bitcoin because it harms their interests and ability to print money from thin air. But at the end of the day it's a distributed ledger, so even if they do find a way to manipulate or damage or takeover the network the Bitcoin users can just fork it from before they did their damage and continue from there. That is the ultimate power of a decentralized blockchain, nobody has ultimate power and everyone votes with their resources.
Power comes from the barrel of a gun.
Yes. That is why the Second Amendment is so important. It reminds those in the government not to overstep their bounds.
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If anything, the real risk of BTC isn't governments destroying it.
It's that everything you do on the blockchain is there forever, so if a government needs you in jail for using it, they can show you were involved in a financial crime and the blockchain proves it... And if you are unwilling to give up your public wallet they can keep you in jail indefinitely until you do.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. Every activity on the network is encoded into a perpetual auditable dataset, by design.