Replying to Avatar Olivier Roland

The risk of domestication of #Bitcoin

"If you can't beat them, join them"

If Bitcoin becomes part of the U.S. Strategic Reserve, this will give the U.S. government very powerful leverage over Bitcoin's future.

I see several risky scenarios with this.

For example, the government or the Senate could decide that Bitcoin must integrate KYC natively for it to be used legally by the US state, US financial institutions, businesses and individuals.

They could pay developers to create a fork, and force all these American people and entities to use it.

The rest of the community will then have to choose:

- Stay with the original version of Bitcoin, which will NOT be used by the U.S. government, ETFs, #Microstrategy, etc.

- Or use the version that all these American entities will use.

The problem is that it's the version used by US entities that should have the highest price per Bitcoin, creating an incentive for all other users to use the new fork.

What's your opinion on this scenario and the risk it represents?
Avatar
Ajax 1y ago

I guess I disagree that the market would price the KYC bitcoin higher than BTC classic. In my view the original promise of the protocol was P2P, ie to take out the middle man and return financial self-sovereignty to the individual. The more friction you add to that the lesser its utility, hence the lower its value.

You’ll also have difficulty forcing miners onto the new fork (mining capacity will just relocate outside of the US), while forcing nodes to run the forked core will be literally impossible.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

No replies yet.