I do understand what you’re saying, and I totally get your concern. You have to understand what p2p really is under the hood to not be afraid of it. The person in the middle is just another peer with equal power to change content as every other peer: zero. In BitTorrent, which inspired bitcoin, files are uploaded and downloaded. When it first came out, most home internet connections were spotty and when you tried to download huge files, if it didn’t just lose the connection and fail completely, the file would get corrupted and be useless. BitTorrent introduced a method to disseminate huge files, chunk by chunk, in a way that would only succeed if the resultant file matched a hash of the original, meaning it was the DEFINITELY THE SAME EXACT FILE. This was great for downloading OSs and software that you needed a positively perfect copy of, then later our internet connections got better and we started checking SHA256 hashes to make sure our downloads were good. But BitTorrent still does this job perfectly, and bitcoin’s p2p network is similar in that it IS the protection. It is what makes it possible, and bitcoin would have never grown so huge without it. These peers are your friends. The network doesn’t allow ‘rogue’ peers.
Discussion
I am glad yoy understand my points.
I think I have a fairly good understanding of what is happening under the hood.
It will be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out in the future.
I am not concerned about a miner changing a transaction however I do see the very real threat of miners censoring transactions in the future. From a protocol level it may be in the miners incentive to always include the transactions with the highest fee however I see significant external pressure from governments ect on miners that could outweigh this incentive.
As you said we might just go around in circles.
It seems to me that while you understand what I am saying you do not see the P2P description as being potentially misleading in the same way I do.
thats fair. Maybe I never thought of it as misleading because I don’t care what anyone else thinks about these descriptions or descriptors because I get it. Typical autist shit, you know. I figure if some miners censor transactions in the future because of the origin of the coins, other miners will be there to do it instead. If not, then the network has been completely compromised anyway. Mining problems from an entity like blackrock are real fears. This is why I hope that hyperbitcoinization includes an explosion of mine development in every nation to fight the current centralization efforts