The REAL Reason Why Bitcoin is Decentralized

In short, Bitcoin is decentralized solely because its leadership aka “Satoshi Nakamoto” is long gone (due to whatever the reason).

If “Satoshi Nakamoto” was still around today, Bitcoin would never be as decentralized as it presently is.

There would probably be a lot of hard forks for upgrades and improvements along the years that would make Bitcoin very clearly centralized.

Back on August 15, 2010, Bitcoin was hacked and ended up hyperinflating by an additional 184+ billions of BTC out of thin air.

This event is known as the Value Overflow Incident in Bitcoin history.

Within 5 hours after the hack, “Satoshi Nakamoto” quickly hard forked the Bitcoin blockchain to remove the hyperinflated coins.

If “Satoshi Nakamoto” did not interfere and instead just let the power of decentralization do its job, Bitcoin would not have remain in existence today.

Such act of intervention (despite the intent was to save Bitcoin from destruction) was clearly an act of centralization.

Bitcoin is decentralized today not because of a voluntary choice or because it is based on proof-of-work as wrongly perceived by most people, but rather because its centralized leadership aka “Satoshi Nakamoto” is already long gone.

Proof-of-work is flawed because the miners’ financial interest is not aligned with the blockchain’s ever-increasing hashing power need to maintain security.

And this misalignment of interests will only grow wider going into the distant future, causing tremendous stresses, both financially and technically, to the miners.

You may say Bitcoin’s centralized leadership being gone (be it by force or by nature) is a good thing, but do not forget that also means Bitcoin is way behind all the needed onchain upgrades to stay relevant.

In other words, Bitcoin is long obsolete.

Bitcoin remain alive today only because of huge vested financial interests.

Eventually, Bitcoin’s fundamental obsolescence will “come home to roost”.

The timing for such event will be in multiples of 4-years, i.e. the amount of years from one halving to another halving, where the reward will halve exponentially along with the ever-increasing technical and financial stresses on the miners to subsidize the ever-increasingly astronomical price level.

Subsidizing an ever-increasingly astronomical price level for the blockchain to stay secure will become tremendously burdensome to maintain.

Most people are not aware of this.