#segwit

Part of the hubris around Bitcoin is that of decentralisation.

Question though — Is it …really ?

Or can it be ?

The question arises, because GHash failed. So did the SegWit (segregated witness) fork, because a community could not come to a consensus. In a truly decentralised model, (e.g. open source software ) an independent developer can create a hard fork and let it be - to be used or not - by subsequent members of the community.

In the case of GHash -  AntPool, BTC, ViaBTC, F2Pool all publicly demonstrated they owned 51% (i.e. majority).

In a true decentralised model, there is no concept of majority share.

The truth is,

• miners are smart and they do not want to show majority share aligned to a particular hash rate
• they mostly use the computing power of AWS (which again is not a decentralised platform).
• they also work within the confines of their nation states, which have complete control over them (taxpaying citizens)

As long as majority miners are concentrated in one country (in this case China),  and majority computing is being done over a single computing cloud (AWS) - owned by the US, can any cryptocurrency be truly decentralised, away from the control of a nation state?

Sure inside the blockchain, the ledger is decentralised, but the  blockchain can be changed by mining on empty blocks or by rewriting the history.

Obfuscation is not reality.

Yet.

PS: Lest we also forget that Bitcoin is about 2000 times slower than Visa in processing payments.