ZeMing M. Gao’s Post

Elon Musk is concerned about the centralization of Bitcoin. But he fails to realize that Bitcoin's biggest problem is NOT that it is centralized at mining, but it is secretly centralized at a human Core, which is controlled by a handful of human agents who ideologically and economically represent certain powers behind the scenes. This is why Satoshi wanted Bitcoin's base protocol to be locked. Satoshi understood Bitcoin as a system comprehensively, including computing, economics, and law. But BTC chose to do the opposite, which was both a reason and a consequence of Satoshi's exit from BTC (a critical part of history you should investigate more). The way Musk talks about centralization or decentralization shows that, like most others, he fundamentally misunderstands the concept of "decentralization" for a network system to prevent the weakness of a single point of failure or concentrated points of failure. For this, please read Baran's foundational work (Baran P. “On Distributed the Communications“). For example, the kind of incidents Musk points out, in itself, really is not a problem at all, as long as the system is open for other mining nodes that are competitively independent of the hypothetical fallen node to pick up the load and rise from the fall. Baran's work has shown that the existence of just two such nodes would make a significantly more reliable system than a single full-node system. The network reliability increases exponentially with the total number of independent full nodes. More importantly, after the total number of nodes has reached 4, it quickly becomes unnecessary to increase the number of nodes because the marginal return quickly diminishes. Bitcoin is both a computational and an economic system. Please don't imagine things based on empty and abstract propaganda of "network of everyone", which is a fallacy promoted by BTC. When you talk about "network", be very certain of what network you're talking about. While it is economically foolish to require an unlimited number of full nodes (see Baran), it is desirable to have an unlimited number in the network of applications and the network of users. These are entirely different networks. The BTC community confuses them altogether. But they took advantage of the confusion to promote a useless "digital gold". I'm glad to see that people like Musk are waking up from the deception of BTC. But I'm afraid that they are not seeing the whole picture yet. For this, I humbly recommend my book: BIT & COIN: Merging Digitality and Physicality (http://bitandcoin.net). Volume I Digital Humanity’s Truth Layer Blockchain The New Internet, its Authenticity Layer, and Applications Volume II Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Beyond Essays of Science, Economics, Law, Ethics, and Controversies