What role does BTC play for the financial industry

Back story: After Bitcoin found more and more use as a digital means of payment in the economy from 2014 on wards, especially among small businesses in the hospitality and tourism industry, but also in online stores etc., the success story of Bitcoin as digital cash began.

This was of course a thorn in the side of the established financial industry, its banks and credit card operators and especially the government control freaks and their shareholders. However, there was no stopping Bitcoin as a means of payment, so it was decided to infiltrate the Bitcoin community and put their own agents in charge to further develop the Bitcoin protocol itself in the desired direction. To this end, companies from the government-subsidized financial industry founded Blockstream in 2014.

Funded with millions of USD in capital and software developers such as Adam Back and Gregory Maxwell, as well as Pieter Wiulle and others appointed as directors and in leadership positions, the Blockstream squad, excellently funded and with contacts deep into the established financial industry, quickly took the lead in the Bitcoin community and is now guiding the development of the Bitcoin protocol, which until then had been led by cipher punks, voluntarists and individualists.

Although AXA Insurance Group provided the founding investment of $55 million and launched Blockstream, today Blockstream is primarily funded by Digital Currency Group DCG and Mastercard. A consortium that funds quite a few crypto projects and has enormous influence across the crypto infrastructure.

Agents also took the lead in relevant social media forums such as Reddit, etc. and censorship began to cover up the behind-the-scenes purge within the Bitcoin protocols and the hostile takeover of Bitcoin's development by the stooges of the state-subsidized financial industry.

Millions were invested in advertising campaigns to sell Bitcoin now as a so-called store of value and create an association with gold to move away from its use as digital cash and payment. But Bitcoin was conceived as digital cash and payment. The Bitcoin whitepaper spells it out unequivocally in the headline what Bitcoin is designed for. 'Bitcoin - a peer-to-peer electronic cash system'.

A hard nut to crack and under normal circumstances an impossible undertaking. But not so for the state-subsidized financial industry, which can use state power and politics as a tool at any time and thus has infinite financial resources at its disposal and can additionally apply censorship on a wide scale against everyone and everything.

Step 1 - Create a Problem

While all undesirable Bitcoin players were ostracized and censored from relevant platforms, the narrative Bitcoin could not scale without losing security at the same time began.

Therefore, Bitcoin was unsuitable as a digital means of payment and should only serve as a store of value. The Bitcoin protocol should no longer adjust its block size to market transaction demand for security reasons. The capacity of the block size was to remain forever limited to 1MB. This prohibited the Bitcoin protocol from the most effective form of scaling. More and more transactions were crowding onto less and less block storage and transaction costs were skyrocketing, and at the same time, transactions now had to queue and wait for long periods of time. The demand of Bitcoin as a digital payment method decreased noticeably after that. High transaction fees and long waiting times were even openly desired by the blockstream nerds and applauded as progress. This marked a first major success for the government-subsidized financial industry.

Bitcoin payments were now to take place over other networks. Blockstream already had the plans of such other networks in the drawer and with access to government universities and developers Blockstream immediately set to work developing such networks.

The main 2 networks are called Lightning network LN (streamlining the IBAN system) and the Liquid network LQ (streamlining the SWIFT system). These networks should merge with the Bitcoin network. To do this, an anchor had to be implemented in the Bitcoin protocol. This was done with the implementation of SegWit (a code change to restructure the signature within transactions).

Of course, the LN only makes sense if Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain are expensive and slow. But that was not the case with Bitcoin at all; on the contrary, Bitcoin was designed to scale theoretically infinitely. Depending on the transaction demand of the market, the blocks were supposed to adjust the capacity of the block storage. But this is exactly where the blockstream agents successfully stepped in and through mountains of FIAT money, useful idiots and above all censorship and exclusion on the relevant platforms managed to enforce a limit on the block size to 1 MB.

Now I'm sure many are wondering, yes but how could the crypto community accept this turnaround in Bitcoin's development? Surely there must have been some comprehensible arguments?

To do this, you need to know the following about how Bitcoin works in order to understand the arguments of the blockstream nerds and their disciples:

The history of all Bitcoin transactions are stored chronologically in blocks as a blockchain in the Bitcoin log. Anyone who installs a wallet stores either part or all of the blockchain on their computer. A so-called light wallet or light node stores only a part of the blockchain. A full wallet or full node stores the entire blockchain. Each new block that is entered into the blockchain must be updated on all nodes so that all always have the current blockchain stored. However, in order to enter a new block into the blockchain, there are so-called miners in the Bitcoin network. The miners are special full nodes that, in addition to storing the entire blockchain, have the task of checking whether the transactions of the new blocks were executed correctly according to the protocol rules and Bitcoins were not already spent elsewhere at the same time (double spend). The Bitcoin protocol rewards this task with fresh new Bitcoins created for entry after each block every 10 minutes.

Many miners try to add new blocks to the blockchain every day to collect the reward. The rule here is that there can only be one person who enters a new block into the blockchain and collects the reward for it. For this purpose, the Bitcoin protocol gives a mathematical task with each new block, which a miner must calculate in order to enter the new block in the blockchain. The first person to solve this task is allowed to make the entry and receives the reward - all others are left empty-handed. The more miners feed computing power (hash power) into the network, the more difficult the task becomes. The algorithm adjusts the difficulty of the task so that the solution always takes about 10 minutes, measured against the total hash power of the miners that is currently available to the network. This mechanism is called proof of work POW and is the revolutionary feature of the Bitcoin protocol. The miners ensure the correctness of the blockchain through the POW and make sure that all nodes update the correct blockchain.

In the protocol, the longest blockchain is always considered the correct blockchain.

The miners are organized in a decentralized manner and compete with each other. Anyone can install a miner full node and participate in the POW to earn bitcoins. The more miners are in competition, the more decentralized the network is and the more difficult the POW and thus manipulation is for the individual miner. Maximum competition and the decentralization of hash power among miners secure the Bitcoin network.

Decentralization here refers to the distribution of the total computing power (hashpower) among the individual miners. The more distributed the hashpower is among the individual miners and the more miners there are, the more secure the network.

If a miner has a hashpower that is greater than 50% of the hashpower of the entire network, it could completely rewrite the blockchain, i.e. create a longer blockchain itself and produce as many bitcoins for itself as desired. All nodes would automatically update the manipulated longer blockchain and the result would be FIAT-Bitcoin. This is referred to as the 51% attack and it is the weak point of Bitcoin.

After this short excursion on how Bitcoin works, we come back to our blockstream nerds and the reasoning why blocks need to be limited to 1MB. Decentralization was also recognized by the nerds as the basis of security and the most important thing in the Bitcoin network.

However, the decentralization that was promoted here curiously did not refer to the decentralization of miners, hashpower, and POW competition that actually provide security. No, decentralization referred to wallets, specifically full wallets or full nodes that simply update the entire blockchain.

Of course, for the user themselves, Full Nodes are theoretically a bit more secure than Light Nodes, because they verify every update with the entire blockchain they have stored. If you don't want to run a miner, it is desirable for everyone to run a full node to make it as difficult as possible for fraudulent miners and not fall for a manipulated blockchain that is not the longest.

Does running full nodes in any way help others on the Bitcoin network? No, because each node only verifies for itself that the Bitcoins it receives are proper. And a Full Node can do that better than a Light Node, because it has stored the entire blockchain. But this only works as long as there is no 51% attack.

Does the operation of a Full Node help against a 51% attack ? No.

Full Nodes are irrelevant to the security of the Blockchain and they only ever follow the longest Blockchain they receive from the miners, even if it is tampered with. Running a Full Node basically provides a bit more theoretical security for itself but not for the network.

And now that the Blockstream nerds have proclaimed the operation of as many full nodes as possible in the network as the most important security feature, the following is being spread on all platforms and repeated by countless influencers to supposedly maintain the security of the Bitcoin network.

It is said that if the blocks were not limited in their storage size, then over time more and more storage space and computing power would be needed to store and update the full blockchain to run a full node. And as the blockchain grows, running a full node would logically become more resource intensive and expensive.

However, since it is sufficient for most users to operate a light node to store and send their bitcoins, fewer and fewer users would operate a full node for cost reasons. This would lead to the centralization of full nodes. This centralization was now branded as a security risk for the entire Bitcoin network. The goal was now suddenly that everyone could operate a Full Node with a child computer, e.g. a Raspberry Pi. Because if everyone operated a full node, it was said, then the decentralization of the network would be secured and thus also the security. The solution was to limit the blocks to 1 MB and to use other networks like the Lightning network. This was to limit the growth of the Bitcoin blockchain to always be able to store it on a cheap child computer, e.g. Raspberry Pi.

This is ridiculous, of course, because without exception in any emerging technology, division of labor and specialization arises to meet the growing demand of the market ever more efficiently at lower cost. So it is with blockchain technology. At some point, slow children's computers are no longer sufficient for the professional use of a globally growing network.

Apart from that, anyone can install as many full nodes on Raspberry Pi children's computers as they want. This is meaningless for the overall security of Bitcoin. Miner decentralization and POW are critical to Bitcoin's security.

And the miner computers have long been anything but children's computers, and running them is very expensive and much more complex than running a full node.

The Bitcoin miners are the most potent network in the world when it comes to computing power.

Therefore, the measure to limit the block size to 1 MB to establish the security of the network is nonsensical and counterproductive for the long-term development of Bitcoin. With the same illogic, one could also introduce a hashpower limit, a transaction limit, or an account limit.

The real point of this block limit of 1 MB is of course to destroy the scalability, and thus the competitiveness, of Bitcoin as a means of payment (money), to the unbacked FIAT coercive currencies of the central banks, until modern FIAT cryptocurrencies are available to the central banks as exclusive payment networks to maintain their monopoly on money.

Blockstream and other strawmen are developing such exclusive networks to accomplish these tasks. After all, that's exactly what Blockstream ends up doing with the Lightning network and the Liquid network. Take a look for yourself - Every little function is patented there.

This is so obvious that it stinks to high heaven. But unfortunately, human stupidity, just like the universe, seems to be unlimited.

Step 2 - Present the solution

The takeover of BTC is complete and with the LN up and running, the government subsidized financial industry with its straw man companies is now impatiently building crypto FIAT. On the Lightning Network (LN), claims (IOUs) on bitcoins are sent instead of real bitcoins through entities (HUBs) that act as a kind of financial service provider. A practice that the Bitcoin whitepaper takes to absurdity. The whitepaper explicitly states that Bitcoin is a computer-to-computer electronic cash system in which payments are executed directly from user to user and are documented on the blockchain in a way that is forever immutable and equally verifiable by everyone. That is, the transactions without intermediaries or any service providers and without the user must trust the actors in the network, can receive and send payments completely independently, which no one can stop or prevent.

However, this is not the case with the use of the LN because the HUBs are becoming middlemen and financial service providers. Theoretically, anyone can run their own hubs and LN channels, but that's like running your own email server. Only very few people do this because it is far too time-consuming, expensive and unnecessary for most people. The alleged Bitcoin transactions over the LN are only transactions of Bitcoin IOUs, which are issued, controlled and managed by the HUBs, similar to today's banking network. The LN has neither a blockchain, nor a viewable immutable history, nor any consensus mechanisms.

Only the LN IOUs are still connected to Bitcoins that are blocked on the BTC blockchain. It must be understood that the LN is designed to work best the fewer HUBs there are i.e. the more centralized it is. The bottom line is that it works best when everyone is tied to one HUB and that is where all transactions take place and are managed. Then it is lightning fast ;-) hence the name Lightning.

For the user it is cheapest and easiest if he entrusts his Bitcoins to a big HUB service provider that has a lot of LN channels and a lot of Bitcoin. The user then only uses the LN receivables as a means of payment. And the less real Bitcoins are moved on the blockchain, the more the Bitcoin miners have to earn from the transaction fees to keep the expensive operation profitable at all. I.e. real Bitcoin transactions can then easily cost 1000 USD or 10 000 USD or maybe even 100 000 USD. And if then dadruch almost all BTC users use the LN, then inevitably comes the time when only very rarely real Bitcoins are moved. This is the time for government regulation of LN HUBs and the first introduction of a partial reserve system of LN receivables. Over time, significant inflation occurs and eventually there is a complete detachment of LN receivables to the blocked Bitcoins that reside on a lame and porky BTC Blockchain that is now only used by a very few big players in the state-subsidized financial industry and their friends.

Sound unbelievable? I think you really don't have to be a prophet to see that already now. Especially and particularly with regard to the blockstream funders and operators of the LN, it is clear that if the LN is successful, a state of maximum centralization will inevitably be reached sooner or later. A wet dream of every state control authority and its shareholders.

Who is behind the LN? Blockstream is. Blockstream is funded by Digital Currency Group and Mastercard. DCG board member Glenn Hutchins also sits on the board of FED New York. Also people like Lawrance Summers and many government related officials e.g. at MIT and other universities are also very interested in LN and see a future in it. In short, the interests of the central banks are ultimately behind the LN.

So these are the people who are interested in decentralizing and securing Bitcoin? Who with their millions of investments in the LN want to help the BTC network scale so that everyone can make free BTC transactions and at the same time everyone can run a full node as cheaply as possible to make Bitcoin as secure as possible?

Of course, this massive centralization of the LN is not an issue for our Blockstream nerds and their disciples, because all LN claims are still backed by Bitcoins. And most importantly, thanks to the LN, anyone can now install a Bitcoin Full Node on a cheap Raspberry Pi child's computer and decentralize the Bitcoin network.

Resistance ?

Despite the tremendous resources of the financial industry, there was also resistance and the Bitcoin community split several times. Bitcoin saw the split of Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Cash is a group of developers and investors who stick to the concept of the white paper. And even though Bitcoin Cash, has exactly the same blockchain as Bitcoin Core, so it is just as Bitcoin and unlike Bitcoin Core, it develops Satoshi Nakamoto's original Bitcoin concept as a digital currency, so it strictly adheres to the whitepaper, Bitcoin Cash was declared a shitcoin that allegedly stole the Bitcoin name. And although Bitcoin Core has very little to do with the Bitcoin whitepaper after the code changes with SegWit, the dictated block limit and the development of the LN, Bitcoin Core kept the BTC ticker and is still considered the original Bitcoin today. While the original Bitcoin had to adopt the BCH ticker and is slowly fading into irrelevance.

Because the influx of a great deal of FIAT money from institutional investors into Bitcoin Core BTC, which are firmly connected to the established financial industry via Blockstream, the price of BTC has risen enormously, which is equated with success in the crypto community, BTC has expanded its position as the undisputed No.1. The original Bitcoin, i.e. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), currently costs just 130 EUR and is by far the most hated coin in the entire crypto scene and is considered a failed Bitcoin plagiarism.

Eliminate competition

Meanwhile, our self-proclaimed Bitcoin experts and useful idiots are celebrating the alleged progress that the financial industry is delivering to us through Blockstream and its patented technology. Useful idiots operate as volunteer agitators, calling themselves Bitcoin maximalists and bashing all other crypto projects except BTC as shit coins and warning everyone to invest in such projects. They are called a danger to the investors that people are so worried about.

Meanwhile, in the slipstream of the Bitcoin maximalists, the financial industry is preparing the crypto-cultural revolution that is supposed to state-regulate all these so-called shit coins.

This attack of the financial industry was initiated by its lackeys the state coercively financed institutions. The first victims were the operators of XRP Ripple, who were reported by the US regulator SEC as operators of unregistered securities. The proceedings are still ongoing and the classification "unregistered security" has been hovering over all crypto projects like a sword of Damocles ever since. All tokens and coins are now suspected of being unregistered securities.

I suspect that XRP in particular has been targeted because XRP technology is direct competition for the SWIFT system which they would much rather modernize with Blockstream's Liquid network because the Blockstream nerds are much easier to control than the rich professional businessmen who have been successfully developing XRP for over a decade.

The so-called Bitcoin Maxis and rich notables like BTC-Moonboy Michael Saylor and other etatists are agitating the authorities at every opportunity to finally regulate the other crypto projects as "unregistered securities" now to protect investors and bring security to the crypto market. Security is so important after all, we are so scared.

However, to the dismay of the financial industry, numerous other cryptocurrencies are emerging every day and blockchain technology is advancing at an incredibly dynamic pace. With new mechanisms, faster, safer and simpler, the crypto market is inexorably providing functionality and applications, making the corrupt financial industry and its state-monopolized financial products uninteresting and obsolete. At the same time, their troyan horse BTC is losing more and more market dominance. And now the financial industry has to fire its decisive weapon, state power, on a broad front to neutralize the BTC competition through regulations and bans. In the process, it must rush to create a new crypto FIAT money monopoly with its own products like the LN.

It remains to be seen how intelligent and resistant the crypto market is and whether the financial industry will succeed in deceiving the crypto community into accepting a crypto cultural revolution for the alleged protection of the investor at the end of which BTC will forever remain the No. 1 and the entire crypto market will be subject to state regulations and thus come firmly under the thumb of the state-monopolized financial industry.

It is worth mentioning that Blockstream has not yet dared to rewrite the Bitcoin whitepaper, although BTC still resembles electronic cash and has nothing to do with store of value. Since the implementation of SegWit in the BTC code, the BTC blockchain is actually not even a chain of signatures as required by the whitepaper. The financial industry would like to see a better headline for the future e.g. "Bitcoin a peer-to-peer store of value". However, this is still a hot potato, which is probably only due after the crypto cultural revolution.

At this point, I would like to apply a quote from Henry Ford to BTC and conclude:

'If people understood the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto and BTC today, we would have the flippening before tomorrow morning.'

more info

https://odysee.com/@QuantumRhino:9/Who-killed-Bitcoin--(2022):8

thanks for reading