Another great post.
Just out of curiosity, you keep mentioning Bitcoin, which is understandable since that is what most people know.
But what are your feelings on alt coins? Do you see the same protection that Bitcoin offers? I would imagine that in a scenario you laid out that all crypto will moon especially if the currency it is paired with, the USD, is collapsing.
You are on here, what are your thoughts of STEEM, EOS, and BTS versus BTC? Do they offer the same protection? What about LTC and ETH, more mainstream tokens that the masses are more familiar with?
I'm not a bitcoin maximalist. I do believe that bitcoin is the most secure of all the crypto's because more developers have been working on the code for a much longer time frame than some others, but there are other use cases that bitcoin isn't equipped to handle. Bitcoin lacks turing completeness on purpose. This is why it's more secure. The inability to execute certain commands gives Bitcoin a smaller attack surface for hackers to exploit. But this also means it can't do the things that other smart contract platforms can do such as EOS and ETH. ETH is going to have a hard time scaling which is why I also have EOS. I've also invested more than a millionth of supply of Steem and Bitshares. Steem is actually one of my lesser value assets, but I think it will climb up with Bitcoin as with most other alts in the next moon shot. Some of course will probably disappear so I generally concentrate on the top 10 coins by market cap the most.
The question with EOS and other DPoS is whether they are decentralized enough. I hope so. I'm certain it is better than relying on the mercy of the western banking system, but I'm not certain it can withstand government manipulation should EOS (for example) become the premier smart contract platform. What if the US government throws a couple hundred billion into EOS to buy up the stake? I'm worried that it might not be much trouble for the US government to get at least 15 of their own block producers then rewrite the constitution to suit their plutocratic needs. Right now EOS is too small for them to worry about. Hopefully it will become more like bitcoin and become more resistant to attack as time moves on and EOS gains value making it too expensive for any one government whale to attack.
I think if EOS gets past the one trillion market cap it will become very expensive for a single government to buy up enough stake to take over the network, but there are some wildcards. For instance, assuming this becomes the case, the US government might take on emergency tax measures and impose austerity to assert control of the EOS network. If other nations such as China can be persuaded to collude, then that's problematic. But if other nations dump all their assets into EOS and 21 different "nations" now control the blocks, then decentralization might be maintained. That doesn't mean that the political landscape would necessarily be favorable. Hopefully all governments go bankrupt through their abuse of national fiat before this happens.
Personally I dont trust EOS at all and feel it is one of the primary chosen projects designed to co-opted the crypto space over time. I hope I am wrong but fear that I am not.
Wouldn't you simply fork a currency that's been bought out by bad actors? Everything is open source.
You need to convince people to use it. Forking doesn't giving the same network affect.
And bad actors will come back or come new. BCH attempted to take out bad actors they thought were bad and now...
They are fighting within themselves.
Forking is too hard, it better if you just start a new one.
I said fork I meant clone. Seems like if a coin went totally belly up like that (being bought out by a single government) it wouldn't be hard to get people to make the switch.
Would work but the people using it would be cheated out by not having the coin. And if it was airdropped to them then the government could do technique to trick the new chain to airdrop to them as well. So no matter the users would lose out. No you might say isn't bitcoin the same just get all miners and boom done right? Well no.. you can keep blocking miners but no stakers. POS if 51% will continue to be 51% unless you block the 51% staker coins-decentralization much huh...
There is a reason why people say Bitcoin is sovereign state resistant and EOS is a Platform-grade Censorship Resistance.
About the only thing one can do is opt out, which is better than the current situation with statism, but that would probably be similar to deciding to leave behind your bank account for crypto. If you could see it coming in time and get out, that would help, but lke @sames said, the network effect would be severely damaged. Consensus failure is also possible. @dan has said that if 7 or more BP's were removed at once, then consensus could fail (I'm assuming he means in the same block). Blocks are very fast on EOS right now, so an attack would have to be timed to the millisecond.