[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[Kapilkov, Michael]

-----Original Message-----
From: cryptography <cryptography-bounces+mkapilkov=pace.edu at metzdowd.com> On Behalf Of John Levine
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 4:55 PM
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com
Cc: bear at sonic.net
Subject: Re: [Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

In article <975c65154b3d9a5ce0ff810d110ed38ecbe34007.camel at sonic.net> you write:
>I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that you're not going to get 
>scalability in any system in which one transaction no matter how 
>trivial results in communication to every node. ....

The truth is most regular Bitcoin investors/speculators (not users) rely on third parties for custody.

Bloomberg's Matt Levine (not a relative) writes about bitcoins in today's column, riffing on news reports about people who would be gazillionaires if only they could remember their passwords.

The gist of it is that as more people who are less technical become interested in bitcoin, it is becoming ever more like other financial assets, with third party custodians and so forth. The commmunity where people consider it a feature that a lost password means your bitcoins are lost forever is not large:

The irony about Bitcoin is that greater adoption and price appreciation make it less P2P, less transactional - turning it into digital gold.  I wonder if there is a stat somewhere (at least approximate) what percentage of Bitcoin txs are still truly p2p?