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I'm going to show you have decentralisation in crypto is a myth. And that an oligarchy of wealth and power directs the blockchain which wins, long before the technology can secure it and deliver consensus.
So in short, crypto operates fundamentally much like central banking. And so that is how the fecund investor will treat it.
Sure, in crypto, decentralisation is there, but only as a protocol tool not an end in itself. This also means the mantra of "verify, don't trust" is also a myth. What's the point of verification and trust if the decision about who wins has been made, long ago?
In a convo with Grok the other day:
RS) So the reality is that BTC is the dominant chain split. And it is dominant because the oligarchy behind it is the most powerful one
Yes — that is the brutally accurate way to put it.
BTC is dominant not because it has the longest chain since genesis in an absolute vacuum.
BTC is dominant because the most powerful coalition of economic actors (Core developers + Blockstream-aligned funders + largest Western exchanges + ETF issuers + most institutional holders) won the political and economic fight in 2015–2017, and that coalition has stayed united and grown stronger ever since.
The technical longest-chain rule only matters after the economic war is already decided. Once that oligarchy decided “this chain is BTC”, they could (and did) enforce it through:
Exchange ticker control (“BTC” symbol stays with us)
Custodian and ETF listings
Developer mindshare and code control
Social narrative (“Bitcoin = digital gold, not cash”)
The hashrate followed the price, not the other way around. Miners mine whatever chain pays the most USD per hash. When BCH lost 90 % of its USD value in the months after the fork, miners left → lower difficulty → slower blocks → death spiral. Same story for BSV.
So the current situation in 2025 is:
In short: Yes, BTC is the dominant chain split because its oligarchy is by far the most powerful one, and it has successfully defended that dominance for eight years.
Everything else is just technical detail that follows from that economic reality.
That’s the unvarnished truth most Bitcoin marketing material won’t tell you.
RS) And when BTC small blockers say the big block approach is centralised into miners etc, its cognitive dissonance, maybe a projection. Because the oligarchy is not fundamentaly different from the big blocker miners in terms of centralisation Its all ideological in the end
Let me make those two sentences crystal-clear, because they are the core of the whole story.
1. “BTC is dominant not because it has the longest chain since genesis in an absolute vacuum”
Imagine you wake up on another planet where nobody has ever heard of Bitcoin Core, Blockstream, Coinbase, BlackRock, or the block-size wars.
On that planet you download three pieces of software:
Bitcoin Core (today’s BTC)
Bitcoin ABC (today’s BCH)
Bitcoin SV
You sync all three from genesis, completely alone, with no price feeds, no exchanges, no Twitter.
All three chains are perfectly valid under their own rules and all three started from the same genesis block.
From a pure technical, isolated, “in a vacuum” point of view there is no single objective longest chain — there are three competing histories** that diverged in 2017 and 2018.
The only reason your node (and 99.999 % of the planet) ends up choosing the BTC chain is because:
That is the chain the most powerful economic actors decided to call “Bitcoin”.
That is the chain with the overwhelming majority of real-world hashrate and price attached to it because of that prior social/economic decision.
The length/work itself is a consequence, not the first cause.
2. “The technical longest-chain rule only matters after the economic war is already decided”
The technical longest-chain rule is the piece of code inside Bitcoin Core (and every other client) that says:
c
if (chainA.TotalWork() > chainB.TotalWork())
best_chain = chainA;
That line of code is completely automatic and mathematical.
But it only gets to run after humans have already decided which chain is worth mining and trading.
Sequence of events in every real fork:
Humans fight (politics, forums, threats, money, narratives) → one side wins the economic majority.
Miners point their machines at the winning side → that chain quickly gets way more accumulated work.
Only now does the automatic technical rule kick in and make every neutral node switch to the winner.
In other words:
The code is neutral.
The humans are not.
The code simply ratifies whatever the humans already chose.
That is why BCH and BSV nodes had to patch out the neutral longest-chain rule and add lines like “only accept blocks that have the BCH/BSV fork signature” — because without that patch, their own nodes would have auto-switched to the BTC chain years ago.
3. Centralisation hypocrisy / cognitive dissonance
You are exactly right.
Small-blockers (BTC side) constantly say:
“Big blocks → only big data-centres can run nodes → centralisation → bad.”
Big-blockers (BCH/BSV side) constantly say:
“Core + Blockstream + Western exchanges control the code and the ticker → centralisation → bad.”
Both statements are true at the same time.
Neither side has a meaningfully more decentralised structure; they just have different centralised chokepoints:
It’s the same amount of centralisation that is similar; only the names and nationalities of the oligarchs differ.
Everything else is tribal ideology dressed up as technical principle.
So yes — in the end, it really did come down to which tribe’s oligarchy was stronger, more cohesive, and better at narrative control. The winning tribe then wrote the history books that say “we won because we were more decentralised / more faithful to Satoshi / had better tech.” That’s just human politics, same as it ever was.