It is indeed quite dire. My hope lies in that the recent attempts have been more upstream first oriented where lots of distros run on phones. They do not work well yet but that approach might just get us there eventually.

Another thing that gives me hope is that phones do not change much any more. Much easier to catch up to a stagnated market.

That is super interesting! But yeah, that was really early days. Hash rate centralisation could of course still be a problem today but it was most likely 100 times worse in 2011.

Bitcoins indeed have much worse privacy than cash.

As you outline, if people use the worst possible privacy choices the privacy is ridiculously bad. It does not have to be that bad.

The current best practice for on-chain transactions (as in not all the layer 2 stuff needed to scale) is to use a new address for every incoming transaction. That way a shop would not have one address but thousands, none of which your employer can easily know about.

This type of privacy is still not anywhere near cash. To get that type of privacy you would need to mix your coins with others. Essentially putting all the coins into a sack, shaking it, then handing out coins to everyone. It is not perfekt but we are getting to cash like levels of privacy. Cash is not perfekt either, bills have serial numbers, etc.

The elefant in the room is that for most people what will really matter is the layer 2/3 solutions and what properties they have. On chain transactions does not scale to planet level. The thinking these days is that the bitcoin blockchain should be used more like a court and less like the ledger it was initially intended to be.

100% that being open source is not enough. Just like the fediverse the protocol is really important.

But if the fediverse protocol and all servers and clients are proprietary we would be in a bad place.

The bitcoin protocol makes it possible for everyone to run a bitcoin core node very similar to that anyone can run a fediverse server.

Btw, that signal is actively working against federation makes me so incredibly disappointed…

It is similar to open source social media. No single entity is in control. No single company or government that can use that power to control the users. For the end user the result is that bitcoin is more like paper cash than other digital money. You and only you are in control. It is extremely hard to stop you from sending or receiving money.

Just like with the fediverse, there is no Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to kick you out. With bitcoin there will be no Putin or Trump to freeze your bank account.

Alright, do you mean concentration in hash rate (mining)?

Bitcoin Core is MIT licensed.

There is value in having core functions of society like social medla and money decentralized and running on open source software even though it will not fix wealth inequality.

Like the rest of society, some people get ridiculous wealth by luck of being at the right place at the right time. That is no reason to not have open source money.

There are many issues with bitcoin but that one I do not buy.