ManyKeys on Nostr: Can you buy, hold and send Bitcoin p2p without anyone's permission? You can, so it is ...

Can you buy, hold and send Bitcoin p2p without anyone's permission? You can, so it is doing what it was meant to do.

quoting
nevent1q…dgyr

The question that sent me down the rabbit hole a few months ago:

- Is Bitcoin decentralized and secure, or is it allowed to look decentralized and secure?

TL;DR

Bitcoin is permissionless in code but permissioned in practice by choke-points that governments and large intermediaries either directly control or can cheaply coerce. It's allowed to look decentralized/secure so long as it functions primarily as a supervised store of value and speculative asset, not a mass medium of exchange outside compliance rails.