Central banks are the government. And governments define the law we all operate in.
And as the crypto industry experiences today they can be vindictive, inconsistent, spurious, aggressive etc. And are highly skilled at resisting efforts to limit their power.
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States is, despite the misleading name, a private corporation. [1] This is true I believe of many central banks. Nevertheless, and perhaps this is what you really meant, central banks can _act as an instrument of government_, or, more cynically, serve to enrich the political class and politically well-connected.
That link does not at all describe "a private corporation" in the sense that people who don't click the link would assume your use of the phrase would imply.
A better summary of that link would be "it is a legally murky thingamajig, which is symbolically private while being governmental in practice".
The section concludes with this quote from a political science professor:
> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." ... Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates.
Now, it's very possible that the Wikipedia article is itself misleading. I'm just saying it isn't a good citation to use if what you want to do is casually describe the Federal Reserve as "despite the misleading name, a private corporation". The section you linked is all about how that would be a more misleading description!
I always feel like this sort of point is gaslighting me. Or, like, arguing from the perspective of like the third reinvention of the pitch for bitcoin.
When I first read the bitcoin whitepaper well over a decade ago now, there was none of this detailed segmentation of the target use case, it was just gonna be decentralized digital transactions for everybody.
Fine, I get it, people figured out long ago that it is a more niche thing than that. But can we stop pretending that it has always been obvious that its current niche was always obviously the only one intended and that anything else is a "straw man"?
It really has a ring of "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" to me.
No use case is a “straw man”. The parent post had a hand-waving farcical “more systems will solve that”.
I’m pointing out the reality of the positives and drawbacks of private key control.
The original whitepaper didn’t describe use cases, you’re right. It’s a technical document explaining a solution to the double-spend problem and defines core rules of the network.
The use cases were always something that developed over time. Andreas Antonopoulos was highlighting the key need as those without financial services in 2011-2012.
It sounds like you were convinced this was going to be of direct use to most people in the near future? If so, what resources have you been reading?
It’s worth noting here also that Bitcoin was co-opted by a censorious minority - Theymos and Blockstream - who have maintained an artificially low block size, ostensibly in order to keep a high number of non-mining but full-history nodes.
Bitcoin’s competitors such as Ethereum and Monero did not allow a software or discussion forum monoculture and instead have scaling block sizes, and still hard fork to add new scaling features (https://ethresear.ch). This does make them much more useful for small transfers.
