I've seen a lot this misconception about Bitcoin decentralization. Actually I've just answered in another topic about this.
Gary Gensler doesn't understand that the decentralization of bitcoin is about the full nodes and the miners involved, not about the number of wallets containing big funds (and frankly, those are still plenty too).
And allow me to be a bit mean: maybe he confused it with Ethereum.

Because bitcoin is stored on CEX doesn't change the nature of bitcoin from decentralized to centralized, and what I understand is that a lot of people do not understand that the bitcoin network makes it decentralized due to the way it is designed for nodes to control the whole system.

The only way that bitcoin can be weak in decentralized nature is if all the mining pools are bought over by government, where they choose whose transactions that they will add to the blockchain, but as long as miners don't accept such, bitcoin remain decentralized. This is why one must use a self custody wallet, and use DEX.

Not so long ago, GG had some much worse statements about Bitcoin, and this one about decentralization doesn't really make much sense if we know that decentralization is actually about something else, and not about who and where keeps someone's private keys. Perhaps it is a much bigger problem for us that miners from China (and other parts of the world) have moved to the US, and we can never know what the politicians in that country may come up with literally overnight. If Mr. T becomes president again, who knows what crazy ideas he might come up with.

As for who buys or sells BTC, it's a free market and no one can do anything there, and no matter how you turn it, someone won't like it. Let's remember what the reactions are when a bank refuses to process crypto transactions, or when a well-known banker says something negative about Bitcoin - and now that they have begun to speak and act positively, we again wonder where this is going.

Fortunately, not everyone sells, and it remains to be seen what will happen when (if) supply becomes greater than demand.

open to read as a book. but there is a tiered hierarchy of moderation and recruitment process for the privilige to be able to offer proposals to evolve the source code of activated rules of the network.


..
when economic nodes (NYA) have the sway of what transactions they prefer to use and see wiling to ban pools blocks that dont comply to a economic node preference

when the source code is literally in the hands of a brand that purposefully named itself CORE (center)

when the mining is no longer solo but pooled..

when full nodes offer features to disable peer services such as full archive seeding and also backward compatibity so that older nodes get stripped data or data thats not required to be validated fully..

.. whats left?

we need to stay vigilant and actually look for the changes and risks, rather then play dead and say "its decentralised simply because that was a buzzword of 2009 so must be true now"

#not-your-key-not-your-coin
having a balance on a offchain system is an IOU not actual ownership (then note instances of MTGox(people havnt got 'their' coin))

and share holders of ETF have no owner claim of bitcoin whatso ever, so not even a IOU of bitcoin(note SEC regs of not allowing in-kind redemption)

we need to stay vigilant and actually look for the changes and risks,, scrutinising them..  rather then play dead and say "its decentralised simply because that was a buzzword of 2009 so must be true now"

If as much as we can agree that the total decentralization people talk bitcoin isn’t that, but no financial network actually beats bitcoin network decentralization currently. What Gensler is thinking is definitely just about the price of bitcoin and not the network, all this entities mention can only decide to affect bitcoin price If they all decide to either sell (dump) or buy (pump) bitcoin at the same time and as I said it needs to be a consensus decision still which shows a bit of decentralization too not like fiat that a single government structure can decide on. For them to affect the network they need to control more than the total hash power of the network and that’s still limited to some decisions as they also need other nodes to accept some consensus rule, this is decentralization to me even if it is not total decentralization.

He's absolutely right, in the context in which he was speaking.

In all practicality, most holders of Bitcoin (in terms of numbers of individual holders) use some kind of centralized entity to hold their private key, which is in turn connected to your name, address, social security number, and so on.

In other words, most Bitcoin investors hold Bitcoin in the same way they hold AAPL or MSFT.

That's not in any remote way, "decentralized". Most investors don't even know what a "private key" is, let alone keep it physically on their person.

As I wrote in the Anon Paradox, most average consumers don't want the kind of "privacy" that means escaping the government, they just want their actions kept from everybody else but a government with a court-ordered subpoena. For the latter, the only people that actually care about that are those who go against the law where they live, and most people don't want to tangle with their government.

So Bitcoin's decentralized architecture is not a value to most people who invest in Bitcoin, so it makes sense that most people don't use it that way.

Today, in practical reality, Bitcoin for most people is an investment in a brand, or an abstract idea, or a name that they know and think will go up in value. They don't know what it means and they don't care.

Yes, the blockchain architecture enables a decentralized ledger, and yes, technically Bitcoin is decentralized, but that's not the way consumers use it, and that's what somebody like Gary Gensler concerns himself with in his role as SEC chair.

Isn't this the Gary Gensler was was teaching a bitcoin/blockchain course at MIT some years ago? He is well versed in bitcoin and cryptocurrency and there is no way that he doesn't get what bitcoin is, a decentralized system. That is an open and transparent system without human decision makers over ones that have them. But why does he continue to be against it? Is this politically motivated because he is gunning for the sit at the treasurer or is it because the big financial institutions are scared of bitcoin? This is for Gary, can the banks and the governments provide a true ledger and let's compare with bitcoin?

He jumped out to the other side of the fence when Binance rejected his application on Binance. He wants CZ to regret the rejection and he seems to have won, CZ was gone.


Well, there's Dogecoin too. There are lots of altcoins to move to but they will not stop taking control of which coin we may try using. I think if we all start using memecoins, they will like it.   BTC may look to be decentralized. It is meant to be that way but a lot of changes are happening just when institutions are coming.

He apparently understands absolutely nothing about the functioning of the bitcoin ecosystem, all he needs is to have as many bitcoins as possible to be centralized, totally wrong, and this man only opens his mouth to talk nonsense... well, what to say... lol .... Even a parrot talks... Don't take him so seriously, he (gary gensler) doesn't know what he's talking about.