> you are trusting that this decentralized ledger will gain acceptance by the whole world.
Bitcoin itself is inherently trustless, that's the whole point of it. You can trust that there will never be more than 21M Bitcoins, you can trust that there will never be a double-spend, you can trust that it will run 24/7, etc.
Whether it will gain worldwide acceptance is another matter (btw, adoption is increasing at very fast pace now), as long as there's a subset of the world that accepts it, that's good enough for me.
> Bitcoin itself is inherently trustless, that's the whole point of it. You can trust that there will never be more than 21M Bitcoins, you can trust that there will never be a double-spend, you can trust that it will run 24/7, etc.
No it isn't. If the Bitcoin devs and miners agree on a change (for instance, to increase the cap), it'll happen, so you have to trust them.
They can't implement those changes uni-laterally, it would cause a hard-fork. In addition to devs and miners, you need users, network nodes and exchanges to agree to it as well.
And even if that change were to go through, there will still be people running the old chain (Ethereum Classic is still alive). So those parameters would only change if they improve the network for most stakeholders, otherwise, most people would stay on the old chain.
> They can't implement those changes uni-laterally, it would cause a hard-fork. In addition to devs and miners, you need users, network nodes and exchanges to agree to it as well.
Sure, but the devs do have the "Bitcoin" name, which would leave them well-positioned to market their changes. Bitcoin Classic may stick around, but like Etherium Classic, it may not be very healthy: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-blockchain-subject...
Nobody owns the "Bitcoin" name, people collectively decide which chaintip to call Bitcoin and that's it. The devs own "Bitcoin Core" which is just one implementation of the network.
This is where the difference between theory and practice comes in. Who is 'people' here? Billions of people today have no idea what bitcoin is and will have no say in 'collectively' deciding which chain tip to call 'Bitcoin'. BTC is decentralized in theory, but with literally .0001% of the population owning like 99% of BTC it can't get more centralized..
For example, when the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash split happened, you had people dumping one for the other to manipulate the price in their favor, you had miners that decided which one they wanted to mine, exchanges that decided which one they wanted to put under BTC ticker and some people that just stayed on the sidelines waiting to see which chain would prevail.
For a brief moment, Bitcoin Cash was actually close (in price, adoption, etc), but then eventually people chose the original chain as Bitcoin and we know the rest.
>Nitpick, Cash was the “original chain” as the split happened because what became the BCH portion of the network declined to adopt a proposed update
AFAIK adopting segwit is a soft-fork (existing clients will continue to work, only miners need to update), but raising the block limit is a hard-fork (all clients need to update).
Bitcoin itself is inherently trustless, that's the whole point of it. You can trust that there will never be more than 21M Bitcoins, you can trust that there will never be a double-spend, you can trust that it will run 24/7, etc.
Whether it will gain worldwide acceptance is another matter (btw, adoption is increasing at very fast pace now), as long as there's a subset of the world that accepts it, that's good enough for me.