Professor Jiang Doesn't Understand Decentralization
A perfect example that exposes most people's fundamental limitation on understanding, creating bitcoin hesitancy and even altcoin acceptance.
Bitcoin & Markets | Apr 15, 2026
Exploring the intersection of bitcoin, macroeconomics, markets, biology, and politics within the evolving global order.
Where are the servers
“I want to know where the databases are, where the servers are, physically.”
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This is a category error at the most basic level. The fundamental innovation of bitcoin is the lack of centralized servers and the creation of distributed consensus.
It's not a small oversight, it's the inability to grasp a decentralized architecture. It's the limitation of midwittery.
'Show me the HTML servers! Where are they physically?' That’s the level of misunderstanding we’re dealing with. HTML is a protocol. Bitcoin is not a company, nor is it controlled by a few servers in some centralized location.
Bitcoin is a protocol that runs on a distributed network of nodes, operated independently all over the world. Each node stores and verifies the ledger. Each node enforces the rules. There is no “main” copy, only consensus across many copies.
Download the software and run it. Nodes and miners exist in every corner of the planet. Jiang’s home country, China, tried to stop it, with some success domestically, but the network routed around it.
This Level Of Thinking Is Everywhere
It's unfortunate that most people can only grasp bitcoin through this lens. Or, said differently, they are unable to grasp what bitcoin actually is.
This exact type of ignorance explains why some gold bugs, to this day, still don’t understand or accept bitcoin. They know the talking points, 21 million, 10-minute settlement, but they can’t internalize decentralization and how that makes its properties immutable. 'You can control your own node,' doesn’t register with them at all.
We spent years early in bitcoin's history logically arguing again altcoins as centralized scams. I often said, "decentralization is not just a nice thing to have." You either start that way and guard it zealously, or you're centralized. Some can see why that is important, others cannot. They don't understand decentralization conceptually.
They fail to see that this technology, its benefits and strengths over legacy networks, is entirely derived from decentralization. That's why they think centralized altcoins can be legitimate.
HODL strong. Thanks for reading! PLEASE SHARE!
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