> The cartel can raise fees and change the code. They own the hardware and install the software. What's to actually stop them? If the cartel decides which branch to take at a fork, the rest of the ecosystem really can't do much.

See how that played out with Bitcoin vs BCash (no I won't stop calling it that). Your hypothetical threat has happened several times before that, too. With the backing of a 'cartel' headed by the former 'chief scientist' of Bitcoin no less and it still failed to hijack the Network/protcol like you think would occur.

Fees are not determined by a single entity, but rather a priority based system determined by the allotted space in any given block and the desired time/fee between the next block being created from the txs in the mempool; so while it can raise the tx costs for a short while, which clog the mempool and slow low mining fee based tx, it cannot itself cause a hostile take over to take place--Jihan and Ver tried this very tactic and spammed the network, in hopes of making users migrate to the bigger block chain they created and it ended up costing them immensely in the end, causing the former to be ousted from his company and losing its dominate hashing power.

A record of a valid blockchain, and thus all of its transactions, exists throughout the entire network to self-validate in a decentralized consensus system between miners, nodes, users; forking it would require an adoption of not just miners magically adopting a new protocol/chain with the fork (Bitmain had a majority of the hashing power on BTC's network) but also the nodes that validate the txs and issue new coins.

The culmination of all of these events gave Nash's Game Theory an empirically proven usecase when those nodes refused to follow the majority hashing power, several big businesses/exchanges and formally reputable members of the community and instead remained with Bitcoin Core's original chain.

> Digital USD will be way more of a deal than Bitcoin.

This is exactly the only kind of mindset I would expect to ever be able to draw these type of erroneous conclusions... never mind the fact the USD is actually already technically digital. Physical cash accounts for such a small percentage of actual tx volume and total currency in circulation [1] most of it exists in ledgers as 1-0s on servers and databases.

A printing press is a mere relic of 19th/20th century's perception of what currency is and bares little to no relevance in the Modern World. And that is actually not a good thing, but I'll spare you the History lesson.

Its like you're truly incapable of understanding the paradigm shift that is occurring before your eyes, and instead you avert your eyes away to what you think you understand and make unsubstantiated claims that clearly reveal you don't have the slightest understanding of the topic at hand given such a statement(s).

> The one thing about all this I do like is that some nerds figured out how to extract money from suckers to fund basic research. No one in crypto is making revenues the are greater than their costs, except the mining cartel

Exchanges. Binance makes WAY more in fees than any single miner on the network ever since Bitmain failed in their coup. Again, stop and actually learn about the ecosystem you are trying, and failing miserably, to criticize.

I'd be way more understanding if you simply said you don't comprehend it, but to make these easily refutable arguments about the USD and its superiority, or any fiat currency in existence to date, doesn't instill any confidence in you even having the slightest grasp of what you are talking about.

I try my best not to be seen as hostile, as no one can understand everything, but this narrative is quicly repeated and accepted as truth around here that its startling to see (mainly) professional tech people make these simply mistakes and no one tries to correct the misinformation at all.

1: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-money-exi...