I cannot, however...
Imagine you are playing a game of Russian Roulette with a 6 round revolver. You spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger and NOTHING happens.
Now imagine somebody claiming the game is safe (secure) because you survived a single round. This represents a FALSE sense of security.
This is similar to the current state of bitcoin and censorship resistance. Just because no transactions are being censored today does NOT mean the system is immune to censorship.
Four pools could neglect the work done by the other 25% of miners and cooperate to harm bitcoin's "censorship resistance."
We should try to solve this potential problem before the censorship begins.
Do you disagree?
The metaphor is incorrect, because if a txid is censored, it just sits there in the mempool. Bitcoin is not destroyed, it’s not over, the transactor can simply CPFP/RBF until greedy miners defect.
the problem I see in this reasoning then is how many generations? and how high a fee? with centralized mining, this is definitely a threat.
I don't think we're in doomsday scenario yet. and my guess is we'll see more mining pools rising to the occasion in the coming years, with governments and corps taking more of an interest. we'll have to see.
I’m not good at price predictions 😂.
Game theory seems to be that censors won’t bother because the fee to overcome would be relatively low.
Not if the people doing the censoring can build on top of their own blocks?
Might just take longer to accumulate censored transactions in the mempool
Or we could just recognize the current issue and work to solve it prior to any 1-2 entities having the power to censor.
There’s a lot of hypothetical problems to be solved
Mining being centralized is not a hypothetical problem. It is the current state of things.
Fortunately, those who have monopolized the hash-rate have not harmed Bitcoin.
Curious 👀 about how this ages.
Transactions being censored is a hypothetical problem.
Mining can’t be monopolized, it’s the most competitive industry in the world.
Anyone can fabricate arbitrary centralization metrics and declare a hypothetical of theoretical censorship-resistance, for example 100% of hashrate is on planet Earth.
@matt you were (are?) extremely concerned about mining centralization and the risks it poses to Bitcoin. Pierre doesn’t seem terribly concerned.
Would you review this thread and help me better understand both of these view points?
If I recall you even suggested a nuclear option of changing to another hashing algo if we cannot fix the situation.
Pierre, I respectfully disagree with your position.
Your claim was “Until further notice, Bitcoin is NOT censorship resistant.” I think you’ve appropriately backed off that claim to a more nuanced “there’s a risk of Bitcoin maybe not being censorship resistant in the future”
The production of the hardware and the hash rate are both centralized and represent a threat to bitcoin.
If you’re right they’ll get attacked, and if I’m right they will decentralize in response to that attack. That’s what I mean by anti-fragility of censorship resistance.
You’re welcome to pour resources into pre-emptively tilting at windmills, but I have to pushback when someone claims that Bitcoin is not censorship resistant when they have no censored transactions as evidence.
One of the primary value propositions of bitcoin is censorship resistance. If it loses this feature, people will lose confidence and the network will suffer.
75% of the hash-rate can disregard the other 25% and build on their own blocks.
Are you suggesting the current state of mining centralization is fine? No issue?
Censorship resistance is a dynamic, anti-fragile process, not a static feature. If there is censorship, people will pay higher fees to overcome it.
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