The majority of hashrate mines for profit. It’s not about what should be, but about what is. It is the case that most large miners are energy arbitrage plays, or ways to mine shareholders in public markets.
Pubcos will absolutely remain compliant, or else they can’t use the ATM to mine their shareholders. That means complying with OFAC sanctions regulation.
I love the bitaxe movement and it enables individuals like you and me to participate in the mining ecosystem, but the problems of censorship on Bitcoin are far bigger than what any of the bitaxe miners can actually solve.
I agree that it should be a norm, but I also see the reality that it isn’t a norm, and changing behaviour en masse is extremely challenging. The elites needed to use many PR tricks to scam the sheeple into injections and mask wearing. That level of behaviour change requires a massive propaganda campaign, which is something not in the budget of an open source movement.
The state has already broached the plan of a feather fork and high level policy circles are talking about it. Bitaxes don’t solve this—it’s an absolutely real threat to base layer censorship resistance, and the tornadocash/samourai wallet trials are setting the precedent to enable the state to fuck the pools and the miners so hard that they mine compliant blocks.
The way we overcome this is +30% of global hashrate distributed across many small and non-compliant pools to make it more difficult for policies like this to be enforced. Bitaxes can be a part of this for sure, but they will be a small part of what needs to be hundreds of exahash to overcome this scale of an attack.
https://youtu.be/jiNo-T71FLk?si=gPrEzu75Gn6c9Pfw
"Miners and pools validating transactions from sanctioned addresses are potentially guilty of strict liability sanctions violation" — Carole House (Former Director for Cybersecurity and Secure Digital Innovation in the White House).
From the video above. They are waiting for the right time to strike because hashrate is currently incentivised to aggregate further. It’s not about if, but when.
Were the PR campaign for more distributed civic mining instead of always for a profit motive, you and me and anyone else we can convince of the importance.
I'm pointing it out to you. I've posted on nostr about it before even doing the math for how much hash you need for your % of hash to equal your % of all coins held. I brought it up at the last in person meetup I went to.
The commercial miners won't ever stand up to the gov when the rubber hits the road, they are infrastructure dependant. It has to be distributed at the device level so the government simply has too many targets to effectively engage with forcing compliance.
Then the individuals can change pools at will or even solo from their own infrastructure like some of the people in meshtadel are working on.
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