Oddbean new post about login | logout 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.
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.
Did you say Decentral Hash rate and FOS hardware for each homehttps://m.primal.net/KmSJ.mp4 ? You haven't been introduced to the $BTC Tech Nerd Army yes it seems. https://m.primal.net/KmSB.jpg
