True. The elephant in the room is miner centralisation. Will they stop mining compliant blocks using black lists?
So why did Luke Dashjr say "Hashrate is irrelevant at this point"?
I won't pretend to know what his opinion is, I'll just give you mine.
1) Mining isn't decentralized — pools are (allegedly, not really).
Why are pools not decentralized? Because the interests of "rival" countries converge more often than most realize (More context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/rivalry-between-countries-is-curated ).
Hashrate aggregates into ~5–7 top pools; 2–3 could cross 51% at times.
Miners "vote with feet", but:
- Payout variance pushes them to big pools.
- Pools integrate with regulated fiat ramps and insurers; they may adopt OFAC/blacklist templates to avoid headaches.
Template power: Pools select transactions. If major pools adopt "policy clients" (e.g., template filters, blacklists), settlement becomes steerable — even if blocks remain valid under consensus.
So what? Incentives favor pool compliance with state policy — especially when insurance, utilities, and public listings are involved.
2) Hardware & energy are choke-points (supply-chain centralization)
- ASIC oligopoly. 2–3 manufacturers dominate. Firmware signing, remote management, and replacement cycles create vendor leverage.
- Jurisdictional energy. Large industrial miners rely on permits, grid interconnects, subsidies. In a low Gross Consent Product environment, regulators swap "ideals" for "stability" — conditional access > rights.
- Policy carrot/stick: cheap power for curtailment agreements, transaction policies, ESG attestations; penalties for non-compliant operators.
So what? If you need the grid and the power plant, the power plant owns you, and guess who owns the power plant.
I have just described the current state of mining "decentralization". Of course this could improve/worsen in the future.
Unless mining decentralization improves significantly, increasing hashrate is irrelevant at this point.
Discussion
Yes, I expect major pools to drift toward OFAC/blacklist templates (or "risk-graded" inclusion policies) unless the miner–pool protocol surface changes (Stratum V2 with job negotiation/Ocean's DATUM + non-custodial pooling) and enough hashrate actually uses it.
Security against reorgs/51% still scales with hashrate. So hashrate increases are not completely irrelevant.
But censorship-resistance does not scale with hashrate if template control remains centralized.
So marginal hashrate under the same pool topology is mostly irrelevant for freedom. Marginal hashrate under miner-templating topology is highly relevant.
What I expect (base case path)
- Soft censorship becomes normal: not outright bans, but risk-weighted delays and fee penalties.
- Pools posture "we follow law", insurers and utilities quietly codify it; most retail never notices — TXs just "feel slower unless you KYC".
- Effective Free Hashrate (EFH) stagnates unless miner-templating spreads; raw hashrate hits ATHs; headlines say "record security", while settlement becomes more steerable.
- Result: BTC functions as supervised SoV with compliant MoE corridors; non-compliant MoE becomes niche/expensive.
So the real metric you care about is Effective Free Hashrate (EFH).
EFH ≈ total hashrate × share using miner-controlled template selection (Stratum V2 job negotiation ON/Ocean's DATUM, or non-custodial pools) × (1 − censorship correlation across pools).
If Effective Free Hashrate (EFH) isn't rising, censorship cost isn't rising, no matter what the difficulty says.
TL;DR
With today's pool topology and perimeter levers, large pools are likely to adopt OFAC/blacklist-style templates (explicitly or implicitly).
Without miner-level template control becoming mainstream, more hashrate mostly strengthens the appearance of security, not the censorship-resistance Bitcoiners actually care about.