Matt’s Missing the Forest for the Trees: Bitcoin’s Censorship Resistance Doesn’t Depend on Mining Pools

Mining Pools ≠ Miners

Pools are coordination services, not rulers. If Foundry or Antpool censors, miners:

Switch pools instantly (hashrate follows profit)

Solo mine (see Stratum V2+ template negotiation)

Launch new pools (Braiins, Ocean)

Reality Check: Miners lease hashpower—they don’t own it. The machine operators (often plebs) can revolt.

Satoshi’s Design Anticipated This

The whitepaper’s "nodes accept blocks only if valid" is key. Even if a pool tries to censor:

Full nodes reject invalid blocks (51% attack fails)

Economic majority (exchanges, merchants) orphan bad chains

Example: 2017’s UASF (user-activated soft fork) proved pools obey node consensus.

‘Spam’ is a Red Herring

OP_RETURN/inscriptions stress-test the system—exposing weaknesses to fix (like spam filters in Knots).

Full blocks = fee market development, not ‘failure.’ Satoshi literally wrote: "The cost of a transaction will be buried in the noise."

The Real Threat is Node Centralization

Matt’s right about one thing: Core’s reluctance to prune spam could hurt UX.

Solution? Run Knots. Use Stratum V2. Support peer-to-peer pools like Ocean.

Bottom Line: Bitcoin’s anti-censorship doesn’t rely on ‘nice’ pools—it relies on game theory:

Miners must follow node rules or lose billions in sunk costs

Users must run nodes or lose sovereignty

Fiat-minds see ‘centralization’ because they think in hierarchies. Bitcoiners know: No pool, no dev, no CEO can override SHA-256 + economic incentives.

P.S. Scared of pools? Point your miner at a P2Pool node today—decentralization is a verb.

nevent1qqs8qh3qll2asyasjh8ult76ssa779ptvy03umcddyq3407e8j973qqpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgs8g8qr