Replying to Avatar Ben Ewing

Most of the hash pools are US domiciled. Executive order plus a few ICE raids and that hash power could be at the whim of the US Govt.

Then they could print bitcoin.
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Tommy "The Purchase" 4mo ago

If I'm not mistaken, controlling most miners would give them de facto control over which transactions would go through, right? They could modify the ones they control to check with Palantir whether or not a transaction is allowed. Then regular people would have to hope to catch a "free" node outside the US (and probably outside Europe or NATO as well).

Printing on the other hand, i.e. inflating the supply of bitcoin to more than 21*10⁶ would mean a hard fork and probably a substantial rewrite. But if almost all the nodes are centrally controlled, there probably wouldn't be much opposition and said fork would be adopted, leaving the non-western "free nodes" with the old code.

Might as well just launch a CDBC and plain outlaw bitcoin altogether.

Well, there's more than one way to slice it but either way, the people with the most guns win I suppose. Lovely.

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Ben Ewing 4mo ago

Yeah I think you’re kinda right. I was more thinking about haspower capture, but node capture might also work. One option might be for the US to hard fork with their hashpower, and legislate that commercial miners, US pools and custodians/ exchanges only point hash/ transactions to their fork. These centralised entities would likely have to comply, but foreign ones probably wouldn’t. So there is a ‘US approved’ fork and a non-us approved fork. So then which would be the ‘real’ bitcoin, well that might depend on where the hashpower went. If the US was able to command that, I think it could arguably maintain a narrative that the US bitcoin is the ‘true’ bitcoin.