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Today, public pressure is what keeps miners from censoring. See Marathon's launch for an example. The block subsidy keeps miners in business, otherwise the industry would collapse and censorship resistance would be a moot point. Ergo the block subsidy is our runway to get enough people using on-chain bitcoin to sustain the mining industry.

I believe demand response and heat reuse will replace the subsidy with economical business models. Great news! Demand for these services is distributed across the Earth according to population density and energy generation capacity. This is how we achieve decentralization. (What's really gonna bake your noodle is how population density will change to match available energy resources after the mining industry stabilizes.)

Modern centralized mining farms are unsustainable. It's a bubble. We will have to deflate it if bitcoin is going to survive. Great news! Satoshi already thought of this and implemented the decay function of the subsidy to do exactly this.

Our challenge is to grow the use of on-chain bitcoin before the bubble fully deflates. This will take a long time, multiple generations. We have a lot of time thanks to the decay function.

JuAnHu 5mo ago 💬 2

I agree that the subsidy provides a first runway for hashpower. Therefore, an attacker cannot simply spin up some hashpower themselves for the attack. OK.

However, I don't agree that this runway provides censorship resistance.

Public pressure might be helpful for now, but I doubt it will be enough long-term.

Even with spacially distributed energy availability and mining: What makes you so sure that nation states will not collaborate and push for censorship? (e.g. "sanctions") I am pretty sure they will some day. They will legally bind the miners to their will. Mining companies will comply, or they go out of business.

In the end, someone has to pay for the resistance. Either by directly mining the illegal/censored transactions or by paying a fee premium. In any case it's only possible with a sustained demand.

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Discussion

vnprc 5mo ago

I never said the subsidy provides censorship resistance. It clearly doesn't.

My thesis is that small scale private and privacy preserving mining is the only way to resist nation state control in the long term. Mining companies are a bootstrapping phase. They won't ever go away completely but if we don't transition to majority pleb mining then I don't see how bitcoin can achieve mass adoption. It will just be gold 2.0 and suffer the same fate as gold 1.0: state capture.

JuAnHu 5mo ago 💬 1

I see.

In the end both aspects are needed. Demand for censorship resistant transactions and private (or privacy preserving) mining.

vnprc 5mo ago

Yeah if you think about it gold was decentralized because anyone could go and take it out of the ground without permission. We need the same for bitcoin. This requires miner privacy.

Unlike gold, once we reach a steady state (no subsidy) new bitcoin will only come from people transacting with it. So that's an added requirement that gold doesn't have.